[nagdu] LA Times: Service Dogs Are Beyond Fetching

[Criminal Justice Major Extraordinaire]

Hi, all,
Got this article from another list I'm on and was given permission by the 
list moderator to share with others.
I'm curious to hear what your opinions, thoughts and feelings are on this 
article in the hopes of getting a discussion going.
Although this article was informative for reading, I felt there were some 
things I didn't agree with.
I think that can happen with any article as a whole.
Bibi
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2011 12:35 PM
Subject: LA Times: Service Dogs Are Beyond Fetching
latimes.com/health/la-he-service-dogs-20110718,0,3674464.story
latimes.com
Service dogs are beyond fetching
Their use is growing. They help guide the blind, perform tasks for the 
physically disabled and may even help people with epilepsy and autism.
By Karen Ravn, Special to the Los Angeles Times
July 18, 2011
One moment 15-year-old Glen Gregos was a happy-go-lucky kid riding a 
motorcycle. The next he was the lucky-to-be-alive victim of a terrible 
accident, paralyzed from the chest down.
Now 54 and a resident of Woodland Hills, Gregos has built a rewarding life — 
college, marriage, a successful banking career, a daughter who just 
graduated from college.
Still, for decades after the accident, Gregos faced challenges every day 
from simple things most of us take for granted — going to the grocery store, 
going out the front door. And then six years ago, his life took another 
dramatic turn. He met Beulah — a.k.a. Miss Bo — a black Labrador retriever 
who has been at his side, 24/7, ever since — to open doors, carry bags, pull 
his wheelchair, pick up anything he drops on the floor and cheer up any 
black mood he falls into.
"It's hard to put into words everything these dogs do for you," he says. 
"It's physical. It's emotional. It's all-encompassing. You probably have to 
live it to understand it."
Miss Bo is not considered a pet. She's a service dog, a concept first 
introduced with guide (or seeing-eye) dogs for the blind, perhaps as far 
back as the 16th century, though it wasn't until 1929 that the first guide 
dog training school in the U.S. opened up. By the 1970s, people had started 
training dogs to help with other disabilities, and that trend has continued.
Service dogs now include dogs that can open cupboards and drawers, alert 
someone to a ringing telephone, assist someone during a disorienting 
seizure, help someone keep their balance or get back up after a fall, not to 
mention dogs that can sniff allergens in the air or low blood sugar on 
someone's breath.
"Here in the U.S. we have a highly individualistic culture — creative, 
experimental," says Lynette Hart, director of the Center for Animals in 
Society at UC Davis. "It's like a caldron for coming up with new things that 
dogs can do for us. And dogs love to work. It's a very natural marriage for 
them to help people."
This has been a boon for many who, like Gregos, have had their lives changed 
by some extraordinary dogs. But potential pitfalls abound. "There's almost 
no regulation," Hart says. "And everyone wants to do what they want to do."
Sometimes people want to call their dogs service dogs even though they're 
really not. And sometimes people want to believe dogs can do things even 
though there's no real proof they can.
Many dogs have a natural knack for providing comfort, companionship and 
emotional support to their people, who often consider that a pretty big 
service. But it doesn't make those dogs service dogs. Neither does a 
capacity for warding off crime by looking or sounding formidable. According 
to the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act and new regulations put in place 
in March, a service dog must be trained to perform a service for a person 
with a disability that is directly related to the person's disability — 
turning lights on and off for someone who's paralyzed, for example, or 
alerting someone who's deaf that a smoke alarm is blaring.
Many organizations train one or more kinds of service dogs, and in general 
their programs follow a pattern set by the early guide dog training 
organizations: careful breeding followed by puppy-raising by volunteers who 
begin the basics of obedience and socialization, and finally intensive 
training by professionals. (Potential human recipients also are carefully 
screened, trained and matched to dogs.)
Guide Dogs for the Blind, the first guide dog training school on the West 
Coast, relies solely on Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers and crosses 
of the two. Training organizations for other types of service dogs often do 
too. "They have wonderful temperaments," says Katie Malatino, public 
relations coordinator for one such organization, Canine Companions for 
Independence, headquartered in Santa Rosa. "They're a good size for the 
tasks they have to do, and they have an instinct to retrieve, which comes in 
handy for picking things up off the floor."
Canine Companions for Independence provided Miss Bo to Gregos in November 
2005. These days she is always on call if Gregos needs her, which is not to 
say that she never has any fun. "She has toys," he says. "We play ball. But 
once she gets vested up" — wearing the vest that identifies her as a service 
dog — "she knows, 'OK, I'm ready to work.' " (And people who see the vest 
should should know and respect that too.)
Like any good service dog, when she's working, Miss Bo is unperturbed by 
loud or unexpected noises ("bomb proof," Malatino calls it) and undistracted 
by other animals or people — unless Gregos gives her special dispensation. 
Which he often does.
