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Well, this was a fun episode of Laura today. Jason, what do you think? Yeah, if you, if you wanna know all about which breeds are best for service dog training or how to give a pedicure to a rhino, this is definitely one you’re gonna wanna listen to, that’s for sure. Two important things. The only thing I can give away right now is the answer was not the chow chow, which surprised me.

I thought that was, I thought that was gonna be the recommended service dog. Yeah. Unfortunately that was not at the top of her list. Who would’ve thought, what, what a surprise. Yeah. Yeah. Some people may be disappointed in that, but, uh, there’s definitely some, some information in this episode that people can, um, keep, people can, can probably learn something from.

That was a, it was a pretty, uh, pretty in depth discussion about selection and, um, preparation for service dog work, some of the ins and outs and some of the challenges that are faced by, um, service dog trainers. Um. As you know, we, we train service dogs. We do it a little different than she does. She does a lot of owner trained stuff, which we don’t get involved in.

So it was, it was definitely, um, interesting to hear her perspective on how they approach that and um, have some success with it. Yeah, and it was interesting for me ’cause that’s not my area of expertise, so I learned a lot today, which was nice ’cause most of the listeners probably know I’m, I focus on training pet dogs and a lot of behavior cases and most of my experience is people come to me with an aggressive dog and say, I want him to be a service dog.

And we say, why don’t we focus on teaching him to not bite first, let’s get him to no longer guard his resources and no longer try to attack the neighbor dog. And then you can figure out if it, if you should make this guy a service dog. See if that’s a fit later on. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, this was a, this was definitely a cool episode.

Um, just want to remind everybody who may be listening, uh, to go over, check us out on YouTube. Like I mentioned, it was a couple episodes ago. We got a new home over there. We’ve got our own space on YouTube. Dog Pro Radio Podcast has its own channel. Um, be sure to like, subscribe. Leave us a comment, let us know what you think.

Uh, which episodes do you like, which ones, um, do you find the most interesting? Uh, also, uh, if you subscribe on Spotify, you can now watch videos there as well, and you can actually get access to it a day early. So they’re getting released early over on Spotify, so be sure to subscribe to us there too. Yeah, I would like to see more comments on Spotify because we get a lot of views, but not all that many comments.

I’d love to see a lot more, it’d be fun to know what people like, what they don’t like, what, you know, what we could strive for or just guests to have on, because. There’s a wide variety of guests we could get. And if you give your input, we’d love to hunt that person down and get ’em on the show. Yeah. Or even topics, you know, again, just that feedback for us is valuable to create the show that you wanna listen to.

So your, uh, your input’s important. Awesome. Well enjoy the show everybody. Welcome to Dog Pro Radio. Today we have Laura Damo. Roy, welcome Laura. Hi. Thanks for having me. Yeah, welcome Jason. Hey, good to be back. It should be a fun day. I’m going to, I, I’m gonna stick to a short intro today ’cause I know Laura can explain herself way better than I can.

So I’m gonna give like, the short synopsis of who you are and what you do, but then I would love for you to give people a lot more detail that. Uh, you’ll do a much better job than I. But Laura has been training service dogs for 15 years, has spent a lot of time basically doing it all. Helping raise, I think, I think you did some breeding, but definitely helping.

Raise the right. No, no breeding. No Raising the right puppies. Yeah. Placing the puppies in a house. Training the dogs. A lot of work with guide dogs. Uh, she now focuses on her YouTube channel, doggy. You and I’ve checked it out. There’s a lot of cool content on there. We’ll put some links in the description later on.

But now at this point, I think you’re not doing nearly as much with individual clients. You are focusing on producing content, which we all know is incredibly hard. So excited to hear about your journey, how you’ve gotten to that point, and love to talk service dogs today. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll give you a little bit of background on, on my journey into service dogs because people are always curious how you get into doing service dogs.

And I actually, I didn’t have a dog growing up. I wasn’t, you know, one of those people that got to do dogs as a child, we weren’t allowed to have dogs. Um, and so as soon I, I came up with other opportunities, so I started volunteering at the shelter, getting my hands on different dogs. Um, I actually had the opportunity to go down to Florida while I was in college and do a zookeeper internship.

And there I was able to watch them do some really cool cooperative care stuff with zebras and rhinos and cheetahs, you know. Having the cheetah stick their tail through the cage so that you could do, you know, injections voluntarily, being able to give a rhino a pedicure, you know, that kind of cool stuff that really had an impact on what was possible kind of with all animals.

And so I got to kind of try it out. I, I did horses and I practiced on pigs and, and all sorts of fun stuff. And while I was finishing my masters, a friend started bringing their German Shepherd around to classes with their little vest on and all of that. And I started getting into guide dogs. So I volunteered, um, at my local guide dog organization, which was Fidelco Guide Dog Organization.

They are, sorry, Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation. And they raised and trained German Shepherd guide dogs. And I started volunteering there. And I had a bit of a connection to this ’cause I, my dad has retinitis pigmentosa, which is a slow blinding disease. So I grew up in a household understanding, um. The blindness community a little bit.

And so that’s kind of how I got into it. And as I was finishing my master’s and apprenticeship position opened up, so I became a guide dog apprentice. And that’s a three year program, so everyone always asks, oh, how do you get into it? My biggest advice for that is if you can get into an a DI or an ig, um, an Assistance Dog International or an IGDF, which is the Guide Dog Organization, kind of equivalent to a DI to get your hands on lots of dogs, that is the best thing that you can do if you have that option.

So three year apprenticeship working tons of German Shepherds. You know, when we’re talking guide dogs, most guide dogs, schools do labs. Um, the school that I worked for only did German Shepherds. It’s the only school in the US that does that. And I also got to work with clients because when you’re talking about raising training service dogs, half of that I.

Is working with clients, right? Like really you have to love people and working with people because that’s the majority of what you’re gonna do, especially if you start doing owner trainer stuff. So I worked there, I, uh, did a lot of placements. So the school that I was in did in community placement. So you take a dog, you train it for six months or so, and then you would bring it to the person in the, in the community they live in, live in a hotel for two to three weeks and introduce the dog to that new environment and to that new person.

Um, and we did that all over the US and Canada. Um, and so I did that for about five years before I moved to Colorado and I took a break from Guide Dogs to start working with puppies. So created a puppy program with a colleague of mine, um, at Rocky Mountain Dog Training. And I would take, you know, nine, 10 week old puppies do.

Yeah, the basic obedience, sit down, you know, down, stay, come, leave it, all that stuff. But huge focus on socialization. So getting puppies that. C present as potentially fearful to be able to play with other dogs, be less fearful of, um, environments. We’d go on field trips every week. It, you know, it was a, it was a real, it was a real blast to work with the, you know, the little puppies, you know, not great for your back, but very fun.

And then, um, we moved back from Colorado back to where we live now in Connecticut, and I did placement specialists. So when we’re talking about guide dogs, there’s the people that generally do a lot of the training. And then there’s the people that place the dogs. And because, um, I have an affinity or I’ve worked a lot, um, with people with disabilities, I ended up being a placement specialist for another three years until I had a little bit of a health crisis and I had to leave guide dogs.

And what I did dur with that is I started, my channel had already started, but I went full-time into the educational space, still doing one-on-one clients online. But, um, you know, the big focus was on getting the information. Out there with my YouTube channel because I’m trying to get to people before they make decisions.

So before they pick the dog while they’re doing in the research phase, because there’s so much, when I was doing, I, I guess I, while I was doing guide dogs, I also had a business training service dogs as well, um, in the evenings. And one of the hard parts about that is I would spend the first, you know, the eval.

You’d go to a client’s house, you’d eval the dog. The dog is totally unsuitable for service dog work. And so it was a lot of like, sorry, but this dog probably isn’t the right fit. We can do X, Y, and Z, see how the dog does. But, but generally this dog is too fearful, afraid of men, you know, of whatever, all of all of the things.

Um, and so I wanted a way to get to people before they made those types of decisions, before they put their money down on a, a puppy, all of that, and to provide. Free resources because a lot of people who need a service dog also tend to be low income. And there just wasn’t a lot. I mean, when I was in Guide Dogs, everything was industry secret, you know, like, like a decade ago, you know, no one talked about the training.

And now the more that we have these resources available, the easier it is for people to do good training with their dogs. So, so that’s where we’re at right now. So that’s mostly what I do. That’s, that’s a lot. That’s quite the, quite the journey. Yeah. It’s been fun. So, and, and I apologize if I missed it, but where exactly were you training working with rhinos and other animals?

Down in Florida, there was a conservation center. It was private at the time, but now it’s a nonprofit called White Oak. Okay. Uh, conservation Center. Yeah. It was just a four month summer thing, but man, it was, it was a great experience. It was a, it was a lot of fun seeing what was possible. Basically Cool.

Yeah, I’m still trying to imagine what a rhino pedicure looks like. Putting their, putting their foot up on a little pedestal so you can shave it. Oh my gosh. So, so cute. You know, I’m no expert on any of that, but went to Bush Gardens, uh, you know, I don’t know, maybe a year or so ago, and I was amazed. They take way more precautions with the hippos than the rhinos.

And I had no idea that in captivity, a hippo would be that much more dangerous than the rhinos. But it was, well this, this facility, I mean, a little off topic, but was very interesting because it was a private collection and, and they were doing a lot of scientific research, but it was 8,000 acres, so sometimes you wouldn’t see an animal for days because the enclosures were so big and much more realist.

I mean, nothing is like the wild, but we’re not talking about having to have people have eyes on the animals all the time. So it was a really interesting location to work in. And does it still run at that size, 8,000 acres? I think so, yeah. I’m pretty sure. Yeah. That’s amazing. That’s called what? White Oak.

White Oak. It’s in, um, Yulee, Florida, like right on the Florida Georgia line. Okay. Yeah. That’s amazing. Yeah, it’s a, it was a good time. Definitely nice for the animals. Yeah. It, it was great for them and it was just, they did a lot of cool research. I’m not gonna pretend to be able to espouse what they’re doing right now.

