Service Dog Public Access Class

 Announcing the NEW Crazy2Calm Canine Coaches Service Dog Public Access Class!

Yooper Paws of Love is pleased to be partnering with the Crazy2Calm Canine Coaches to bring the SD Public Access Class to all our clients. This class is designed to help Owner Trainers have a smooth transition between training in pet friendly environments to training in NON PET environments such as grocery stores, medical appointments, and public places that typically do not allow dogs.

The Crazy2Calm Canine Coaches are pleased to now offer this virtual class that will include some work at your own pace classroom materials, small group Zoom meetings every 2 weeks, and 1-on-1 support from the trainers.  In this class we will be going over the basic laws that impact Service Dogs, the basic skills and manners that is appropriate for all Service Dogs, and the finer points of making this transition successful for both the Handler and the Service Dog in Training. 

The SD Public Access Class is a designed as a follow up class to the SD Foundations Class that we released last year. The Foundations Class goes over how to teach important skills such as basic targets, basic positioning (heel, middle, tuck), leash manners, stay/settle, and recall. 

The Public Access Class is designed to help the student figure out where and when to use those skills more successfully in public spaces. We will also be going over common challenging topics such as dealing with the public and other general Service Dog Etiquette info. We will also be offering a Public Access Skills Evaluation at the end of the class. While it is not required by ADA for Service Dogs to be certified by an organization, we feel that many teams value the ability to say that a 3rd Party Organization provided an assessment of skills. Therefore we will not be offering a "certification" that your dog is a Service Dog, but will be offering an Evaluation Checklist and Certificate that states your Team has been evaluated and meets the ethical skills & manners of a Service Dog Team.

(While this review and evaluation process is offered to the students in this class, it is not required to complete the class. The evaluation process is also available to SD Teams that are not taking this class!)

The first week will include a release of written materials on Monday, May 22nd! Then the following week on Tuesday, May 30th at 8pm Central will be the first group Zoom session.  If you are unable to participate in the Zoom session, it will be recorded and added to the classroom the day after the meeting.  We will continue this pattern of Week 1: Materials will be released (Mon-Thurs)& Week 2: Zoom meeting (Tues at 8pm Central) will take place for a series of 12 weeks in total. There are 6 total lessons with 2 weeks to work on each lesson.

The cost of this class is $150 for 12 weeks of support via small group and 1-on-1 chats with the trainer.  You will have access to the virtual classroom materials for 1 year after the start of the class.  Scholarships are available if needed so please include that request on your registration form.

Please fill out the registration from below and you will receive an email from one of the trainers with payment information and class details.

Thank you for filling out this registration form!  If you do not hear from us within 48 hrs, please email crazy2calmcaninecoaches@gmail.com for assistance.

Building Up Interactions with Children

Azul loves children and pretty much always has, yet I still needed to approach interactions with youth by training smarter!

Azul was born into a house with 4 young girls and with me he has had lots of experience with my grandkids.  This has helped build his desire to interact with kids.  As a Service Dog, I frequently need Azul to go into public spaces where kids will be present.  And as a Therapy Dog, we often visit places where there are larger groups of children that all want to see him.  Not all dogs will enjoy doing educational presentations with large groups of children or enjoy laying in the library while youth read to them.  For this blog, I'm going to describe the slow approach I took to help Azul increase his love for interacting with children of all ages.

Azul at 4 months interacting with 2 girls on the library stairs while a concert was taking place across the street.  We were sitting at a safe distance far away from the music with just a few people coming and going on the library stairs.  These girls played the Pick One game with Azul!

  

By watching from a distance at parks and community events Azul learned to be calm around larger groups of people with kids running around playing nearby.

 

Azul learned to watch my grandkids playing with a wide variety of toys inside and outside the house.

  

 

Azul learned the cues for when to interact with kids, when to give his focus to the kids, and when he was free to play with this those kids by working with friends and family members on walks, while camping, and during training sessions.

 

Spending the day at a quiet park with my kids & grandkids.  Azul had time to play on the playground equipment with my adult children and relaxed on the bench with me while the kids played.

