An Update, Finally!

Well, it turns out that I’ll be working with an individual professional trainer instead of a full program to get my service dog. I will have a private trainer from the original program I’d been working with who will train my SD for me, so this is still someone I know and am familiar with.

My trainer says that she found someone to do the puppy raising portion of training! This means that there are no more hoops to jump through before assessing candidate puppies and purchasing one, aside from the small detail of fundraising! I’m so excited to learn that finally we can actually make some progress toward my ultimate goal! I’ve been waiting for a SD since spring 2011, I believe.

I am still fundraising through my Etsy shop, selling my handmade beaded jewelry.

Meeting the Rest of the Team

Last night I had the opportunity to talk to another member of the program who’ll be training my SD for me.  It’s amazing the kind of communication that Facebook allows!  I am feeling more and more confident without our decision to work together.  One of the women breeds German Shepherds, another trains dogs, and the third uses a SD herself.  Between the three of them, we’ll pick a good dog for my needs and have him (her?) trained to assist me in no time. 

In reality, we are looking at 12-18 months’ training time, and that’s after a SD candidate is chosen.  In the world of service dogs, that is actually quite fast.  Typically it takes two years from the birth of a puppy to it graduating as a ready-to-work SD.  My program places dogs who are 18 months to three years old at the time of placement with a handler, and I find that to be a reasonable age. 

I’m told there’s a pair of Golden Retriever puppies, littermates, who are being looked into.  I’m very excited to hear the results of their assessment!

And the Winner Is…. Number Thirty-Six!

To date, I have applied to over thirty service dog programs.  Number thirty-six was one of the few programs to accept me as a client and SD handler, and they’re the program I’m going to be using. (The other two programs which did accept me didn’t work out for various reasons.)  It’s taken a lot of work to finally find a program to work with, and more than a little patience.

It seems so simple, really: just apply and wait to hear back– surely someone would accept me out of the dozens of programs that exist in the United States!  Some programs simply ignored my application, or phone call, or email.  Others wrote back to tell me that they would not work with someone who had my diagnosis, or they could not/would not train the tasks that I knew I needed a service dog to do.  It was pretty discouraging, to be honest.

Almost exactly two years after I started the search, I found my program.  Based out of Boulder, CO, they’re just getting started as a non-profic, one of the few I’ve seen.  This program only asks the handler to pay their own transportation and lodging to and from Team Training, when I’ll spend two weeks learning to work with my new service dog.  They are looking for a SD candidate right now for me, along with putting up with my multiple “helpful” suggestions of dogs I come across.

Basic Commands the Dogs Are Taught

They say that the average dog has the intelligence of a two-year-old.  I don’t doubt that, especially after I heard the list of the things my program trains them to do!  This is just a list of the basic commands the SDs are taught.  It doesn’t include the disability-specific tasks and work that they do:

• Heel (heel on the left)
• Side (heel on the right)
• Behind (go behind me)
• Close (go in between legs)
• Sit (sit in location)
• Down (lie down in location)
• Stand (stand in location)
• Place (go to a specified place)
• Front (sit in front of me)
• Here (come)
• Stay (stay where they are)
• Under (go under something)
• Tuck (tuck tail/legs in)
• Through (go through a tight space)
• Over (jump over an object)
• Back (back up in the heel position)
• Forward (keep going forward)
• Left (move to the left)
• Right (move to the right)
• Wait (pause for more instructions)
• Load (get in a vehicle)
• In (go into an area or room)
• Out (go outside of a building)
• Free (release command to go play)
• Friends (go sit down for pets)
• Leave it (ignore an item, typically one on the floor)
• Drop on recall (freeze in position in the middle of coming)
• Target (touch an object with nose or paw)
• Kennel (go into their crate)