These Workers Are Happy to Toil for Their Masters : Animals: Canine Companions become the arms, legs, ears--and friends--of disabled owners.

When Dr. Alan Elkins asked the state for permission to have a working dog accompany him alongside his wheelchair at Atascadero State Hospital, the requirements were simple.

“First, they wanted me to provide a letter from Canine Companions saying the dog wasn’t trained to attack,” said Elkins, a psychiatrist at the institution. “Second, they wanted a letter from me, saying I would clean up after the dog.”

Elkins, 48, was left paraplegic eight years ago in a motorcycle accident. He heard about Canine Companions four years ago on the East Coast, but his injury hadn’t affected his work and he was in no rush to turn in an application.

He took the step only after he met a young girl who said her life was changed by a Canine Companions dog. Today, Elkins and Fiat, his black Labrador retriever, work together in an environment that’s a far cry from the comfortable confines of Canine Companions for Independence in Rancho Santa Fe, where they recently underwent a two-week boot camp.

At home, Elkins is teaching Fiat to go down his steep driveway and get his morning newspaper.

He is also training Fiat to listen for a beeper on his pill box, so that when it goes off, the dog will remind Elkins to take a pill.

Fiat’s indoctrination at the hospital began with the staff and progressed to meeting some of Elkins’ patients. His presence has lifted the spirits of an entire institution.

“No one can look at you without smiling,” Elkins said. “It’s like we injected the hospital with something good. The first reaction is always, ‘Can I pet him? What’s his name?’ or, ‘He smells my dog.’ ”

Elkins’ patients suffer from severe psychiatric disorders, and he was amazed at their reaction to Fiat.

“Fiat just met my craziest one,” Elkins said. This patient “howls like a wolf. He has killed two, maybe more people. He speaks to me in gibberish. Then he asked if he could pet the dog, and I told him no. It was the first non-psychotic thing he’s said to me. I finally did let him shake Fiat’s paw.”

Canine Companions has been providing dogs for people with a variety of non-visual disabilities since 1975. The animals become the arms and legs of wheelchair users and the ears of the hearing-impaired.

To train a dog costs the organization $10,000, but the recipients get them for free. All costs are covered through donations.

When the dogs graduate after 14 days at camp, it is the end of a 26-month process that begins in Santa Rosa in Northern California, where the organization is based and where the dogs are bred.

Canine Companions breed black and yellow Labradors and golden retrievers as service and social dogs. The animals carry books, push elevator buttons, turn light switches on and off, retrieve objects and pull wheelchairs.

Herding breeds--preferably border collies and Welsh corgies--become signal dogs, alerting the deaf or hard of hearing to the ring of a telephone, the cry of a child or a knock on the door.

When the puppies are 8 weeks old, they are sent to puppy raisers, who have 12 to 18 months to mold them into responsible dogs, capable of serving people with disabilities.

Puppy raising hasn’t been perfected, as Elkins discovered after he’d had Fiat home a few days.

“This particular dog hadn’t been house-trained the way a disabled person needs him trained,” Elkins said. “They trained him as able-bodied people. He was raised in the country and had an outside kennel. They didn’t realize a disabled person won’t be getting up at 5 a.m., probably won’t be living in the country and won’t have all this access for the dog.”

When puppy raising comes to a close, the dogs are given back to the center for six months of advanced training, where some of them are weeded out. Medical and temperament problems have put potential Canine Companions out to pasture before advanced training was complete.

“The breeding aspect is not as easy as you’d imagine,” said George Kuhrts, director of the Southwest Regional Training Center. “We’ve only been doing this 16 years. That’s nothing when you’re talking about breeding strategy.”

Canine Companions was founded in 1975 and has five regional offices, including the Southwest center, which opened in May, 1988. Overseas offices are in the planning stage. The Rancho Santa Fe office covers 11 Western states and Kuhrts’ staff is planning an early 1992 move to land it has purchased in Poway.

Allison Rubalcava, the Southwest center’s training manager for four years, said labs and retrievers are the preferred breeds, for several reasons.

“They have the retrieving instinct, they’re socially acceptable as breeds, they have fairly manageable coats and soft mouths so they don’t destroy things, and they’re large enough to pull people in wheelchairs,” she said.

Herding breeds, she said, are well oriented to their environment.

“They react quickly to sounds. When the phone rings, they react instantly. They have strong working instincts.”

Canine Companions experimented with Rottweilers and Dobermans, but Rubalcava said they are not as socially acceptable as other breeds and generally not as cooperative.

Standard poodles are easy to train and were once used. But their grooming requirements meant they were expensive to maintain. At times, they were also too smart.

“They wanted to do their own thing,” Rubalcava said.

Applicants for dogs are screened carefully and go through personal interviews before they are invited to boot camp, which is held quarterly at the Helen Woodward Animal Center in Rancho Santa Fe.