 

Then we practiced some pre-public access training skills at an ice cream shop with the grandkids.  Azul had previously practiced at quiet, outdoor patios.  But when we were ready to add in more distractions we were able to practice his under my seat tuck with family.  A few months later we were on vacation and had a meal at a picnic area with 18 family members for Azul to ignore.  I allow him to visit with family freely during non-meal time.  However at meal time, even in outdoor environments such as the campground we practice his Service Dog skills of laying under my seat or on a mat beside me.

 

Azul learned to ignore over 22 family members during meal time while we were camping before we went with these same family members into a restaurant as a Service Dog.  This was as much training for the family as it was for Azul.  He had already done quiet restaurant training with 1-2 friends and family members.  But taking this time during a family camp allowed us to set the boundaries of petting and play with all our friends when it was not meal time and totally ignoring everyone (and everyone else not trying to interact with Azul) during meal time.

As an adolescent Azul needed to go back to the park and other outdoor settings to remind him when to interact with people and when to ignore people.  By the time he was 2, Azul had generalized this to pretty much all environments.  This led us to be able to do one of our latest adventures....The Kid's Play Area during a birthday party!

     

 

This environment was far more stimulating then anything we had done before.  At 2.5 Azul is pretty much ready for anything or anywhere I need to go.  He handled this environment far better then I did.  Our next adventure is going to be the aquarium!

I hope you enjoyed this photo blog about building up interactions and the ability to ignore children by starting in low distraction environments and slowly building up.  This is extremely important for training Service Dogs!  If we move too quickly, putting them in environments they have not built up to yet, we run the risk of making them fearful around kids or in those environments.  

It's way more beneficial to Train Smarter, Not Harder! 

 

Weekend Class Special!

Yooper Paws is pleased to announce...

The Crazy2Calm Canine Collaborative has decided to offer a Weekend Special from August 12th through 14th!

With the recent launce of 2 new classes, the Crazy2Calm Collaborative has decided to help out Service Dog Owner Trainers with a special weekend blitz.  For a limited time, if you register for one of our fall classes at the purchase price, you will also receive FREE registration to one of other classes.

Fall Classes

SD Foundations Course

Scent Based Medical Alert Workgroup

Free Classes

Positively Puppy Paws

Crazy Canine Adolescents

Confident Canines

How to Participate

Register for both classes before midnight on August 14th.

You will be contacted via email on Monday, August 15th with details on the Fall Class you registered for and payment information.  

Once payment has been made, you will be given access to both classes.

All the free classes are a work at your own pace class that you will have access to for a full year so there is no need to hurry your way through the materials.  

The Fall Classes have a live Zoom component so you must register asap to participate in those classes!

We do our best to make classes accessible to all learning types and all disabilities.  However if you have questions about which classes will best meet your needs or think you may need additional accommodations, please reach out to us at crazy2calmcaninecoaches@gmail.com

Independently Training Your Service Dog

 

I have a page on this site filled with SD Tips with links to the laws involving Service Dogs (SD) and various training.  For this blog I want to focus more on some of the personal experiences and hardships that happen when you are disabled enough to need a Service Dog yet want to do the daily care and training yourself.  If you follow any of my social media pages & groups, you'd know that I speak with lots of other SD Handlers around the world and I see many of the same struggles over and over.

Self Doubt

One of the biggest challenges is often getting past the personal struggle of doubting if a Service Dog is really needed.  For years the thought was you had to be blind or in a wheelchair to qualify for your dog.  It seems that it's only been common to use a SD for other disabilities for the last 5-10 yrs.  In fact the Federal Law that covers Service Dogs and defines what a disability means in order to qualify for a SD, the American with Disabilities Act (ADA), was signed into law 32 years ago.  It often takes a very long time for a person to admit that they are disabled enough to benefit from the use of a SD in day to day life.  Often times the individual lacks support from 1 or more family members that makes them have self doubt all the more.  Then the interactions with the general public any time you leave the house with your SD adds to this self doubt yet again.  I struggled with this really hard for about a year and still every now and then if I've been having a run of good health I wonder if I really need Azul with me everywhere.

