Service dogs can be a real godsend for people with physical and mental disabilities. They can alert them to medical problems, provide comfort, be their eyes and ears, and offer them a better quality of life.These highly trained dogs are required to perform tasks that assist someone with a disability.
Sadly, some people are using a loop hole to call their untrained pet dog a service dog. Then they take that untrained dog to restaurants, on airplanes, shopping etc and this untrained dog does all sorts of UNBELIEVABLE things like going potty, barking, grabbing at food or goods, lunging, snapping at people, and worse biting people.
Service dogs spend many months in very intensive training to ignore any distractions as well as learn how they will service their new owner. You will never see a trainer service dog make any of the mistakes I listed above yet shop owners, airlines, etc are starting to turn away REAL service dogs because someone wanted to break all of the rules.
Here is a list of things service dogs are trained for:
- Seeing eye dogs not only do they guide their owners, which is huge, they have to be able to pick up dropped items, get their working harness, go potty on command, never touch food not given to them, and remain in a down stay for hours and hours at a time.
- Hearing dogs are trained to notify their owner (without barking) of any sound that needs to be responded to, such as doorbell, oven timer, fire and carbon monoxide alarms, alarm clock, etc.
- Physically disabled assistance dogs are trained to pull a wheel chair, open and close doors, open appliances such as the refrigerator, oven, dishwasher, washer, and dryer. They learn to turn on and off lights, and so many more specific skills based on their person’s needs.
- Seizure and Diabetes alert dogs are trained to smell very slight changes in a person’s body chemistry prior to a seizure or sugar crash and to alert both the person getting ready to have an event and anyone else around that person so that they can be ready for the seizure or medicate the diabetic to stop the event.
- PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) dogs are trained to detect a panic attack and push into the owner to provide comfort and help reduce the panic attacks, most are trained to find the cell phone and bring it to the owner as well as many other tasks based on each person’s issue.
Then there are therapy dogs like mine and Judy’s dog, Frances (see a Tale of Two Judys in Rescue Me), that are in no way service dogs, but have training to provide comfort to those that find the presence of a dog comforting.
Written by Jean Owen of NJ FixMyDog.org
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