Rue came to us extremely fearful, and would become paralyzed in any new experience. Her world was very small. Her owners adopted her in June 2022, and hadn’t seen her play once in the 1.5 years they’d had her.
We spent her first few weeks getting her comfortable in her new environment, building a relationship with her, switching her diet & building her food drive, loading a reward marker, keeping a structured routine, using movement to create pack drive, and integrating her into stable social groups to mirror healthy play & interactions.
As Rue began to open up and demonstrate trust in us and her surroundings, we began to take steps to gently push her outside of her comfort zone. This meant utilizing a little controlled pressure along with rewards to urge her to tackle new challenges like moving through tight spaces, over new surfaces, accept handling & touch, and more. All things which previously led Rue to flatten to the ground in trembling fear or flee. We did not wait for her to choose to tackle some of those scary things on her own; she would never do so. We used some gentle leash pressure to urge her forward, and rewarded her for following through. This meant Rue needed to work through some pressure to overcome something that was challenging for her. There is a great distinction between unfairly flooding a dog who is in a state of fear and applying a small amount of pressure on a dog who is under threshold & still willingly taking rewards even though they are nervous. Rue experienced the latter.
For dogs like Rue, nearly EVERYTHING in life feels like pressure. She came into training with no ability to cope with this experience of pressure. By creating controlled scenarios that enabled her to work through small amounts of pressure, and then obtain not only rewards but a sense of accomplishment in her ability to see that the perceived challenge was conquerable, Rue’s world is beginning to get bigger!
Here’s the coolest part: For the first few week
There are a plethora of tasks a service dog can learn to help their partner mitigate their disability.
I specialize in tasks that revolve around non-weight bearing mobility assistance like retrieving, tugging & pushing. These skills can translate to picking up dropped items or retrieving items out of reach in the house, tugging open doors or tugging off clothes and pushing drawers, doors, push plates & light switches… just to name a few. I also specialize in hearing dogs (dogs alerting their partner to sounds in their environment) and psychiatric service dogs (this category includes a wide variety of skills from deep pressure, blocking and help with crowd control).
Finding a service dog trainer to help you owner-train your own service dog is a tricky task!
Make sure you look for a trainer that specializes in tasks you are looking for! For instance, I do not train allergen detection, guide work and most medical alerts and I will not attempt to do so unless I decide to seek out further education on this.
Look for a trainer that has professional experience with dogs that are not their own. Someone can be successful training their own service dog, but that does not translate to service dogs in general.
If a trainer guarantees they can train your dog to be a service dog, that’s a huge red flag. Ask your trainer about dogs that they have ‘released’ or ‘washed’ from working and why they did so.
Owner-training your service dog is not an impossible task, but it can be a difficult task. Not all dogs are cut out to be working dogs, even with the best genetics. After a year (or even two) of raising and training your dog, they can potentially be released from working. It is also important that your service dog pass health clearances like OFAs or PennHip, hearts and eyes!
Questions? ⬇️⬇️⬇️
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We all want our dogs to be well-behaved around kids, right?
Well, I think it’s just as important to teach kids to respect dogs in return!
And in my opinion, you can never start too early. I’ve been teaching my nephew about dog body language for the past few months when he hangs out with me and the dogs. I’ll often point out specific body language that the dogs are displaying and tell him what it means and if we need to do anything about it.
Obviously, I have it very simplified in this video. We all know that a wagging tail doesn’t always mean a dog is happy and that growling doesn’t always mean a dog is angry, but for the sake of him being 4, we’ve kept it simple. He has been doing an excellent job of retaining the information and is often able to point things out on his own! He can tell when Rocky is asking for more space or when my training dogs might need him to be calmer. He will sometimes ask if Mike is panting because he is hot or stressed.
Advocating for your dog can be as simple as teaching the little ones in your family how dogs communicate. This can also help prevent dog bites when kids know what the boundaries and rules are around dogs.
As always, dogs and kids should never be left unsupervised, even if they do understand the basics.
Thor arrived three weeks ago all the way from Las Vegas with an agenda of his own! He struggled with leash walking, following basic commands and would often find his own fun if no one was paying attention. On top of that, Thor came to learn some task work that could help his handler around the house! He can now tug his handler out of a chair, help her off the ground and knows how to walk next to her mobility equipment!