Daily Care

In my opinion, starting with a young puppy is the best way to ensure success in training a Service Dog.  However, many disabled people (including myself) struggle with being able to care for a young pup and adolescent dog that is not yet fully trained.  Costs for routine care are often more then an individual can afford.  A dog has to have certain needs met before you can train them to do anything; food, water, shelter, going out to potty, exercise, enrichment activities, mental stimulation...it all adds up as far as financial cost and physical energy of the main caretaker.  

The puppy sleeping arrangements of needing to potty every few hours causing lack of sleep is just the beginning.  Then setting up a daily routine that meets your puppy's needs and allows you to get your day to day life activities accomplished can be quite challenging.  Then puppy grows up to become an adolescent which throws even more challenges in fitting everything into one day.  With my first SD, I made the mistake of giving her tons of exercise and keeping her busy because I thought that was what was needed.  Unfortunately that creates a dog that NEEDS to keep busy and much of SD life is being calm and doing nothing.  With Azul I started calming behaviors and settling down routines from the very beginning.  We also visited tons of new environments to simply sit there and do nothing.  I get asked all the time if Azul is a typical hyper Husky and my answer is always, "Nope, he's the calmest dog I've ever met!"

Now that Azul is mostly an adult, his needs for day to day activity are much less then when he was younger, but he still has physical needs that are sometimes hard for me to achieve on bad health days, especially when I have a month like this July where every single day is a bad health day.  There are days where all we've been able to do is play flirt pole for 2 short bursts of 5 minutes at different points of the day.  Azul does fine with this for a day or two, but after some time he needs to go explore and sniff whether I feel like it or not.

Training Challenges

The first major challenge in training is that you either train too little or too much or don't realize what training is most important.  There are tons of professional dog trainers out there who can teach you the basic concepts to force free training which is a never ending journey as there is always another way to apply something or problem solve for your struggles.  Then there are several SD Trainers that will guide new handlers attempting to train a SD.  (This is also goes back to financial issues and how much you can afford to spend on learning.)  With all of these professionals and dog training being an unregulated field, it can be hard to weed out the good trainers from the bad.  Often, we need to have more then one dog training professional in our contact list to accomplish all our goals.

Learning more about dog training brings about another challenge that many disabled individuals struggle with and that is cognitive issues due to brain injury, auto-immune diseases, and other traumas.  This challenge often becomes the one that is nearly possible to overcome simply because you can't find a way to take the information your trying to learn and apply it to your dog.  The phrase, "Easier said then done!" comes to mind here.  As someone who has brain fog, challenges with finding the right words, and a horrible memory, this is has been a huge hurdle.  Again this is why it helps to have a large network in the dog training world to help you when your overlooking something or can't figure out what your missing.

Often people search for that one template or training plan that works for them with their dog and that simply doesn't exist because every person is a unique individual and so is every dog.  Andrew Hale from Dog Centered Care is always referring to this as an individual's Emotional Truth.  When it comes to past experiences no two people are the same, so if you begin to look at the emotional journey that you undertake when training your own SD you can only go on YOUR emotional truth.  

Training also brings about a whole other level of self doubt when we get exhausted or frustrated with ourselves feeling like we are letting our dog down.  This can come from feeling like we are not training enough due to physical abilities or having other complications like not being able to drive to the location we'd like to do training in.  Feeling frustrated and helpless can then cause further health issues and send us into a spiral we can't seem to get out of.

As a Trainer, Behavior Consultant, and Canine Coach let me just say that the easiest way to get across all the training hurdles is to find a professional or mentor (or a few) that share your training style and that you are totally comfortable communicating with.  You need to be able to let this trainer see your best work and your worst days and feel comforted by the fact they want to support you without judgement.  If you're still searching for your support network, consider joining my Working Paws Facebook group which is filled with lots of knowledgeable and supportive people.

We all face challenges in day to day life, but getting over these 3 common challenges have made a huge difference in who I am as an individual, as a trainer, and as a mentor!  

