Fetching Help : These Dogs Have Learned New Tricks to Help People With a Variety of Handicaps
They had known each other less than a week, but Allison felt it was already time to test her relationship with Mickey.
“Mick,” she whispered in the dead-quiet library. “Mick, go under.” Her sandy-haired companion knitted his brow and looked up at her, then obediently scooted beneath the desk.
“Mick,” she repeated while backing away from the desk. “Mick, behind.” Again, Mick dutifully complied, falling in line behind Allison’s wheelchair.
Except for the occasional but understandable olfactory distractions hidden in a wastebasket or two, Allison Herring’s golden retriever promptly executed her every command--plucking books off shelves, picking up pens off the floor and even standing up at a counter to pay a small library fine.
It was, Mickey’s trainers agreed later, an admirable performance by one of the star pupils of the latest graduating class of Canine Companions Inc., a nonprofit California concern that trains dogs to help people with a variety of non-visual handicaps.
Canine Companions, the first and largest such service in the country, trains dogs to work as the legs of people who cannot walk, the arms of the weak and the ears of those who are hearing-impaired.
“This dog has opened doors for me that I thought were permanently closed, doors that had kept me from living a normal life,” Herring said near the end of a recent two-week “boot camp” at which she and half a dozen other people were matched with dogs and trained in their care and use.
Herring’s dog performs a number of tasks. He pulls Herring’s chair to transport her, retrieves dropped items, switches lights on and off and generally serves as the hands of his mistress, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, a chronic nerve disorder affecting muscular coordination.
Besides “service dogs” that help people with muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, spinal cord injuries and other orthopedic handicaps, Canine Companions trains three other classes of dogs. Signal dogs alert the hearing-impaired to doorbells and other sounds, social dogs are placed with autistic children and others for whom dogs are therapeutic, and specialty dogs are trained for people with multiple disabilities.
Canine Companion dogs learn to recognize 89 commands. They range from basic discipline-- sitting, lying and heeling--to such complex tasks as opening a refrigerator, finding the requested item and delivering it.
“We don’t know if the dogs always know exactly what they’re doing,” said Katheryn Horton, a Canine Companions spokeswoman. “We think some of them do, especially the brighter ones. But we’re sure a lot (of dogs) don’t have a clue that, say, the switch on the wall controls the light in the room.”
The dogs--generally golden retrievers, Labrador retrievers, border collies and Welsh corgis--are specially bred in the nonprofit corporation’s own kennels next to its Santa Rosa regional training center, which has a full-time veterinarian on staff.
Puppies are parceled out to a network of volunteers, who rear them for 16 to 18 months. The volunteers are asked to have the animals accompany them wherever they go, including restaurants and other busy, distracting social arenas.
Dogs that prove too aggressive, too shy or too skittish are put up for adoption, or a “career change,” as company officials put it. The rest receive six months of advanced instruction at one of four regional Canine Companions training centers--Santa Rosa; Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.; Farmingdale, N.Y., and Orient, Ohio.
Horton said it costs about $10,000 to train a Canine Companion, but only a small percentage of that is recovered by the $125 fee that applicants pay to learn if they qualify to receive one. Donations make up most of the remaining costs.
Applicants are told that no one is ever guaranteed a dog. Horton said Canine Companions are given only after a dog is adequately matched to someone who has demonstrated a grasp of the basic commands and a balance of affection and discipline.
Nearly 500 dogs have been placed in service across the country since Canine Companions started in 1976. There is a two-year waiting list of people seeking their own skilled dogs. Horton said Canine Companions hopes to reduce the wait by finding the resources to place another 150 dogs in service in 1990 alone.
Those selected to receive dogs come to one of the four regional centers for intensive training themselves. At first, they work with several dogs to find a comfortable match of human and canine temperaments. Then the dogs and people embark on lengthy and challenging training sessions, both in classrooms and in such everyday locations as shopping malls and restaurants.
“At this point, we have to train the people, really, more than the dogs,” Horton said. “The dogs already know all of the commands; now the people have to learn them. For the dogs, this is when they become familiar with their new owners.”
Canine Companions was founded in 1975 by Bonita M. Bergin, a Santa Rosa teacher. While working in Turkey, she saw burros that had been trained to pull wheelchair-bound people through the streets. She thought that the task could be handled by dogs and expanded to an even greater number of jobs. She established Canine Companions Inc. when she returned to California, and with the aid of trainers, volunteers and a Labrador retriever named Abdul, she was able to implement her idea.
Abdul, the first graduate of the program, died last December after 14 years of serving a paraplegic owner in Canada. Abdul was honored on Feb. 17 with a memorial resolution from the California Legislature, the first such resolution ever approved for an animal.
Allison Herring believes that the honor was long overdue, not just for what Canine Companions has done for her but for what it has given her 5-year-old son, Stephen, who is blind and suffers from cerebral palsy.
“People finally talk to him, and not to me about him,” she said. “It has brought people into his life. Even when he gets mad at Friar Bob (his dog), he still says that it’s better to have him than not. I asked him why and he said, ‘Because people like Friar Bob, and I like people, and when people talk to him they’ll talk to me too.’ ”
