If I had a dollar every time someone told me they wanted their dog to be a service dog, I would already have a vacation home in the Bahamas.
Ever since I’ve started working with dogs, I’ve never been able to escape this conversation. The topic always found me, even when I was the manager of a small, dog-only shelter. “I want my new dog to become my service dog and therapy dog,” a lady once told me as she met the dog she had chosen, a four-year-old overweight bully mix that couldn’t get along with any other dogs and constantly created feces art on the wall of her kennel. It took everything I had to resist physically cringing at that statement.
Where has this urge for services animals come from? It’s become an epidemic like obesity and streaming services that charge $20 bucks a month to watch a show with ads (if I wanted ads, I’d watch cable). Where seeing dogs in typically non-dog friendly places used to be like spotting a unicorn, you can now find both a little dog with crusty eyes riding in a shopping cart and a reactive dog that barks at anyone and anything at your local Walmart. To worsen your shopping experience, most of these dogs and owners go unchecked. The employees aren’t having a good time in the world of retail and neither should you.
If I had to blame the birth of the idea that dogs can’t be left alone at home for more than ten minutes at a time it would probably be the lockdowns implemented during the pandemic. I was working under another trainer during that time and we saw so many people get new puppies while they were stuck at home, a nice literal pet project for the whole family. Those dogs enjoyed their new homes and the constant, 24/7 access to attention. When the lockdowns lifted and everyone returned to work and school, those cute little puppies became neurotic adolescent nightmares. We had under-socialized dogs with separation anxiety brought to be trained en masse until all the trainers collectively considered buying ear plugs due to the amount of whining and barking that these dogs emitted.
So that’s part one of the problem and it’s perhaps the simplest one to explain. Like most things in training, we can’t ignore the human hand that holds the end of the leash. Due to both incorrect information and, in my opinion, intentional ignorance, people believe that putting a vest on their dog and calling it an emotional support animal (which is NOT a service dog, by the way) will grant them unequivocal right to bring their dog wherever it so pleases them. To make the Saltine cracker even saltier, the management of those places fear a lawsuit from the Department of Justice so badly that they’ve required their employees to not raise a ruckus if a random dog pisses on the Doritos.
Having been involved in service dog training, I can tell you that it is not for the faint of heart. A service dog must start young. It must be properly socialized and the temperament must be such that it popped from the womb ready to assist. There are many good breeders and organizations who breed and train their dogs in such a way and have a lot of success in doing so.
A service dog’s training takes years and thousands of dollars spent in training sessions, vet visits, food, toys, insurance, and so on. If your basic obedience class is for ordinary house pets then service work is for your athletes, your Olympians of the dog world who spend each and every day training for their goal. There are no cheat days and all rest is scheduled. It is difficult; there are a good portion of dogs who don’t make the cut.
Once a dog is considered ready for service work, they are usually between the ages of two and four years old. Then they undergo one more metamorphosis, the transition from dog to medical equipment. Medical equipment must be kept in pristine condition to run efficiently. It cannot be allowed to malfunction by becoming distracted by anything in the environment and cannot be hindered from completing their duty by being placed in a shopping cart where it cannot reach the handler.
These are things that escape most people’s attention. But even thought this information is available with a Google search, the people of whom this article is written about don’t care to get their facts straight. They wouldn’t be able to tell you the difference between a therapy and a service dog and would have no clue what law governs service dogs (it’s the Americans with Disabilities Act, by the way).
If you’ve been considering training your girl Bella to be a service dog because she learned how to sit in two days and loved everyone she meets, then I’m willing to be the bearer of bad news. Most dogs don’t have the right temperament for the job, are too old or have medical issues that would prevent them from performing, or belong to owners who cannot afford to pay for the training. And there’s nothing wrong with that! But let’s stop pretending that everyone’s dogs are equal, and leave traversing through public spaces to the professionals.
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