Raising a Service Puppy

When you raise a puppy to be a service dog, you are ensuring that the puppy grows up prepared for the work that is necessary.

For years, puppies have been raised as service dogs for the blind. But today, puppies are raised to assist the deaf, injured military veterans, children with autism and people with disabilities of all kinds, according to the American Disabilities Act.

Raising a service dog requires you to spend time socializing and training the dog for the first 12 to 18 months of his life. The goal of this training is to raise a puppy who can bring a higher quality of life to his disabled owner.

You will be receiving two books or one class when you select one choice below. The books are "What Service Puppies Need To Know" and "Raising A Service Puppy"

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Enrichment - meeting the needs of the DOG and following the path of growth as close to naturally as possible.

Husbandry - Showing the puppy that being handled, poked, prodded, groomed and just cuddled is all fun.

Environment - Secure space, species appropriate food, water, space to grow, remove dangerous substances.

Socialization - Not just exposure to the world, but fun, trauma free, interaction. Learn to read stress in your puppy.

Impulse Control - Teach what mama dog would teach - patience, understanding, communication and boundaries, and you will have impulse control.

Engagement - Your pup needs to learn to engage with you before any other engagement and to focus on what you are teaching.

Any particular dog has many instinctive motivations to do what they do - finding food, finding mates, feeling safe during rest, not wasting energy on unproductive activities and interaction with others. He consciously or unconsciously controls his environment in order to provide for himself the necessities of survival. Living with humans is an artificial environment and most of the necessities of survival are provided by the humans - usually in abundance.

I know a lot of people who have issues with the CBS show "The Mentalist." What happens on that show is someone who sees what is there, the minutia as well as the larger things. The character in this show, as he says over and over, isn't clairvoyant, he just notices things. Everything, in fact.

Most of us don't do that. With images and information constantly buzzing around us, we've conditioned ourselves to "grazing," to picking out only the bits that are most interesting and ignoring the rest.

Don't ignore what your puppy is doing or trying to communicate to you. That communication could and probably will escalate into a behavior you can't stand but gets your attention. Which was the whole purpose of the communication to begin with.

Dogs see everything. Dogs are very contextual. It often surprises me that the word "generalization" came into being in the dog training world. It should be specialization since what is actually happening with training is that the dog learns that the environment is not part of any particular action (like sit). The dog learns that actions are separate from the environment instead of being a part of it.

But in seeing everything and including everything in the environment as part of any action or experience, dogs also have specific responses when something goes wrong. Just like learning a new behavior, having things go wrong include everything that was there at the moment of the trauma.

Learn this about your dog. They see and remember everything, especially during a traumatic experience. Learn to help a dog separate the trauma from the environment in much the same way you help a dog learn that sit means put the rear on the ground and doesn't include your favorite chair in the living room.

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