“Before they get here, they have to demonstrate some level of independence,” Rubalcava said. “For example, we get a lot of calls from parents who wants dogs for their children, but we say, ‘Put them on the line.’ We don’t give them an application unless a child asks for one.”

At boot camp, students attend class daily, take written tests that cover the 89 commands the dogs already know, and go on field trips. Finally, they must show Rubalcava that the dogs will be in safe hands once they leave.

“They have to demonstrate they can handle their own lives,” she said. “They can’t be a helpless disabled person. A lot of people learn helplessness, because they have to depend on people. Here, they’re being held accountable for another life. The dogs have to be able to look to them as a leader.”

In the first days of boot camp, students and dogs rotate partners for 20-minute intervals. This gives the trainers a chance to determine what combinations work well together. Students list the three dogs they’d like to be matched with, which Canine Companions takes into consideration. But the final pairing decision rests with Rubalcava and the staff.

“We find out what they need personality- and strength-wise,” she said. “It’s half ability and half temperament of the dog. And it depends on the person. Some people are very unemotional. They may need a dog who doesn’t respond to much emotion. On the other hand, a very expressive person may need a dog who doesn’t get caught up in emotion.”

Zach Briley, 13, a student in Abilene, Tex., is mild-mannered and needed a dog with pep. He got one in Luke, a feisty black Labrador.

“Luke’s just like a little kid,” said Lou, Zach’s mother. “At first I thought, ‘It’s a dog, what’s the big deal?’ But they’re just like people. Some need more love than others and some are rebellious.”

Luke isn’t a rebel, but he does crave attention.

“Luke definitely demands a lot of attention,” Rubalcava said. “And he’ll create his own if he doesn’t get it.”

Elkins was taken in by Luke’s personality. In fact, Fiat wasn’t one of his top three choices. He chose Luke and Fremont, a golden retriever eventually paired with a woman.

Rubalcava said they try to pair students with their preferred pooches, but the match simply won’t work if personalities collide or if a dog isn’t strong enough to perform.

“We know the students don’t know the dogs as well as we do,” she said. “A 12- or 13-year-old child usually needs a calm dog. On the other hand, a 250-pound male paraplegic could take a robust lab, full of energy.”

It’s not unheard of for dogs to be reassigned as late as the day before graduation. Last year, Rubalcava switched two women and the dogs they had been working with throughout camp.

“Something wasn’t quite right,” she said. “One dog wasn’t paying quite enough attention to the woman, so we switched them. It was difficult at first, because they had already started bonding, but in the long run it worked out better. They’re getting along wonderfully now.”

One of the hardest parts of the camp is getting used to the idea that the dogs are already trained and the students must start from scratch.

“It’s kind of like learning and studying a foreign language,” Rubalcava said. “And you have to do it all in two weeks.”

Elkins not only found himself in school again, but there were personality adjustments he had to make. It was out of character for him to show a lot of excitement, but he knew that to get a dog, that’s exactly what he had to do.

“Generally, I speak softly,” he said. “And here they were, asking me to turn it on in order to motivate Fiat. I can’t just do that. But I did, because I wanted the dog.”

Students must demonstrate they can handle the dog in public, and are required to go to a mall and a movie theater on a field trip.

Rubalcava is all business in boot camp. She relaxes a little at graduation, but it’s not until the ceremonies are long over that she experiences her most fulfilling moments.

“For me, the rewards are more subtle,” she said. “Getting letters, hearing anecdotal things like ‘We did this’ or ‘I taught my dog this.’ A lot of times, it’s just a smile.”

Rubalcava was the one smiling when she got a call from recent graduate Elsa Mata of El Paso, Tex., who has cerebral palsy and communicates by tapping messages through a computer.

“She was ecstatic,” Rubalcava said. “She went out and had Fremont (whom Elkins had once had his eye on) buy her ticket for an event. It’s the little things that make a big difference, especially when you’ve always had to rely on someone before.”

And Zach called Rubalcava to share some exciting news.

“Zach always does the attendance in his class,” she said, “but the desk was too high and he had to push his wheelchair around the room to hand it in. Now, he hands it to Luke, who goes up on the desk and gives it to his teacher.”

Some rewards are more immediate. Students are allowed to take the dogs home midway through the first week, and the second night that Elkins had Fiat, he noticed something.

“After about two days, I felt myself humming,” Elkins said. “I realized that this dog had me in a good mood.”

Each student has specific needs, and each dog has the skills to meet those needs. But is there a limit to what these canines can do for their companions?

“Every dog in the class has the potential to do amazing things,” Rubalcava said. “I like to think there aren’t limits.”

She recalled a graduate with cerebral palsy, whose wife had epilepsy.

“He had very little control or use of his arms and legs,” she said. “So he trained his dog to retrieve ice out of the freezer, so when his wife was having a seizure, the dog could get ice for her. These dogs could save a life.”