’cause that was too many years ago that I could, would like to say. But, uh, yeah, it was a good time. Cool. When I’ve seen them work with cheetahs, I look at a cheetah. I’m like, that’s basically just a Malinois with different fur. Well, they raised this one, so there was a singleton and they raised it with an Anatolian Shepherd so that they, it had a, a friend, ’cause it was a singleton and it was a, an educational cheetah, so it would come in our bedroom and hang out with us.

It was, yeah, it was unique. That’s wild. I don’t trust cats enough to have a, a large cat like that near me. That’s for sure. All right. Well, we kicked around a lot of topics for today and I think there’s so many things we could talk about, but you would, you know, suggested maybe talking about, you know, just starting with the beginning, how to choose a dog.

And you mentioned that’s one of your big focuses, right? Is to catch people early and that’s where the focus is of your YouTube channel. Yeah. As opposed to when they’ve got the wrong dog and now they’ve got a problem on their hands. So why don’t we just start at the beginning. If someone’s looking to get a service dog, how do they choose the right dog?

Yeah, so some of it of course depends on disability and what you’re looking for the dog to be able to do. You know, you don’t wanna get a chihuahua when you’re looking at doing mobility tasks, right? That are weight bearing. That’s not right. And if you travel a lot right, you don’t wanna get a. I’m not saying you can’t travel with a great Dane, but if you’re on a flight every week, great Dane’s hard to fly with.

So you wanna look at like what is your life circumstance and also what you know is going to make sense for the tasks you need them to do. Like even retrieve tasks. A a lot of service dog work is retrieving things. And if the dog isn’t big enough to do a good job of that, that’s not a, a good fit. But one thing that I always think about is I wanna get, we’re looking for a piece of medical equipment when we’re talking about like what service dog work is, it’s doing a task to mitigate your disability, right?

And so we’re looking at a piece of medical equipment that’s also your friend and a dog and all of that. And we wanna get the best dog that’s going to suit your needs. And you know, I say this all the time, but it, a lot of times it’s a Labrador. Everyone hates to hear it because they think Labrador are boring and they’re not cool looking or whatever.

And I was the same person. My next service dog was gonna be a Malis when I was in my twenties. Not a decision for me that’s like not what most people need. Most people need a Labrador. And, um, I’m currently raising and training my, my next service dog. It’s a lovely little yellow lab and when you’ve been working herding dogs for a decade and a half and you get a nice little lab that just is so easy to, you know, generally pretty easy to train.

It’s like, it’s a little bit mind blowing. But, um, most people do really nicely with like a bench show, line style Labrador because they can do all the things and like I mentioned, retrieving tasks. So most people need retrieving tasks. It’s, it should be generally hardwired with a little bit of cultivation to be able to get a dog that naturally finds that task inherently rewarding.

And that’s what we want. We don’t wanna fit. Round pegs in square holes if we can help it. We wanna get dogs that want to do the work, and it’s a lot easier if they’re kind of bred to do that thing bred to work with the person. One of the reason people use so many gun dog type, you know, the Labrador retriever of their golden retriever.

And because they have, you know, they have a high success rate because they are bred to work in conjunction with the human spending long days sitting still and doing nothing until it’s time to do the thing. So I’m gonna sit here in the blind with you for maybe two hours. I’m gonna go do that retrieve and then I’m gonna sit back in the blind with you.

And I don’t care about gunfire, I don’t care about these environmental sensi like sensitivities. I’m br you know, a lab is bred or golden bred to work with other dogs around. So it’s got a lot of things that really make it ideal choice and it’s the reason most service dog organizations are using those breeds because of the higher success rates than not.

That’s not to say that other breeds, there are not individuals in other breeds that can do the job. Right? There absolutely are. Um, but if you’re starting from square one, if you’re my client and we’re starting off, I’m gonna try and head you towards the direction of a very nice health tested bench bread service dogs in the lines.

You know, retriever because even these schools that are breeding specifically for service dog work, right, they’re only having, you know, 50% success rate, 30% success rate. Some of these schools and those are dogs that are purpose spread for the job. Right? So when we’re, we’re looking for if possible, something that is purpose bread.

Now, if you’re not gonna get a puppy, well, sorry, go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say, just to hit that point and make it really clear to everyone, ’cause I deal with this a lot is trying to explain, so you said first you’re picking the breed and you like labs, which I get completely, yeah. Then even a lab that’s bred, purposely bred to be a service dog, you said the failure rate.

So a 30% success rate. So organizational failure rate, it’s a little bit different with, because you have a lot more flexibility to let the dog grow up a little bit and let them, you know, be. A little more flexible, but when you’re talking like guide dogs specifically, they have a pretty standardized training protocol.

And so they’re, they have less flexibility to allow for differences in the dogs that come through, but Okay. But yeah, and I mean, 50 some places they’ll say they’re like 70%, but you’re running, you’re wondering when they started counting on that. Um, because sometimes they’re not counting the dog that they took out of the program within the first month or two.

Um, so just, yeah. It’s, it’s, the success rate isn’t very high because the job is really, really hard. Dealing with the public is just very hard for a lot of dogs. Yep. So that’s just to me, such a big point for people to think about. Ha if you, whatever number you use Dogs Bread for this purpose, half of them are gonna flunk out of large programs.

Yeah. Yeah. And that’s across the board. That’s pretty shocking. Now, guide dogs are a little different. So my specialty is Guide Dogs ’cause I did it for so many years and it, it is a little bit unique to service Dogs because when we’re talking guide dogs. Dogs that are going to be career changed or washed as people say out of guide Dog work can sometimes do other jobs.

So they might be able to do a job that is less, uh, independent. So when we’re talking guide dogs, you, the dog takes on so much responsibility because the handler isn’t going or may not be able to give as many cues based on what they’re seeing in the environment, right? So a dog who’s not going to make it for guide work and, and have that really independent drive career may be able to do, you know, work for PTSD or autism spectrum disorder, whatever it is.

Um, so there’s that. Or when I was in, uh, because I did German Shepherds, if they didn’t make it at guide dogs, they usually went to the police or bomb. So, um, you know, different careers are possible with the dog, but yeah, generally it’s, it’s easier to make a laba a retriever of some sort. Generally, of course, individual results will vary, but.

Like we have a, we have a breeder that we use and the dogs that come out of that breeder are just consistently just easy to put with a first time service dog handler. And them being able to, you know, with guidance, be able to raise their own service dog. So, yeah. Okay. So that was all pretty breed specific, you know, choosing breed.

How about choosing a puppy? There’s obviously a lot that goes into that. Yeah. Yeah. So like, I’m not sure the latest studies on puppy, like correlation between testing and puppies, but I’m relying a lot more on the genetics of the parents and the grandparents and success rates than a puppy test. I will always puppy test, ’cause I, I like certain things, like if I’m looking at a puppy and, or you know, a group of puppies.

I am thinking really hard about the person that that dog is going to. So I’m not, yes, there’s some certain things that I want, like I want a dog that’s not sound sensitive. I want a dog that’s handler focused, all of those things. But you know, I might look at a little spicier puppy and say, Hey, that’s probably not for this person, even though maybe that would be good for another person that I’m working with.

Or first time, you know, I’m thinking of this poodle poodle that we did. I, I work in conjunction with one of my colleagues sometimes, and we did this poodle puppy and we looked at the first litter that we were potentially gonna get a dog from, and one of the dogs was just really mouthy. Now can we work with a mouthy puppy?

Of course, you know, all, all puppies are a little bit mouthy, but for this first time handler, it was a better choice to pick a dog that wasn’t innately mouthy and have to deal with that right up front with them. Um, so yeah, we’re looking, you know, we do testing. Um, I don’t follow a specific test. I did guide dog testing, so, um.

I forget exactly what the guide dog testing is called, but we did like a really regimented test. I’ll kind of bring along a bunch of equipment with me, you know, a tunnel, a wobble board, um, a sunshade for the car to see if they’ll walk over that, something that’s gonna make noise and I’ll just kind of see where the puppy is at.

But you’re not always gonna have ideal testing conditions the way you would at an organization like I I used to have. So we are also really relying on, um, you know, the genetics, because genetics play such a huge role in outcomes when you’re talking service dogs. It’s, you know, the genetics play. I think the biggest role in whether or not that dog is gonna be successful.

So you talked about dogs washing out, um, which I mean, it happens. Uh, in your opinion, what do you think is probably the number one reason why dogs wash out? Well, it’s always public access. I’ve never had a dog I couldn’t teach tasks to. Right. Um, so it’s always public access because there’s so many things to contend with.

So it could be the dog is a little too weary of people. It could be they’re weird with shiny floors. It could be they can’t handle travel like my old cattle dog. We were, you know, talking about cattle dogs, uh, prior to starting. And, um, my old cattle dog, excellently trained really, really awesome dog would never be a service dog ’cause he is not great in the car.

Right. I would never have a dog that gets a little bit anxious in, in the car as a service dog, even if everything else is great because now I’ve got an anxious dog I’m traveling with. That’s not good for anybody. Um, so public access stuff, kids, you know, when I was working German Shepherds Movement, movement of children, um, you know.

Touch sensitivity. ’cause you’re always, if you’re gonna be have a service dog, that service dog is gonna be touched without your permission. Uh, it’s gonna, it needs to be totally cool with a kid running up and pulling its tail and be fine with it because whether or not you do a good job of protecting your dog, it’s going to happen.

And that dog’s response cannot be to turn around and open its mouth. Um, so I, I, in my experience, it’s always public access related issues. Yeah. Yeah. Glad you brought that up, because that’s basically the same thing we see. It’s not task training, it’s not any of the other stuff. It’s always environmentals that Yeah.

Um, that gets I’d say 99% of ’em. Yeah. And, you know, I think that’s important because, you know, a lot of people, um, when looking at puppies or, you know, even other dogs that they may acquire, we, we talked about people pulling ’em outta shelters all the time. Yeah. We can talk about that too. You know, they, I, I don’t feel like most people have, um.