My August Theme of the Month will be "Train Smarter, Not Harder!" and is going to involve lots of simple shaping exercises and environmental processing.  Here is to hoping August is a much better month then July!

Using a Service Dog to Gain Independence!

 So here it, July 16th and I'm just not getting to a point where I can write my first blog using the theme "Independence!"  If you know me personally, you probably already know that I've been struggling with symptoms caused by my disabilities for the last few weeks.  In the last 18 or so days, I've had about 3 where I didn't have a migraine or autoimmune issue dragging me down.  But I don't want this to be a "Woe is Me" post and I'm not going to go into tons of details about my medical issues.  Instead I want to focus on how my Service Dog, Azul, makes it so that I can be more active and independent in my day to day life despite my disability.

AZUL, MY LITTLE BOY BLUE

My Heart, Mi corazón, My Little Goober

Migraine Alert & Response is Azul's #1 job.  Since I have more migraine days then not, Azul is trained to pick up on changes in migraines and alert me to when it's going to get bad before it gets bad.  Thanks to a medication routine, I have one med that reduces the impact or prevents the migraine from becoming severe most of the time and one med that I can take as a rescue to stop a migraine that is about to be pushed over the edge of my threshold.  Azul knows this by scent change in a way that I could never tell myself.  Migraines effect me kind of like a wave, most days (including right now) I have pain that ranges from level 2-4 non-stop and that sometimes makes me wonder, is it going to get worse.  Since I don't want to take meds needlessly just in case the pain is going to get bad, Azul's ability to alert before it gets bad helps me to avoid taking meds too early.  On average Azul will alert to impending doom about 45-55 minutes before I fall over in misery.  This allows me to get my rescue meds on board rapidly which makes a world of difference in the activity I'm able to do that day!  

Azul is also trained to find my meds & water to help me take them if I'm not able to get up and go get them myself.  This might not seem like much, but it's amazingly helpful on those days where the migraine hits hard and fast.

Azul is also trained to alert to a rapid increase in my auto-immune flares and episodes of extreme dizziness or vertigo.

These medical alerts make it possible for me to do routine things such as grocery shopping, driving, and even going to see my dog training clients without fear of getting someone and doubling over in pain being unable to make it back home.  Since I'm the main driver for family, running most of the errands and taking care of business this is extremely important!

Azul also helps with light mobility tasks.  Chronic illness can cause some pretty extreme fatigue on any given day.  Some days walking 2-3 miles unassisted, yet other days even walking 20 feet without assistance is an extreme challenge.  This gets even more difficult if I'm walking on uneven or slippery surfaces.  Azul is trained to walk at my side providing a slight forward pull and provide counterbalance assistance when need.  This assistance makes it possible for me to hiking, kayaking, and attend events with my friends and family.

There are some other random tasks that Azul is trained to assist me with.  For example, if I'm out and about with a family member and suddenly become disoriented he will help me find a family member by name which can save valuable energy for where I need it most.  He also is trained to help me find my car, which is amazing on days where my memory is fading fast.  Azul will also tell me when I've been pushing myself too hard and need to sit down to take a break.

I commonly get asked how I can be disabled when I look totally normal.  And to that, my answer is always that I would gladly trade places with someone to allow them to walk in my shoes for a day.  That is not medically possible and honestly I wouldn't wish my ailments on my worst enemy.  I'm just thankful that I have a Service Dog that is able to help through each day and I'm not quite sure what I would do without him.

Virtual SD Foundations Classroom

 Announcing the new Virtual Service Dog Foundations Class

If you are a new Owner Trainer that is just starting out on your training journey with a young or new dog that you hope will become a Service Dog then this is the perfect class for you!

In partnership with Cindy Campbell Dog Training, we are pleased to now offer this virtual class that will include some work at your own pace classroom materials, small group Zoom meetings every 2 weeks, and 1-on-1 support from the trainers.  In this class we will be going over the basic laws that impact Service Dogs, tips for training Public Access, and the beginning skills all Service Dogs should be trained in no matter what tasks they will be trained to do in the future.

