There are numerous benefits of owning a service dog, apparent in both physical and mental forms. There are many specialized categories of tasks and kinds of dogs under the umbrella term of "service dog" that varies depending on where they are needed. Examples include hearing dogs and guide dogs. Service dogs assist with basic tasks like opening doors, guiding their owner, and alerting of heart attacks, diabetes, and other diseases. Studies have shown they assist with much more, "Our review highlights the impacts of service dogs on physical health for children, including helping them with diabetes management, seizure management, and enhanced mobility. Service dogs have beneficial impacts on psychological health including improved quality of life, safety, behavior, stress, anxiety, self-confidence and independence" (Lindsay and Thiyagarajah, 2021). While the physical benefits are subjective, "Such subjective improvement of physical functioning is thought to be derived from the owners regarding the actions done by their service dogs as actions they can now do themselves; empirically, the service dog owners have remarked that they feel like the actions they ordered their service dogs to do are actions they actually did themselves" (Shintani et. al, 2010), there are also many mental benefits, "The mental effects of owning a service dog are evident in reports that living with one improved the self-reliance, internal locus of control, and self-esteem of its owner" (Shintani et. al, 2010). The overarching theme of owning a service dog seems to be an improved quality of life and prevention of health risk behaviors.