A really solid understanding of what it’s going to take environmentally. And as such, their ability to test and evaluate and assess this dog up front is incredibly limited. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And I, I totally agree. And you, you mentioned shelter dogs are, or even adult dogs. The one thing that I will sometimes tell people is if they don’t wanna deal with the puppy phase, and not, not everybody is equipped to be raising a young puppy, which takes so much energy, especially if you have a chronic disability to be able to raise a young puppy, you are going to get much more reliable results with any type of testing that you do.

If you get something that’s one to two years of age already has an established temperament, and then you can easily rule it out, you know, rule in or out a dog or see where there might be some green flags or, or red flags. Um, but you talked about shelter dogs and, and I am, I, you know, I rescued dogs. I, I did Kettle Dog Foundation stuff, but basically.

I went down. So when I started transitioning from doing guide dogs to other types of service dogs, because there was a need in my area and people kept asking, um, I went down to a service dog organization down in Texas and did a week long intensive where we were doing, uh, hearing dogs and mobility dogs.

But one of the things we did is we went to one of the local shelters and had 300 dogs there, and we were assessing and trying to see if we could pull dogs out to, to do service work. And of those 300 dogs, three of them were worth testing and zero of them were worth pulling for service work. And that’s really the, everyone wants to rescue a dog.

And I, there are absolutely rescue dogs that can do the work. Um, but the, the amount of work it takes to find that one dog is so extensive that it makes more sense to save up and buy the well-bred dog in most cases. So Yeah. Yeah. To, you know, to, to your point. Yeah. It. It does take a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of resources to pick those dogs.

And, and, and that’s, to me, that’s kind of the good and bad with shelter dogs. Um, and I say that because, you know, we, we work with a lot of shelters, love shelter dogs, right? But it’s those few that actually can do it, that end up being success stories that I think a lot of people look at. And say, oh, well, you know, they got this one from the shelter.

Why can’t I get one from a shelter? Yeah. Um, and, and, and kind of to your other point with, um, the amount of time and resources it takes to go through all those dogs to find the ones that are gonna be good at service dog work, um, it, it takes, in my opinion, a very skilled person to be able to identify that your average pet owner or individual with a disability who’s looking to potentially acquire a service dog most of the time is not going to have that skillset to be able to have that level of success or the finances to hire someone to do that either.

Sure. Right, because it just takes, you know, even if you’re, and I always recommend that you bring a trainer on board, even if you’re not gonna use a trainer for the rest of the dog’s training, but to help you find the right prospect, that’s good money spent upfront because the of the dogs that me and my colleague have worked with, the ones that we have picked.

Very, I, I can’t even think of one that didn’t make it when we picked them versus when you bring me a dog that is either already older and didn’t have the foundation that we’d like to put on the dog. Um, or just doesn’t have the, you know, that we can try it, we can try and make it work, but I’m not in the business of making dogs do a job that they’re not going to be happy doing because there’s nothing in that for me or for the dog or for the person.

Because if the dog doesn’t wanna do the job and you’re forcing them to do it, when the cards are down and someone is having a medical crisis, the dog is not gonna perform. You know? And so that’s like when you have, especially issues with fear, you know, reactivity, any of those things when you have potentially novice handlers.

’cause I like, I work with a lot of first time service dog handlers. You when those thi those things, I can make ’em look good, right? Like I, you know, most trainer, I’m sure like you guys can make lots of dogs look good when you hand off the leash to someone else. The dog still has to be really functional and without years of knowing what to look for and being able to, um, manage a situation, the dog tends to fall apart when their underlying genetics aren’t there, or that’s my experience anyway.

So you don’t think someone should go get a chow rot mix? Maybe a little shepherd in there from the rest, from a rescue. Oh, you’re gonna make me talk about breeds that I don’t like for service work, I’m gonna get canceled. It’s interesting how that’s become a little taboo lately with some people, like every breed’s bred for a different purpose.

To say one of these is not a good pet for a first time owner or a good service dog is not saying it’s a terrible breed, it just. Has not been bred for that purpose. Right? And, and that’s, you know, that’s, I am, what my whole goal is, is I want people to be successful. So I’m gonna stack all the cards that I can in the favor of that person being successful.

And it’s not that there aren’t individuals of other breeds that can do the thing, because there absolutely are. But when you’re talking about success rates, there’s a reason every school uses the same dogs and that when they branch out into other dogs, they tend to not be as successful. Um, so I’m not saying you have to get a lab, but I’m just saying like, you might wanna, it might, it might be a good idea.

So I have a question for you, like maybe they haven’t, maybe you haven’t met the right lab yet if you think they’re boring. So, all right, go ahead Matt. Sorry. So, no, uh, so what would be your opinion? So let’s say someone. Is has already decided they’re gonna get a lab. So they’ve, and they’ve, you know, picked a breeder.

Would you pick, help them pick a different dog based upon the task the dog is gonna have to perform? So if, yeah, you can choose, I mean, I mean choose two types of service dogs, whatever you want. Could you walk us through Sure. Why and how you would choose a different dog? Yeah, so we were talking guiding, so let’s say guiding versus, say medical alert, right?

You have some type of scent training stuff you wanna do, um, versus a dog that’s gonna have to take a lot more initiative as far as public access work. So going through crowds, that kind of thing. I’m going to want that bolder dog that maybe works a little bit more independently, maybe a little less handler, um, focused than the dog that’s going to have to be checking, you know, your blood sugar kind of thing that you want them on you all the time.

Um, same thing like. Here’s a, a common misconception. So a lot of people will think, okay, I want a psychiatric service dog, and I want that dog to be really in tune with me. Well, I don’t want that dog to be super in tune with you because most of those dogs that are super in tune with you are also in tune with your emotions about a situation.

And so you go into a crowded area, you have a panic attack, and now that dog thinks every time we’re in a crowd, something scary is gonna happen to mom. I’d much rather have that big dumb boy that’s like, huh, Laura’s being weird. All right, let’s go this way. And, you know, not care about those, those environmental things or be as handler sensitive like a lot of people are really.

Have that conception that they need to be like, oh, I need that dog. That just like feels my feelings. No, we do not want the dog to feel your feelings. If you’re looking for a psych dog, generally, you know, they need to care that you exist, of course, but, but they don’t need to be so attentive to you that they struggle When you are having an issue in a claim situation, you wanna be sure you have the right coverage Business.

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Do you have videos on your channel talking about this exact type of stuff? I do have some puppy testing videos on my Patreon. I don’t think I have any on YouTube. I definitely have lots of videos on talking about picking a dog and labs or like breeds to use and I talk about rescues, why I generally don’t use rescues.

Yeah. I have all that stuff over them. Yeah. Okay, cool. Because I’m sure we’re barely scratching the surface of it right now. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot to it. Alright, well should we move on from picking a puppy to actually starting the training and Yeah. Working on public access? Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah. You want me to talk about starting young puppies?

Sure, yeah. Floor is yours. Whatever you’d like to talk about. Um, so I think one of the, the things that I always wanna get out to owner trainers or even, you know, dog professionals that are looking to get into general, you know, service dog work is when we’re talking about pet dogs, there’s a huge focus on can the dog sit, can the dog down, can they not run after your neighbor?

You know, all those things and. While those things are important, when we’re talking about that prime socialization window, when the puppy’s really young, my goal is on independent thinking and problem solving and confidence. That’s, I don’t care at all. If the dog sits, will I teach it to sit? Sure. But really I care about building confidence and building a repertoire of communication and being able to problem solve and think independently because a lot of these dogs are going to have to work independent of a handler having a health crisis in a lot of situations.

And so I care about, I do a lot of shaping really young. So can you walk on this surface? Can you touch this thing? What do you do with novelty? I’m trying to build novelty into their experience as a puppy so that even if they haven’t seen the clown riding the bicycle during the parade, they’ve seen me dressed in a unicorn costume.

They’ve seen me holding balloons and running around. And so they think that novelty is an opportunity for reinforcement and engagement. And that’s really what I’m trying to do young to head off issues with public access because a lot of public access issues come from, oh, that thing over there is scary.

I’ve never seen this before. And I want them to think, Ooh, I’ve never seen this before. Something good’s gonna happen. So that’s what I spend a lot of puppy, young puppy hood doing textures, big deal. Um, because my background is in guide dogs, they’re, and because they have to work forward of the handler and independently, there are dogs that were failed because they can’t handle shiny floors, they can’t handle that black to white transition because it looks like a hole they don’t wanna go, um, you know, across a moving sidewalk ’cause it feels weird.

So I spend a lot of time on under footings and texture when they’re young. Um, and then noise stuff. Um, you know, noise dogs that have issues with loud noises, sirens, that kind of stuff or, so I’ll play those noises very young while and when the noise goes on, tug happens, or you know, something awesome is going to happen, I’ll throw.

You know, they’re kibble all their, I have all my dogs work for their meals. So like there’s, I don’t, so I have a nine month old field lab that’s my dog right now. And I don’t think he’s ever eaten out of a bowl ever, because all of his food comes through some type of work type of situation. So that I want them to really wanna train, really wanna engage, you know, I’ll throw a kibble, scatter in a pile of hula hoops and have them eat their meal that way.

So just trying to build confidence around novelty, um, and then bring up their shaping skills because a lot of tasks, you know, so tasks are, are relatively simple. You got, you know, blocking tasks where the dog’s gonna stand behind you and create a barrier between you and a crowd. That’s pretty simple to teach, but when we’re talking about more complex tasks or, you know, multi-step tasks, even being able to go from one end of the house to the fridge, get medication outta the fridge, close the door, bring it back, that’s a multi-step behavior that I need the dog to be able to shape the dog to be able to do.

So I wanna start early, you know, there’s some videos of, uh, John Denver’s, my, my young Dog’s name, you know, working on. Yeah, yeah. It’s silly. Um, being able to get mail out of a mailbox at, at three weeks old or whatever, because I want him to be able to have the skills of poll go out, poll, bring something to me, all of those things.

But it’s all in the context of, oh, look at this fun game that we’re playing here. And then you can apply those foundation skills for the rest of the life of the dog. So he may not be able to have a really great downs, stay at, you know, three months old, but he can do all this other silly stuff that’s going to help him when he gets older.