"I put her in a 'sit' and let people pet her," he says. "I want to create 
more awareness about these special dogs. I wasn't aware of them myself for a 
long time. I'd think, 'What can a dog do for a guy in a wheelchair?' "
The Americans With Disabilities Act says service dogs get to go wherever 
their people go: grocery stores, restaurants, libraries, amusement parks, 
boats, buses, trains, planes and no-pets-allowed hotels. New regulations 
issued this spring establish two exceptions (which would surely never apply 
to Miss Bo): Service dogs can be banished if they get out of control or if 
they transact certain business indoors that should have been seen to 
outside.
Not everyone knows the rules. Gregos once spent several hours convincing 
officials at a hotel with a no-pets policy that they were obligated to let 
Miss Bo in. "One side of me thought, 'I don't want to stay here anyway,'" he 
says. "But the other part thought, 'They've got to be educated.' "
Even beyond the issue of ignorance, service dog use is not without 
controversy. One problem is cheaters.
"A lot of people try to skirt the system," Gregos says. "I see it all the 
time." Some will claim that their pet dogs are service dogs that help them 
with disabilities they don't really have — and they canget away with that, 
because the law doesn't require people to present proof of their own 
disability or their dog's capacity to deal with it. (It doesn't help that 
service dog vests are readily available online.) Proprietors may deny 
entrance to dogs that arouse their skepticism, and that's fine if they're 
right. If they're wrong, it can lead to a fine of a very different kind.
Another problem is that there are no industry-wide standards for trainers or 
dogs, leaving disabled people on their own to determine how much they should 
trust an organization's claims. "Guide Dogs for the Blind — they're very 
reputable," says Dr. Melissa Bain, chief of the Behavior Service at the UC 
Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital. "If they graduate a dog, OK, I 
trust it." But not every organization has the same long history of success.
Of course, some claims are easier to validate than others. It's easy to see 
if a dog can pull a wheelchair or open a refrigerator door. But seizure 
prediction? "The trouble," Bain adds, "is if people rely on the dog and 
nothing else, that could be dangerous."
Sometimes the question isn't whether a particular dog can perform a task but 
whether some tasks are even canine-ly possible. Take seizure detection 
again. "Is that legitimate?" Bain says. "Maybe."
In 1999, a British epilepsy specialist and a behavioral scientist/animal 
trainer reported that by giving dogs a reward every time their owners had 
seizures, they had been able to train some dogs to warn of oncoming seizures 
as much as 15 to 45 minutes before the seizures occurred. Their paper in the 
journal Seizure inspired a demand for such dogs.
Today, the Epilepsy Foundation says on its website, "while some people have 
been very pleased with their new canine friends, others have been 
disappointed." The foundation "recommends that people take great care in 
reviewing trainer claims and results, especially when thousands of dollars 
are involved."
More questions arose in 2007 when four of the seven seizure-alert dogs in a 
study in the journal Neurology were found to be warning people of 
psychological, not epileptic, seizures. Psychological seizures, caused by 
mental stress, can often be eliminated through counseling — without drugs — 
making warnings beside the point. And in one case in that study, a dog's 
"warning behaviors" were found to set the seizures off.
Service dogs for children with autism have inspired a debate all their own, 
with some districts reluctant to allow the dogs into their schools because, 
they argue, the dogs cause too much trouble — other children may be scared 
or allergic; child and dog may require extra supervision.
But, in fact, the value of service dogs to children with autism is less 
controversial than it is for seizures. "One of the main things our dogs do 
is provide safety," says Kati Rule-Witco, executive director and placement 
specialist for Autism Service Dogs of America, a training organization 
founded in 2002 that's based in Lake Oswego, Ore. "Often children with 
autism will run off. Parents have trouble just going to the grocery store. 
Our dogs provide a way for families to go out safely."
A 2008 study in the journal Qualitative Health Research looked at what 
happened when service dogs were brought into 10 families with children with 
autism and found that they did, indeed, enhance safety and facilitate public 
outings. When the child and dog go out into the community together, the dog 
is tethered to the child but also connected to the adult caregiver since 
that's who holds the dog's leash. Autism service dogs are also trained to 
keep their cool no matter what their young charges do (hug, squeeze, lie on 
top of the dog) and to take positive steps to cope with negative behavior 
(nudge or lean against the child, maybe even stop the child from hurting 
himself).
All of this costs money, a lot of it. That's true for training any service 
dog. Some organizations — like Guide Dogs for the Blind and Canine 
Companions — can operate on donations alone. But not all. Autism Service 
Dogs of America says the average cost for breeding, raising, training and 
placing one of their dogs is $20,000, $13,500 of which families are required 
to pay before they are placed on the waiting list for the next available 
dog.
The website for Autism Service Dogs of America has testimonials from 10 
satisfied families who use words like "awesome" and "miracle" to describe 
their dogs and the jobs they do. They firmly believe that their money was 
well spent. But not everyone is convinced.
Bain notes that research so far has not compared service dogs to ordinary 
family dogs, and she suggests the latter might do just about as well. "Maybe 
a child feels better sitting next to the dog," she says. "There's no way to 
tell if special training does any good."
Gregos has no such questions about the good that Miss Bo's special training 
has done for him. But she'll be 8 in August, and the time is coming when 
she'll need to retire and he'll need to get a new service dog. Then Miss Bo 
will change from service dog to pet dog and spend the rest of her days with 
the man who says that having her has been "magical since Day One."
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