Physiotherapy anon - that was a great answer, thank you! I was thinking in terms of motivation for the patient, as well as helping with exercises in the form of like taking the dog out for walks or maybe something to do with throwing a ball, for fine motor control?
The defining elements of a service dog vs. a pet are:
The handler is disabled.
The dog is trained in a task related to that disability.
Polite leash walking and fetch aren’t tasks that mitigate a disability, but momentum pulling [1], brace and balance [2], and picking up dropped items [3] are.
The other thing is, generally a service dog is a huge commitment in terms of training time, money, and care. You don’t generally see service dogs who are temporary (meant to work only during the duration of, say, physiotherapy) and then return to being pets.
That being said... My first service dog actually started out as a pet for eight years. I was lucky that he was very well-trained and behaved in public. It was super-easy for me to transition him to service work, and he took to his trained tasks beautifully. So I had the unusual, fortunate experience of having a long-term pet who was also a short-term service dog.
Now, though, he’s retired (bad hips) and I’m struggling to train a flaky puppy to take his place. It’s been eight months of constant work, reinforcement, setbacks, and tiny victories. I absolutely would NOT want to do that for a dog who was just going to help with a few months or even a year or two of physiotherapy, then go back to being a pet. If nothing else, it’s terribly unfair for the dog to get used to going out with you for months, then get left home once more when they’re no longer needed. As it is, Bucky howls if I go to the bathroom without him.
So, a few questions to ask regarding your character:
How disabled is this character? Is the disability permanent, long-term, or short-term? If it’s only going to last a couple of years, have the character consider a service dog, realize that it’s difficult and even unfair to train a dog to work and then forcibly retire the dog before they’re ready, and get a pet instead.
Can your character get by with a pet dog? The key to a happy pet dog are things you’ve already covered: lots of walks and lots of games of fetch. In fact, it’d be lovely to have your character explore things to do with their pet and discover things like pet-friendly parks and shopping centers (there are more of these every day!), pet-friendly restaurants where the character can sit on the patio and eat with their dog, hikes, and even sports like agility and rally.
If your character does go the short-term service dog route, then have that character deal with the fallout. It’s disheartening and even exhausting to train a service dog, because there are *a lot* of bad days (and yes, a lot of good days!) And if your character gets the dog used to a routine of constant public access, then stops when the character no longer needs the dog, have the character experience the dog’s frustration at being “abandoned” for hours at a time.
[1]: Momentum pulling needs special training and equipment to keep the dog from being harmed. You can talk to @scriptveterinarian for details of the injuries that happen when a dog constantly pulls on a collar rather than a proper harness.
[2]: Brace and balance also needs special training for both the dog (to tense up and brace themselves) and the human (to lean against the right part of the dog) or the dog can be very badly injured. Again, @scriptveterinarian is your go-to.
[3]: Picking up dropped items is surprisingly easy to train, if you have a dog who’s willing. Some dogs automatically like carrying things around, while others have to be taught with great patience. It took my friend ten months to train her chihuahua/pom mix to pick up things, but now the dog is happily retrieving everything from dropped keys to a little pouch with my friend’s blood sugar testing equipment.