Yeah. So there’s a lot of overlap there with what the, I think I would say the average pet dog trainer does as well. Sure. I, I explain to clients, you get one chance at socializing and we can train this dog anytime. I don’t care how old it is. Yep. But trying to socialize it at six months old of it, if that hasn’t been started, can be a problem.

Yep. Do you give people, I find people do well with a timeline or like, this needs done by 16 weeks. Do you give people timelines like that? Or is it more amorphous? How do you, how do you handle that? People would love it if I did give them timelines. Yeah. Um, people hate my, my answer of it depends. But, um, I do have general things that I, I do with dogs and I show people to do with dogs.

The other thing that I, I didn’t mention is every dog is kind of an individual, so I’m gonna work to their strengths to start so that we’re also building a bond at the same time where I’m like, oh, you love doing this. Let’s build this really quickly. That’s really fun for you. Um, you know, you’re good at surfaces.

Let’s do all the surfaces and then we’ll work in little bits of the stuff you’re not as good at right now. Um, as a young puppy, I don’t have a see a hundred people by four months old kind of thing because what I find for me is that people are checklisting it and not looking at the dog in front of them and reading their body language and seeing how the dog is responding to those things.

So I don’t care if you saw a hundred people and your dog was neutral to scared I much more care that you saw 25 people and your dog was thrilled about it, or, you know, didn’t care right about it in, in a good way. So, um, I’m more on, I’m more talk a lot about reading the dog’s body language and introducing them at their pace because there’s nothing to be gained for.

Throwing dogs into situations that they’re not yet prepared for. I think for pet dogs, I totally understand that because you’re people are going to do like 25% of what you ask them to do anyway, so it’s probably fine. Um, but what I see more of in service dog work is people going, well, I’m supposed to expose them to a store.

So I brought my eight week old puppy to 12 stores in the grocery store and now the dog is completely overwhelmed and is not having good experiences out in public. So I’d much rather them spend five minutes outside of Target watching people than them shopping the dog around in Target, which isn’t legal anyway, but in a store that they’re allowed to be in.

Um, you know, for a full day excursion where the dog is exhausted and not having a good experience there. So it sounds like service dog trainers have very different clients than pet dog trainers. Jason, you might be able to speak to that. ’cause I get the 25% for sure. If I tell someone I want this dog to meet a hundred people, I’m lucky if it meets 25.

Yeah. Jason, what do, what do you see? Do you see a difference there? There’s some, well, and, and, and our situation’s, honestly a little different ’cause we are providing fully trained dogs to people and, uh, you know, we’re training the dog, we’re delivering it to ’em, we’re then training them. I do find that service, a lot of these service dog handlers, um, are going to likely give you a greater commitment to the, to the overall training and maintenance of the dog.

And I think part of that is, you know, again, from, from our kind of angle, is it’s pretty significant investment. Uh, not only in, not only monetarily, but you know, time, resources, um. And we’re oftentimes dealing with, you know, we do a lot of service dogs for, uh, young adults and children with autism spectrum disorders.

So you’re dealing with the whole family, and the whole family has to make this commitment, and the whole family has, um, dedicated a lot of resources and in addition to all the other things they’ve got going on. So, yeah, a lot of times they will, um, it’s my experience, they’ll sort of go above and beyond, uh, more so than most of our pet dog clients do to make it work because again, um, it’s, it’s sort of mission critical for them.

It’s just my belief on it. I totally have the same experience. What I love about working with service dog handlers is that not, this isn’t just a pet. This is both medical equipment and this like part that’s integral to their independence. And so you’ve got long ranging. Relationships with clients. So two year relationships with clients and they’re committed because it does represent not only a financial, um, you know, expenditure, but time emotional.

All of that is a big part of the whole thing. And, and I do more owner trainer than finished dogs, so it’s, it’s a little bit different. But yeah, they’re, what I’m trying to do when they’re just starting out is almost, not scare them away, but be very realistic about what this commitment is and so that they understand how much time it’s, you know, training a service dog is basically like having a second job if you’re raising it from a puppy.

And when you’re talking about disability, it’s, it may make your disability worse rather than better during that time when you’re, the dog is not able to do work for you and you are doing so much for the dog before the time when it’s able to, you know, be an easy dog to have around and, and do tasks for you.

So. Make sense? Yeah. It’s a big make sense. It’s a big, big commitment. I mean, it really is, no matter how you’re doing it, it is, it truly is a big commitment. It’s commitment’s, a lifestyle, you know, it’s, it’s a total change to your lifestyle. Yeah. And again, you know, from, from our perspective, you know, we’ve, we’ve got clients sometimes who’ve, you know, they got 11-year-old children and they’ve never slept in their own bed, and now all of a sudden we bring in this dog and, and this kid’s sleeping in its own bed.

Um, you know, that is a massive win-win for the whole family. And if I tell ’em, Hey, look, you know, these are the things you gotta do to maintain that. Yeah. A hundred percent. Almost a hundred percent of the time they’re gonna do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and it’s, it’s incredible what these dogs can do, right?

Like, I had this dog, um, for a woman, it was, um. We’re training it for a bunch of tasks, but one of them was migraine alert, migraine alerts. And I’m not a scent trainer, so I actually, we, I worked with another scent trainer to work with her on that specific portion. And then I worked the public assets access and the other tasks.

And this was a person who couldn’t drive for seven years because she would get ocular migraines and they would come on like that. So it would be dangerous for her to be in a car. And when the dog was done, she could drive again because the dog would give her 30 minutes of warning before the, so she had time to pull over and, and be safe.

And so when we’re talking about life changing animals, people are pretty committed to doing the thing that they need to be doing. Yeah. What was the dog smelling there? What, what was the dog picking up? 30 minutes ahead of the migraine. So the science on it isn’t there, um, or at least I’m not aware of the science on it.

But there’s, when we did it, we did, um, shirt, so we she’d wear shirts and then would pull samples from, so she, she had enough migraines that this was easy to do. There’s. There’s also an argument to be made about how much time you wanna spend on cent training. Something. If it only happens a very infrequently, she was having migraines three or four times a week.

So different. But you know, you take the armpit portion of the shirt, but we don’t know exactly, or at least I’m not aware of a study that understands exactly what’s happening for them to be able to do it, to, um, do those. So that’s amazing. I leave that to a better, I’ll leave that to a scent trainer.

That’s something I do shed hunt. But that’s kind of the extent of how much scent work. I do want to turn your passion for dogs into professional career at the school for Dog trainers at Highland Canine Training, we offer expert led in-depth courses that fully prepare you for successful career in the dog training industry.

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Visit international dog trainers school.com and unleash your future today. That’s pretty wild. Yeah. Especially that timeframe, 30 minutes and just to think what must be going on in the, the body ahead of time and yeah. I had another dog talking about rescue dogs, the diamond in the rough, it was a Labrador, but uh, I had this woman who brought me a year old field line down, pulled from this rescue and that dog did heart rate alerts.

She came to me with the dog doing heart rate alerts and she had some really serious conditions and, um, we didn’t, we just had to shape the, it was jumping on her, so we had to change the alert system so it wasn’t potentially knocking her over. Um, but, you know, I, I have no idea what that dog was alerting to specifically.

Um, but yeah, it’s, it’s really cool. I’d love to see some more research in that, in that regard on that scent stuff. Yeah. That, that’s amazing. Jason, do you have any input on that? I’m, I, I want to now, I just want to get on Google and start researching that. That’s pretty wild. Yeah, no, that’s, that’s not something we do.

Okay. And to me it is amazing that as humans we can’t create something that’s, has a better sense of smell or detection than a dog. It just absolutely blows my mind. Yeah, agree. So far it cannot be done and it’s just with everything else we can do. I mean, we can go into outer space like it’s can do brain surgery, all these things we can do and we can’t do that.

It’s pretty, it’s pretty amazing. Yeah. They’re, they’re pretty incredible creatures. Alright, well what about talking, so you, you, you talked about a lot of that was puppy focused right? During their early socialization period. How do you handle stressful environments as they get older? And you’re getting into, and I’ll let you define stressful environment or give some examples, but how do you handle that?

Yeah, I think a lot of it is being able to split, like split situations down into things that. The dog can handle and then build on those successes. So a stressful environment, really good example, is an airplane, right? Airplane. Incredibly stressful environment and everything that surrounds the airplane, right?

The human being nervous about flying or whatever, going through TSA, all of that stuff. So how do I break down this incredibly difficult situation, even for a well-bred, well-trained dog and make it into bite-sized portions so that the dog can be successful? Well, the first thing I’m gonna do is make sure it’s good in cars.

Like if I wanna put it on a tin can in the air, it better be really good in every other public transit that is available to me. So I’m gonna put it in cars. I’m going to start on buses. I might go the first day. I have a video of this actually with the one of the poodles. Um, you know, I’m gonna go watch the buses for a day, and then I’m gonna go ride buses that are kind of empty, and then I’m gonna ride buses that are full.

Then I’m gonna go during ComicCon and ride the buses when everybody’s dressed up to ComicCon, and then I’m gonna start going to trains. I’m gonna go watch trains. I’m gonna ride trains, I’m gonna do subways. I’m gonna go just hang out in the city if you don’t live in a city. And then I’m gonna work through subways.

And once a dog can do all of those things, I’m also simultaneously gonna be training for the other experience in the airport, which is being around a bunch of people, being around a person with rolly bags, potentially rolling over the dog’s feet with their, their rollie bags. Um, being able to be pat down by TSA, practicing those type of skills and being okay with that.

So I’m trying to, any experience that the dog is gonna have, I’m gonna try and split that down into all of the manageable portions. And as the dog becomes successful, I’m gonna build up to higher and higher situations or, or, or more difficulty, difficulty, difficult situations in, in that regard. Yeah. Yeah.

Some of those TSA screenings can be pretty intrusive. I’ve, uh, experienced over the years with the dogs. Yeah. And, and another thing I should probably note is, so I do, you know, I, I did one-on-one training, but there is something significant to be said about group classes, and I’d always have clients be in group classes as well, because one of the things that owner trainers struggle with is being around other dogs a lot of time because they don’t have the volume of experience of just, uh, their dog working around these other dogs.