Small group Zoom sessions begin on August 4th!  If you are unable to participate in the Zoom session, it will be recorded and added to the classroom the day after the meeting.  Zoom sessions will take place every other Thursday night at 9PM Central/7PM Pacific.

The cost of this class is $100 for 12 weeks of support via small group and 1-on-1 chats with the trainer.  You will have access to the virtual classroom materials for 1 year after the start of the class.  Scholarships are available if needed so please include that request on your registration form.

Please fill out the registration from below and you will receive an email from one of the trainers with payment information and class details.

Thank you for filling out this registration form!  If you do not hear from us within 24 hrs, please email yooperpaws@gmail.com for assistance.

First Aid for Dogs

The ABC's of First Aid for Dogs.

Blog from Cindy Campbell Dog Training

First aid for dogs is good to know, even if you don't have pets. The priorities are the same for humans and animals, Airway, Breathing, Circulation. 

Always have your dog checked if there is anything going on, even if symptoms seem to have resolved after applying first aid. 

Continue reading here...

Here is the SD Handler Chat Replay of the discussion on First Aid.  This has great info about First Aid for any dog, but also gives some more info to think about if you have a Service Dog!

If you want more information on First Aid, check out this great resource from Oregon State University!

Medical Alert Workgroup - Sight Based Alerts

 

Yooper Paws of Love and Cindy Campbell Dog Training are again partnering to bring you another Medical Alert Workgroup to teach you how to train your Service Dog to do Medical Alerts for a wide variety of medical disabilities that present with behavior based indicators of a need for action.  This is wide range of medical conditions from seizures to psych issues and so much in between.  We will be focusing on training a specific alert behavior the dog can do to let their human know a medical issue is about to happen based on the dog seeing (or hearing) a certain triggering behavior.

This workgroup will meet for 6 Zoom based sessions beginning Monday, May 18th and taking place every other Monday night for the next 12 weeks.  It's not mandatory to participate in the Zoom meeting as each meeting will be recorded and a replay made available.  But it's definitely more beneficial for you to participate live and ask your questions during the Zoom meeting.  

We will also be using our +R SD Task group on Facebook as a platform for group communication between Zoom meetings and can start a Facebook Messenger Chat for those in the workgroup that want meeting reminders and help with the assigned homework.  Yes!  There will be homework!  After each Zoom you will have 1 or 2 actions to do with your dog in the training process.  These should take you less then 5 minutes a day, but are best if you can do them daily and why we meet every other week so you have time to build up your SD team between the Zoom Meetings.

The cost of this class is $75, which is an awesome deal considering all the information and support we offer to all the workgroup participants!  If you'd like to register, please fill out the form below.  You will receive an email with payment options once your registration has been processed and you have been approved as a participant.  For this to be successful, we must keep the Workgroup small and therefore we ask that you only participate if you have already have a Service Dog or Service Dog in Training that is at least 1 yr old or older and that you have been training together as a team for at least 6 months.

Thank you for registering!  

You will receive an email once we process your registration.  Feel free to reach out to yooperpaws@gmail.com if you have any additional questions.

Medical Alert Task Workgroup

**ANNOUNCEMENT **

I am hosting a new Virtual Workgroup for Service Dog handlers looking to train the tasks that go along with Medical Alert & Response! 

We will be focusing on these issues:

Migraine Alerts

Cardiac Alerts

Diabetic Alerts

This workgroup will meet every other week via Zoom and have access to support inside my +R SD Task group.  Zoom meetings will take place on Monday nights beginning January 10th at 8pm (Central Time)

I'm looking for Beta Group Members to help me develop this virtual resource, which means right now this workgroup will be very reasonably priced at a 1 time fee of $75 which covers access to the +R SD Task, all the Zoom meetings, and 1-on-1 support as needed either virtually or in-person where available.  

The Medical Alerts Task Workgroup will run for 12 weeks starting January 10th so register by sending an email to yooperpaws@gmail.com.