So, group classes is a great captive audience to be able to do that. And so recently we did, you know, with my little boy Denver, we went out and did a TSA, um. Training session. So we got to go through TSA four times. But in the lead up to that, I was at the airport just observing. I was at the airport doing obedience.

I was rolling my luggage around the airport with him, you know, doing all these things before I even went to the training session so that he’d seen the pieces before we had to put them together. And that session is something, TSA offers for people to come in and do some practice. So this was with another local.

So I am, I’m always really big on community and building relationships with other service dog trainers in the area. So I have like probably five or six service dog trainers that I regularly train with or, or work with and can refer to and all of that. And so it was set up by one of those trainers and she invited me ’cause she’s lovely and I got to do that.

But I believe it was set up through TSA cares. Um, and I think. There’s a lot that could be done by just asking really nicely and bringing snacks. So like we did a, an ambulance one, an ambulance training and there’s a, like if you call up your local fire or ambulance and you’re like, Hey, I’m doing this thing, any chance, you know, you’d be able to do this?

And then you offer them something as well, Hey, I’d love to do, I’d love to do an educational 20 minutes for your people too and we can kind of do this trade off together. You can get a lot done by being nice to people and, and ’cause a lot of people wanna share in that experience. Like a lot of people think service dogs are cool and are, are happy to accommodate practicing getting you on a gurney and wheeling you into an ambulance if, if they have some downtime.

You know, that’s good advice. I, I like the idea of trying to get out there and. Be able to work for real. ’cause I see a lot of people that do it, what you described at the start of breaking into little pieces as much as they can. But to actually get the chance to go through the line four times in a row sounds pretty awesome for the dog.

Yeah. Yeah. It was a great experience. Yeah. It any, anything that you can do for real. But the, when you have a young dog, you also always wanna have a plan B. Like, how am I bailing from this experience? Because if you have. A young dog, they’re in adolescence, they’re just having a bad day. There’s not a ton to be gained by being like, no, you’re gonna do this thing that you’re stinking at right now.

There’s a lot more to be said by saying, okay, this isn’t for me today. I’m gonna go take a couple steps back, watch this situation happen, and I’m gonna come back on a different day when we have more skills or whatever, you know, the dog is, is going through at that time. Um, so I always tell people like, you can plan to go to the aquarium with your dog, but you have to also be okay with saying, I’ve only been here 10 minutes and this isn’t the right thing for my dog right now, so we’re gonna bail and go do something else.

So I think that brings up an interesting point. How do you handle it in a scenario? Let’s say a train goes by and the dog freaks out Yeah. And is terrified. How do you recommend, what do they do? Do they leave? When do they, if so, when do they come back into the situation? How do you handle that? So, great, great question.

I actually had this experience, so my little lab puppy, super. Super confident dog, but he had a scare when he was young at a skate park where a guy came up over the bull, slammed down right in front of him, whatever. I haven’t seen it crop up again. But the other day I was at a park that I’d never been to before and there was a skate park there.

And so we got out of the car and immediately someone does something very similar. You know, I wasn’t super as close as I was when that episode that I would’ve love to avoid, uh, happened. But okay, so what do I have to do? All right. My dog in the moment is struggling. What can I do? I’m gonna create distance, but I’m not gonna necessarily with my dog and what I know about my dog, leave that situation.

I’m gonna let him observe. I’m going to mark and reward for him. We, we’ve done a lot of work on, here’s the novelty, look at me kind of thing. So when I get to the point that my dog can look at me at a distance, okay, great, I’m gonna put him back in the crate. I pulled him back into the crate and we were there to train ducks.

So at my duck stuff with me, so we went out, we trained ducks, we come back to the situation. And we just did a little bit of engaged, disengaged stuff with him, and he was totally fine going up to the skate park after that. So would I say that every single dog should approach the thing on the day that they had an issue with it?

No. Um, you know, some dogs, it’s best to say, okay, we’re gonna cut our losses. Some dogs it’s, Hey, we’re gonna create distance. Um, it a little, you know, it’s that answer. Everyone hates it. It kind of depends sometimes on the dog and, and what you know about the dog. But it does depend. But you want, you don’t wanna, you don’t wanna like, pretend that’s not happening.

Like that’s, that’s like, we don’t wanna avoid it. Right? It’s the same thing with like, if you have a reactive dog, we, we’re not gonna avoid dogs forever because your dog is reactive. We have to have a plan for how we’re going to introduce this at a level that you can be successful and then grow the level of success over time.

So, you mentioned the phrase captive audience a few minutes ago, and I, I use that exact phrase with my clients when we were talking about reactivity. Okay. You know, we have a captive audience that’s gonna help. But there’s some things that are easy to create or control and some that are hard. Can you give any examples of public access challenges that are not easy to control?

Yeah. Hmm, that’s a good one. Um, I think that’s kind of where we go back to novelty as the norm for the dog. So like, it’s not easy to control a child running up to your dog and grabbing its ears, but I can still prepare for touching of that nature with my dog, even if it’s not with a child. Um, you know, a train going by is not a terrible example.

Like you can, you’ll know that the train is gonna go by, but maybe you got stuck there and you didn’t intend to get stuck wherever you were, um, that you can’t control for. So it’s, again, a little bit depends on what the dog, but you might do some type of redirect to me. If the dog can handle a redirect, do a cookie scattered or diffuse, you might.

Hi, Taylor out of there for a little bit. Get back at a distance, watch the trains go by again. Or you might say like, this isn’t where my dog’s at right now, and I need to do some remedial work between here and there. Um, there’s not a lot that you can’t prepare for though, or that I can think of. Jason. I mean, you do the same thing.

So is there anything you can think of that you can’t really prepare for in some way or the July fireworks displays When clients want to go to those, um, that’s good. When they get, when they get front row tickets to concerts, that’s a difficult one to prep for. Um, but there’s a lot. Air travel. Air travel.

I mean, it’s one of those things. I mean, yeah, you mentioned a lot of things you can do and I will take this moment to emphasize that roller luggage in an airport, believe it or not, is creepy. Creepy. Especially when it’s being pulled behind a person and behind a dog, it can really freak ’em out. Um, but, you know, air travel un until you’ve done it.

Y you can’t fully prepare the dog for, you know, pressure changes in their ears when the on descent and, you know, ascent, those sorts of things. So, um, you do the best you can to paint the picture and, and in some cases you just have to hope for the best. Yeah. Yeah. And I think if a lot of times when there is an issue, there’s other things that you’ve seen that are little indicators of that issue potentially popping up.

Like, I, I very, so I’ve flown with a lot of dogs because when I was, you know, placing guide dogs, I’d take a dog I’d met a week ago and fly across the country for the first time. And those dogs being solid prior to flight, I had no, I had never had an issue flying a dog. Um, knock on wood, but, uh, but you know, I think that the overall preparation is where it’s at.

Of course, things can go wrong. You know, my, my dad was flying with his guide dog. Um. Like a few weeks ago back to Connecticut and a dog came on the plane and started reacting at his dog and the rea like they had walked by that dog, um, you know, in the airport without issue. But as soon as it came on the plane saw his German shepherd.

It was really struggling. And, you know, it’s likely that there may have been some indicator that that might happen prior to the dog getting on the plane. Who knows, you know exactly what was happening with that dog. Um, but I, I think there’s so much that you can do to prepare and what I try to focus on with owner trainers is doing all the things, even if it’s inconvenient.

’cause a lot of people will be like, well, it’s really hard to get to the subway. Yeah, me too. It’s two and a half hours for my closest subway, and I still have to go, I have to figure out how I can make that happen because it’s unfair to the dog to do anything less than fully prepare them for those situations.

Yeah. But yes. And also cross your fingers, like you said, Jason. Yeah. Times Square. How do you prep a dog for Times Square? I mean, we, uh, we, uh, 3, 3, 4 years ago we delivered a dog. Those folks lived in Manhattan. Yeah. Um, they’re trucking through Times Square all the time. So, you know, we, in, in order for us to feel a a lot better about, uh, you know, delivering and dedicating that dog to ’em, we put a trainer, um, we put a trainer in the car and they went to New York for, um, four or five days.

Yep. All the sight and sounds, all the craziness that is Times Square. Uh, and that was probably three months before we delivered the dog, just to make sure things are ready. Some of that stuff, I mean, you just can’t mimic, you have to just kind of experience it Yeah. To do it. Yeah. Yeah. Jason, just send your trainers here.

Broadway. In Nashville. Yeah. Oh yes. I placed a dog in Broadway, in Nashville is so fun. It’s wild. It could be Tuesday at noon and it’s crazy. So yes, great handle training opportunities. Yeah, for sure. Love that place. The dogs don’t really quickly learn how to handle drunk people that are stumbling. They’re like, oh, that’s normal.

You don’t have people dressed as a Statue of Liberty on stilts though, do you? No, not that, but, and that’s where dog temperament too. So we were talking about like a different dog for different people. That’s also where matching the temperament of the dog comes into play when we’re talking guide dogs.

Right. Um. The match is such like, it’s a, it’s the biggest part of the thing because a dog that’s great for one person is going to be a terrible match for another person. And with guide dogs, that starts at pace. And one of the things that people don’t think much about is pacing of the dog. And so when you have a dog that wants to walk really fast and you have a person that wants to walk really slow, there’s just constant conflict and tension down the handle because they’re not, they’re both doing, trying to go in the middle where they don’t necessarily wanna be.

So like, pace is a thing that we would look at. And then environment, is this dog gonna be a better country dog doing country travel down some dirt roads? Or is it a dog that’s a party animal is like, yeah, bring it on, bring on New York City, bring on Broadway. Um, you know, looking at the temperament of the dog for the location it’s being placed at is also a, a huge deal.

Jason, do you have a Southern saying about a high speed dog with a low speed person? I feel like you must have one. I I’ll work on it. I’ve heard it described, someone said basically like a hundred mile per hour dog with a 30 mile per hour dude. And that, that’s a problem. Uh, it is, and we see it with, uh, we see it with service dogs, we see it with police dogs, we see it with, you know, all sorts of, and, and, and as Laura mentioned, that handler dog mismatch is almost always, um, catastrophic.

Yeah, yeah. ’cause it’s hard to, it’s hard to tell with, I mean, I’m thinking Guide dog specifically because there’s just so much, you know, the handle’s up all the time. The dog is driving forward all the time. You get a Drivey dog and that person is flailing behind them. Nobody’s having a good time. That’s not, you know, so that, that match and figuring out.

Pace specifically for guide dogs, but in, in other realms too is, is important. Um, and that goes to breed too. You know, I had said labs and goldens, those are my favorites. But someone might really hate texturally. Like, I don’t like the texture of goldens. I like labs. They’re wash and wear and easy. But you know, some of my clients might do better with a poodle because the poodle’s coat is centrally, you know, a better option for them or you, you know, that’s definitely a possibility too.

And then we have to look at, okay, if this is the dog, this is the breed that is going to fit them best. How do we get the best individual from that breed for what they need to do? Yeah. And you know, those breeds too, in my opinion, have, um, differences that can be, uh, leveraged. To make that fit. You know, you mentioned poodles.

We do a lot of poodles. Mm-hmm. We do a lot of doodles, we do a lot of labs. We do a lot of goldens. Um, and, you know, we find poodles to be excellent service dogs in certain situations. Mm-hmm. We never put ’em with very impulsive children and young adults because, and people are like, why? I don’t understand.

And you’re like, stick your finger in a poodle’s ear twice. ’cause it’ll never happen. You’re gonna get one shot at it. That poodle, that poodle writes you out of the wheel, period. A. You stick your finger in their ear and then you trade ’em a hot dog and they’ll come back to you for years to come. Right, right.

I mean, they just have a whole different perspective about things. Yeah. I mean, like I said, switching over from herding dogs to this lab has been just like delightful. You know? Talk about like making you feel like a good trainer. You just get a nice little nice little lab and you’re like, oh, that’s why have I been doing shepherds for 15 years?

But like teaching a border colleague to not run off and stay close to you off leash, it’s kind kind of inbred there. Yeah. So I have a question for both of you, Jason. You had mentioned a few minutes ago that with TSA sometimes as they, uh, check the dog, it gets pretty invasive. You know, I talk to my clients a lot about be your dog’s advocate, especially with veterinarians.

Like there’s good ones, there’s bad ones. And if, basically if you see them handling your dog in a way that you don’t like, talk to ’em, ask questions, right? Understand what’s happening. Is that conversations you have with people about TSA, because I can imagine they’re doing the checks completely differently depending on the person they are.

It depends on the airport, it depends on the day of the week, and it depends on the person. That’s been my experience. I’ve traveled a lot with dogs and, um, you know, some of ’em, if you’ve never taken one through, generally speaking, uh, as you go through security, you know, you’re dumping all your stuff in the bin.

If a dog’s wearing a harness, a collar, a leash, any of that stuff, it goes in the bin as well. So this dog is what we refer to as naked. Naked, probably not the best term, but we call ’em naked. They have no equipment on, there’s nothing true. Um, so now you’ve gotta, you gotta have a dog that’s trained well enough to handle and manage, waiting in line, waiting their turn, no equipment, no harness, no nothing.

They’re off work, so to speak. Um, you then have to go through the screening. The dog has to stay on the other side. Typically. It’s been my experience. Then when they tell you, you then call the dog through probably a metal detector, right? Uh, and then at that point, once the dog’s on your side, they may or may not elect to, um, physically, um, screen the dog.

And that’s when it can get intrusive. Sometimes they just pat, pat and they’re done. They’re like, thank you, have a good day. Other times I’ve had ’em just get really into their work to the point that I’ve had to say something and even supervisors have come over and said, Hey, look, let’s cut that out and let that dog go.

So my experience is the same. Jason, I actually have a video. I did a video recently, um, with, I have video of that, most of that trip to TSA that I did. Um, and so we went through four times. I actually left the vest on a couple of the times. Um. Because my dog was six months. I was like, ah, we’ll not put him naked.

I had practiced up to being able to be naked, go through whatever. Um, and of those times that we went through with the vest, the metal detector never went off one of those four times he got searched and the other three he didn’t. So it was, it’s really a matter of who you get that day. Yeah. And preparing your dog to be able to handle that.

And you know, I, when I was doing a lot of guide dogs, um, I would always hold the Bity end because it doesn’t matter if the dog was just like, Hey, well what are you doing back there? I always wanna make sure there is no question whether or not that dog is okay to be searched. So, yeah. Yeah. I’ve had TSA agents, like I said, super, super easy.

Pet ’em on the head, let ’em roll. I’ve had others that I, I would’ve sworn we’re trying to do a fecal on this dog. Or fearful. Like what? Like, you know, I’ve had TSA agents that are fearful of the dog too. Yeah. Which, you know, you have to prepare for that, that jumpiness that so that your dog is like, not like, whoa, what’s that person doing?

They’re like uncomfortable kind of thing. Yeah. Another reason to use a lab. Yep. This is just gonna be called the lab episode. Yeah. We got a, I tell my, we got a title there. It is Labradors and Rhino Pedicures. Absolutely. I tell my clients just for pet dogs, get a lab or a golden, most of them don’t, but it’s, your life’s gonna be easier if you get a lab or golden.

Yeah. And, and that’s not to say they don’t have issues, right. The issues are just different and they usually aren’t manifesting as aggression reactivity, that kind of thing. So you’ve got the dogs that are gonna eat stuff off the ground, maybe, you know, that kind of stuff. But that stuff is a lot easier, temperament wise to deal with than when you have other larger, uh, issues with, you know, reactivity and stuff like that.

Right. You do a terrible job of everything. They’re likely to jump on people and swallow a sock. They’re unlikely to kill the neighbor’s cat or bite their kid in the face. Yeah. So, yeah, it’s a different, I mean, it doesn’t happen. I know everyone’s gonna be like, there’s that one Labrador. Yeah. That was, you know, but in, in the aggregate, you know, yeah, I see a lot of aggressive labs, but they’re not labs from good breeders.

They’re labs with something else in them. And I, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a highly, highly aggressive lab that wasn’t really poorly bred. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, and I kind of mentioned it with shelter dogs, right? And that one shelter dog that does incredibly well. Um, not to continue to harp on breeds, but I think that really kind of applies there too.

Right. So, I saw this video, it’s been a number of years ago, on social media, young girl in a school with a big old Great Dane, and I mean, this was like one of those. It looked to me like one of those Russian import Danes, one of those almost 200 pounders. And you know, and then all of a sudden you get all these people who are like, that’s what I want.

And I’m like, no, that’s absolutely, absolutely not what you want. And you know, we really have to tell a lot of people. No, we probably tell more people no, than we tell ’em. Yes. Yeah. Well, and that was, so that was the whole reason that I started that cha my channel right, is because I was saying no, you know, 50% of the things I’m going out to evaluate are just no right off the bat.

Um, and, and I didn’t want people to struggle like that. You know, it’s the, if the information isn’t out there, then they’re not going to be able to make good decisions. Be because given the information, people sometimes try to make good decisions. Right. Um. And that, you know, that’s, that’s the hard part. And also no question about it.

Service dog training’s expensive. You know, when I was doing in-person training, I’m expensive to deal with in-person, right? So if we can give that information out at free or super low cost, then people are going to make better decisions and have better trained dogs. And people are always talking about fake service dogs and all that kind of stuff.

And really what I see out there is a lot more, um, people who are disabled that are not faking their disability, but instead have a dog that is a poor match for service work or is undertrained. So they’re walking around with a dog that shouldn’t be out in public, not because they don’t have a disability, not because they haven’t task trained it, but because it’s the wrong fit for the job or it’s not trained to the level that it should be trained.

Yeah. A quick public service announcement for anybody who’s listening who may have a personal pet or a dog you got from a shelter. If you contact a professional to evaluate that dog and they tell you no. Please don’t take it personally. It’s not, it’s not a personal attack. It’s in your best interest, Andrew.

But that’s one of those, you get a lot people absolutely will take it personally. Oh, they said Fifi was no good. And yeah, they get it. They get pretty worked up about it sometimes. Well, and the other option for that is you can have an at home service dog, a dog that does tasks for you at home. Uh, the majority of people are at their house a a lot of the time, and so there’s so much that a dog can do at home for you without having to take it in public or even in pet friendly locations if it’s not suitable, you know, for air travel.

But it may be suitable to not be wearing a service dog vest, but be going to, you know, your local brewery with you or whatever. That’s, that’s dog friendly. So there are options to help mitigate your disability that don’t involve putting a dog in a situation that it shouldn’t be in. So on that note. Are there any, the, the laws surrounding service dogs, a lot of people have huge misconceptions on, right?

For sure. If, if you could step in and make any changes, what changes would you make? Oh, that’s a loaded question. Um, so, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, there should be a registration or, or there should be, you know, tests that you have to pass. And, and it’s not that I don’t wanna hold service dogs to high standards because I do, and that’s the purpose of my channel is to show what is possible and what I do.

Um, but at the same time, any type of implementation of a registry certification, it sounds easy to be like, oh, we’ll just get them all certified and whatever. Okay. Who’s. Who’s monitoring that program? Who’s doing the certifications? How do we train those people? Who’s paying for the certifications? What about the people that I work with that are in, you know, a rural town, four hours from the closest city?

How are they in their wheelchair without a person to drive them whatever, getting to the place that they need to go? The, it’s very hard to say there should be higher standards that without potentially making access to the care that people need more challenging. So it’s, I think a lot has more has to do with education and holding people to higher standards without necessarily changing the laws around them.

So making it normal for people to have highly trained dogs versus doing the bare minimum, which is what the a DA is, right? The a DA is like the dog can’t pee and poop inside. It can’t be aggressive or cause a disturbance around, you know, other people there. It’s, it’s pretty limited as far as what qualifies and they have to be task trained and you have to have a disability.

Right? Um, as much as I’d like all service dogs to be trained to the standard that I like to train service dogs to, I’m not sure that there’s a way to do it without discriminating against people or making it unduly, you know, a financial or time burden to be able to do it. So, I don’t know the answer to that question honestly.

I dunno. Jason, what do you think? I think the a DA was written in a way that, um. It was crafted, the language of it was crafted, in my opinion, in a way to do the absolute most to protect those individuals with disabilities who needed service dogs. Unfortunately, in my my opinion, again, this is my opinion, um, that left a huge opening for unscrupulous people to be able to take their pets on vacation instead of boarding them.

So, uh, do I think that happens? Yes. Do I think it happens in certain places more often than others? Oh, absolutely. I’ve seen it. Um, do I think that, um, that has caused a lot of problems? I do, but what I’m seeing lately is that it, it has also created, uh, a situation where people are, in my, my belief, are becoming a little more educated on what a service dog should be doing and what it should look like and what it, what a service dog is not.

Um. Not that I’m suggesting that anybody should be the service dog police here, but, uh, I do think awareness has been, um, increased significantly probably in the last two years because of, um, some of the things that’s, that’s happened. Um, I also think the implementation of the DOT forms for airline travel and those sorts of things that really have, in my opinion, it has cut down a ton on the number of people I see in airports who have seven chihuahuas with them.

Um, you know, and again, I’m not here to say that Chihuahuas can’t be service dogs or even good service dogs. I’m just saying, why do you need seven? Um, they each have a job. Jason, come on. What are the, what are the other six doing that the first one couldn’t be trained to do, I guess is my question. So, um, I, I think I’ve seen a lot of that diminish in my travels over the last probably two years.

So I’m, I’m really happy about that. Yeah, I think education is huge. I mean, when I started my career it was. Really common to be denied access multiple places. Okay. Um, and now it very rarely happens. And now I, I constantly, I was out the other day and I’ve got children educating their parents to not touch the dog.

I mean, I think we’re moving in the right direction with, again, the free flow of resources. You know, the, the, the education that is out there, I, I think it is getting better. We’re there always be bad actors? Of course there’s always gonna be bad actors, but I always look at that as an opportunity to train my dog against it.

So you are not gonna stop the reactive whatever from, from coming, you know, in your vicinity. So it’s really important that you’re not avoiding those situations and that you’re training for them because they’re going to happen. Whether it’s, you know, a dog with a service dog vest on or a pet dog, it’s gonna happen.

You gotta train your dog against it. Just like you don’t want people to pet your dog. They’re gonna do it. So you better train your dog. And you’re always gonna have sneaky petters when you go out in public. Yes. Those sneaky petters, they always creep up behind you and get that little quick, you know, pet god that, that awful we, we always trained for that.

But when I was in guide dogs, that was the worst because people would be like, oh, you can’t see me petting your dog. So it’s okay. I mean, just devastating, you know, stuff for people to deal with. And so even that, I see other people actively shaming people who make bad decisions like that in public, which is, you didn’t see that as they should.

Yeah. I mean, you didn’t see that a decade ago. So yeah, I think some of the abuse of the ESA system. Has led to a lot of people becoming educated, right? When it hit a point where it was so ridiculous, like, you’re bringing peacocks, that was Charlotte Airport. That was us, man. That was, that was the CLT, I think it was, uh, American or United Counter as a lady standing there.

You can still find it on the internet with this and, and not to like 20 pound Powl on her shoulder and not to, you know, degrade ESAs because I think they do have an important role in people’s lives, but there is no training requirement and they’re not covered by the aada A and people, again, the education is now out there to say your ESA is not a psychiatric service dog.

Here’s the difference. And so you are getting a lot more people, even businesses that are more empowered to make decisions and follow the law in that regard. And I think it took a little bit of abuse to make people care enough to look into it. Yep, that’s possible. Yeah. Is it, uh, what I’m, uh, on the outside looking in, we don’t train service dogs, you know, I’ll help people with the basics, you know, a lot of like public access and tell ’em, you know, if you need help there and then go find a service dog trainer.

But from the outside looking in, I’ve seen a big change over the last few years that just, I, I have another, like, can we switch topics just slightly? ’cause I just had a thought that I wanted to think when we were talking about preparing a dog for, for service work. Uh, it’s, it’s tangentially related, but, um, building confidence.

What I also sometimes see in the industry is dogs that are put out too young. So I’ll have a dog that’s put, you know, I’ve, I’ve cleaned up so many messes of people that put out a one-year-old that’s not even out of adolescence and is as a fully trained service dog that is not prepared for the world at large.

Because, you know, one of, as the rise of service dogs happen, there’s more and more people that wanna jump on board and, you know, they’re high dollar dogs in a lot of cases, right? So the. Yeah, the monetary, um, incentive is to put out dog. You know, the longer your dog is in training, the more you’re paying for board and for training and all of that.

Putting out young dogs that haven’t even fully come into their adult body yet and their personality changes slightly or, or whatever. And now they’re with a person who doesn’t know how to handle a dog that’s going through adolescence and is supposed to have this fully trained dog that they shouldn’t be relying on.

You know, I’m very big on letting a dog be a dog and grow. So, you know, I do a lot of training with my dogs and also they spend equal, if not more time swimming, hiking, outside, being off leash, doing dog stuff because it’s really critical that I don’t put my own, you know, ’cause I have a disability too.

Part of, you know, what you see on my channel is me raising my puppy. And it’s really important for me to not put adult responsibilities on an a puppy, um, because it can burn the dogs out. And so one of the things that I would. You know, love to get out there is, is we’re not, you shouldn’t be in a rush. We want to let the dogs be puppies.

Yes. We wanna train them, we wanna socialize ’em, we wanna do all that stuff. And also, they shouldn’t be responsible for your disability when they are not even adult dogs yet. Um, it’s, it’s the reason, you know, when we’re talking about guide dogs, they don’t even come in for training until 16 months. They have, you know, they haven’t even started training until they, they’ve fully developed.

And, you know, I know that that might be controversial, but there’s no, especially with owner trainers that I work with, your dog doesn’t have to be finished at two. It doesn’t have to be a finished dog at two. And I always say, even if your dog is finished at two, it takes a good year to, for them to go from green to seasoned.

You know, they need to see a lot of things out in life. And we wanna make sure that we’re not putting so much pressure on these dogs really young that they don’t wanna do the job going forward. I’m assuming there’s a big difference there in recommend that age based upon the dog’s tasks. Right. Yeah, so like there’s a different, like there’s a difference between a dog having to deal, like respond to a panic attack and a dog needing to fet your keys, right?

Like those are two different tasks that the dog needs to be able to do. And what I’m talking specifically about is those emotionally high octane situations. Um, you know, I even try to, if possible, you know, seizures, things like that. I try to block young dogs from seeing those types of things super young so that they aren’t in a period where they’re potentially fearful of something happening to their person.

It’s also one of the reasons that if, if you can, if you have the funds to do it, starting a psych dog with a trainer is a really good idea. If you can do it, you know, I have limitations as to situations that I am not fully. Able to be president. I hire my trainer friend to go and do those things for me with my dog first.

So they’ve got a neutral party being introduced to these challenging things for me so that they don’t take on my emotions about that activity. So I think that’s another thing is just letting dogs grow up and, and be dogs when they’re little and you’re gonna have a, typically a longer career with those dogs because of that.

Yeah. And so you were saying there a dog that’s React, you know, has to watch for seizures and handle that scenario, is one that you think should be in training longer than a less stressful scenario, necessarily longer? Just that I, I’d like to avoid, you know, I personally like to avoid high emotionally stressful situations for dogs when they are in more sensitive periods of development.

That’s it. Yeah. Okay. And I may mimic, you know, I may mimic those behaviors, but I’m not then asking, you know, my nine month old dog to respond to a panic attack and bring me out of a store, because that’s just way too much responsibility to put on a baby. So I’m curious, Jason, what are your thoughts? I would picture a dog, and I don’t know the answer here.

I’m just curious. A dog trained for a child with autism, I think a one-year-old dog would be able to handle that better than something like what you mentioned, seizures or you know, or a guide dog. Is that accurate or, or no. Um, we may do things a little different. Yeah. Our, our service dogs for particular children with autism are oftentimes a little younger.

They’re 12, 14, 16 months old when we deliver ’em, um, mobility dogs. Well, uh, usually over two, well over two. Um, so kind of, kind of varies. Um, you know, again, I, I think it a little, but you’re raising and training your own dogs, right? From a puppy. Yeah. Yeah. We’re, we’re bringing ’em up. So you’re, they’re not ex they’re not being raised by the person that they’re going to go to.

No. So I think there’s a difference there as well. Yeah. We, so we’re back to, it depends. It’s the best answer. I have time. My favorite si I get in trouble for it all the time. My students absolutely hate it. They cringe. You can see ’em cringe every time. I say, I literally had a student in this last class who bought me a shirt with that on it.

It depends. Um, but I mean, that’s the, the reality you have if you’re gonna be a dog trainer, it’s art. You have to look at the situation and assess it in real time and with what you know about the dog, the handler, and the situation. Yeah. So there isn’t a blanket way to do everything, and sometimes you have to try different things too.

And that’s, that’s a hard answer for people. Like, oh, I want the prescription for how I train this. Well, I’m gonna train my retrieve differently to the dog I have now than I did to my Cooley. Like it’s, I’m just doing it differently based on the dog that’s in front of me now. I wanna make sure that I have all of those options so that I know how to pivot if something isn’t working.

But you gotta train the dog in front of you. Absolutely. Yeah. And we were just having this conversation not to beat a broken record about dog breeds, but again, again, but, um, my wife and I were just having this conversation dealing with a client, um, you know, just like goldens and labs, poodles were bred to be water retrievers teaching a retrieve with a poodle, way different ballgame teaching a retrieve with most labs.

I’ll just be honest with you. Mm-hmm. Just because they’re retrievers, your approach is not going to be the same with a poodle as a, uh, as a lab or a golden, so, yeah. You know, when you mentioned it depends. We’ve gone through that many times. We train our own trainers in-house, okay? And I can’t tell you how many times they’ve said, I’m getting conflicted information.

I was, I shadowed this trainer yesterday, they said this, then I shadowed this trainer today. And he said something completely different like, well, was it with the same dog? No. Well, that’s probably why, right? The amount of differences between those two dogs and those two clients and those two situations, who knows?

Not one of my sayings, Matt, but you can use, this is an analogy, you can use this. Jason has the best sayings, just so you know, Laura. So we start getting that with students. I, I, you know, I asked such and such about this problem. They told me this, and then, so what? I get ’em, I get ’em all together and I, I make ’em look down at their shoes and I say, look at your shoes and the way they’re laced up now, look at the person on either side of you and look at how they laced their shoes.

You all did it differently. But it’s all working for you individually. So the answer is never concrete. Right. How do you tie a pair of shoes? Well, there’s like 50 different ways to do it. The reality is they all keep the shoes on your feet. Um, you know? Yep. It’s, it’s important to understand that your approach will absolutely have to be different, particularly dealing with service dogs and the skills that they have to be trained to do.

I think it’s, that’s what, you know, when I was doing guide dogs and I was a placement specialist and I was brought out as a fixer a lot of times. Having a toolbox full of options was so critically important because you’re working, you know what I love about, what I loved about doing guide dogs is you’re working on the fly all the time.

So you’re always having to come up with solutions. So, you know, this dog, we’re passing this, now we’re in the, you know, I don’t know how much you guys know about guide dogs, but you know, they travel in straight lines and they’re gonna stop at curbs. Okay, well this guy has to cross the street in the middle of the street.

There’s no, no, no curb cut there. So we have to teach the dog on the fly to target a lamppost that’s three feet down. Then we’re gonna, you know, do all these things and you have to be, be able to think on the fly. And that’s what’s like. Super fun I find about service work is just the, the critical thinking skills that you need to work with an animal and a person.

And they’re, or, you know, talking about disability, you know, okay, I have this client that can’t bend down. How am I gonna teach her to do this? How am I gonna, you know, they, they have this specific limitation. How are we gonna work around that limitation to make sure that they can still get the training that they need on the dog, kind of thing.

Yeah. I think that phrase, the fixer. It’s a pretty badass, a fixer Well, you know, part of, part of being a placement specialist. Yes. I went out and I, I would, you know, place the dog for two to three weeks, but I also did a lot of follow up. So I’d go out, you know, the school that I was at, we’d go out every year for follow up, see how the dogs are doing.

But you’d also get a call and say, Hey, my dog will no longer get on the bus because they got stepped on on the bus, you know, uh, too many times. And, and now they’re afraid to go on. Okay, I gotta go on and go in and have a plan on how we’re gonna fix that. And I don’t even, you know, I get to the situation and I gotta be working right away to fix, fix that problem.

So, um, yeah. That’s, that’s the fun part at the job. Yeah. If I could just, Laura de Mayo Roy. The Fixer. The Fixer. It’s like a movie title, right? At least a book.

Oh. Shout out to the other gmi that have to do that in, in community stuff, because it is wild to go out in different parts of the country and see what you’re dealing with in all different places. Yeah, if I can add, jump in here and add something. ’cause it’s, it’s been a bit of a theme across a couple of these podcast episodes.

Um, and you know, we talked about trainers a lot of times spending a, a ton of focus on learning the mechanics of training, right. And, and, and developing their skills. Um, and we talked about how important it is for them to learn to teach people. Here’s what I’ll tell you, and this has just been my experience.

If you’re struggling or you’re not where you feel like you need to be in teaching people, you’re really gonna struggle when it comes to teaching people with disabilities because it’s a whole different ballgame. It truly is a whole different ball game. Yep. And you have to be more flexible. I mean, that’s the reality is, is your flexibility has to be high.

Um, and your ability to rework, you know, you may have a plan for how, and, and, you know, all dog training, you may have a plan for how you wanna do something, but things change so rapidly. Um, and you have to love working with people. So many trainers get into dogs because they love working with dogs. And, and across the board you have to like people, you gotta really like people to work in service dogs, because that’s the majority of what you’re doing is, is showing people how to do something that’s really hard to do and you gotta be good at pivoting.

Yep, yep, yep.

That makes for a tough job. Yep. But a fun one. Not, not for everybody. Well, not for everyone. That’s, that’s true. I always say, if you wanna get into service dogs, go to an organization, learn that part. Get your hands on lots of dogs. Get your, get your experience with a ton of people while you have people mentoring you to do it because it’s, you know, I see a lot of people who have trained one service dog or trained their own service dog and now they’re hanging the shingle that they’re a service dog trainer without any further education or mentorship.

And it’s scary because you don’t know what you don’t know when you’re, when you’re doing that, and you’re gonna run up against, you know, you’re talking about people’s disabilities, their independence, their lives that you’re playing with. It’s not just, you know, not to say just a pet, but it, it’s a different ballgame.

So the more you can go to some of these larger organizations, if possible, and, and get mentorship, the better off you’re gonna be when you do go out on your own. I don’t think people understand sometimes the amount of work and how hard the work it is. I had a quick story. I had a guy, he worked for me for a number of years and he worked for me on my police dog side, right?

That’s the space everybody wants to be in. That’s the cool kids, right? The police dogs, and, uh. I had a couple seminars I needed to teach on the West coast and the, um, other side of the country. And, uh, on my way I’m like, I’m, I need to deliver this service. Dog is finished. I’ve been working on this family.

Let me do this delivery over five days. And then we’ll just back these seminars right up behind it. We go teach ’em. And, um, the, the guy on the service, the police dog side says, yeah, I’ll just go, will you? We’ll I’ll help you with the delivery. We’ll go do the seminars. And uh, we got through with that five day, um, delivery with this kid who’s probably 15 at the time in this service dog.

And, uh, we were getting on the plane to go to Oregon to teach a, his dude looked me dead in the eyes and he said, I have absolutely no idea how and why you people do that. He said, that’s, that’s the most work I’ve done since I’ve been here. Yep. Right. Yeah. I mean, when I place guides eight hours a day, plus working nights, working weekends, working 10 days in a row and being part of someone’s family for that period of time, people don’t understand how personal, how you become a therapist for these people.

In a lot of cases, you’re, you’re coming to help them, you know, it’s very, and you’re gonna be working with people of all walks of life, all types of dispositions. And it’s, um, you know, it, it’s a reality check for some train, you know. So where I worked, you know, I would, when I was later in my career, um, I would take apprentices with me and.

Just the logistics of making it happen were too much for, for some people or the, the intimacy of being involved in these people’s lives. You’re inserted and with them for eight hours a day, sometimes more every single day. And it’s, it’s mentally, it’s exhausting. I mean, it’s exhausting a lot of the time.

Yeah. You have to be mentally tuned in for eight to 14 hours a day with these people and there are no breaks. Yep. And it’s, that’s tough. That’s tough. And you have to allow for them to also have, like, you know, I’ve been on plenty of placements where people are having a breakdown, they’re crying. They didn’t think this is, you know, this is their first guide dog, and they didn’t think it was gonna be like this.

I’ve had people hand me the leash telling me they’re done, and then I have to, you know, make it so that they understand it won’t be like this forever. And that they’ll get it and they’ll feel more confident. Um, you know, there’s, there’s a lot emotionally that goes into that job. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s hard.

It’s not a, it’s not a, you go home and leave your work at work job in any, any form. Yeah. That sounds like a challenge for sure, and probably good for people to hear before they maybe go down that path and realize it’s not for them, because obviously we need a lot of empathy. Yeah. There’s a ton of joy.

It’s a super rewarding, you know, line of work. And also it’s a lot. And so, you know, it’s, it’s just the more that you can shadow and, and see it before you fully commit, I think the better off you’re gonna be. Awesome. Agree. What have we not covered today? I mean, I guess probably many things, but anything else we should be covering here?

If you could give us a walkthrough on the, again, I’m still hung up on the pedicures. If we could just get a walkthrough. Good point. Kind of a step bust. Never heard that one before. Yeah, they don’t walk right. They don’t walk enough in, uh, captivity. Captivity. So you gotta, so you have to Yeah. Just, you know, just like, I mean, not the same as a horse, but you know, you get the, you get the idea.

Yep. Yeah. Awesome. Hmm. And do they shave it off like they would with a horse? A rasia. Okay. That’s on my list to learn how to do. So in the next few months I’m gonna know how to trim the hooves on horses and then to like get the cheetah to stick its tail out for a blood draw. You do that one too? Well, I don’t have any cheetahs to work with, but my wife has tasked me with, she’s like, you need to be able to take care of her own horses and quit paying a farrier.

So, oh, I thought you did have some rhinos to work with. I thought you were saying you, you had some, some rhinos to practice on. Not yet. Maybe one day I fed a rhino once. That was pretty rewarding and pretty neat when they stick their tongue out and grab stuff. Most of that job was, you know, shoveling poop and, and weed walking.

But there were occasional like bright moments like that, so, well hey, that sounds like my average Saturday or Sunday and I don’t get paid anything for it. So getting paid to shovel, poop and weed walk the poop’s just a lot bigger. But awesome. Well, thank you for coming on, Laura. Appreciate it. And we will put, thank you for having me links to, uh, doggy you, uh, in the description so people can go check out all your videos.

Yeah. And real quick, you got, uh, it sounds like you got Patreon. It looks like you got some free, free stuff online too, right? Yeah, I have ba what I was telling Matt beforehand is I have enough content on YouTube that you can train your service dog just from free content. Um, but the way that I pay my mortgage is I have a Patreon ’cause you know, okay, no, everyone knows YouTube doesn’t actually pay that well.

So I have a Patreon and that’s where I put all of my more in-depth stuff. So YouTube has like a specific. Type of form of video that people will watch. Whereas when I, you go on my Patreon, you’re gonna see me actually training uncut videos. You know, my whole thing is I wanna be able to show you exactly how I’m doing the thing uncut, unflashy not, you know, prettied up for YouTube.

You need to be able to see what I’m doing and what that looks like. And right now I’m raising, you know, John Denver and showing that entire process so that people can follow along and, and do it with their dogs. So I have that and I have a couple of courses as, as well. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, I can’t wait to see what John Denver looks like.

Well thank you guys. This has been a lot of fun. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And thanks for listening everybody.