A Dog Named Boo May Ease a Family’s Fears

When Jake von Voigt was 3, he figured out how to hop the fence behind his house.

Now 7, he’s gotten faster and roams farther, slipping out of school, turning up at a backyard swimming pool, or riding his bike on a six-lane, 50-mph road outside the family’s gated San Bernardino County subdivision.

When his parents, Bob and Marie von Voigt, find him, they scold him, but a child with Jake’s level of autism cannot process scolding any more than his own name when his parents call for him.

The von Voigts are working on a solution. They’re hoping that this complicated child--a boy who speaks in halting monosyllables, but whose first spelled word was “octopus”--might be saved by a far simpler creature, an 18-month-old yellow Labrador retriever that is learning to track Jake’s scent and lead his family to him.

“I want to be able to go places and not be scared,” said Marie, 39. “I want the dog to at least be able to tell me the direction he was headed in.”

As far as anyone can tell, training a service dog to track an autistic child as if he were a fugitive is a novel idea. But a number of autism experts say that given the potential hazards, it’s worth a try.

Like about 15% to 20% of autistics, Jake is an “eloper,” a child who is consistently compelled to run away from his caretakers and into a world he can only partially comprehend.

It is just one aspect of Jake’s baffling neurological condition, but combined with his limited communication skills, utter lack of fear and inability to process the emotion in the simplest rebuke, the running has become his family’s most profound source of worry.

A 1998 study from the San Francisco-based Life Expectancy Project found that mortality rates for autistic children are significantly higher than the national average. Some autism researchers believe that self-injurious behaviors such as running away are responsible in great part for those numbers.

“Especially for little kids, [running away] is really dangerous,” said Dr. Eric London, founder of the National Alliance for Autism Research. “Autistic kids look normal, as a rule. And if you see a kid like that on a curb, you don’t necessarily slow down. That kid could just dart in front of you.”

Keeping track of Jake isn’t as easy as locking the doors. For starters, he knows how to work the double deadbolts, his mother said, and tends to leave the house without fanfare.

Her worry is intensified by the fact that Jake has become obsessed with swimming pools, a common behavior among the autistic, yet he doesn’t know how to swim.

“I have to give these parents a huge amount of credit for trying something,” said Jane Pickett, director of the Princeton, N.J.-based Autism Tissue Program. “It sounds like a pretty realistic solution, actually. I mean, how do you contain someone like this? You can’t put them in jail.”

Some service dogs have been trained as therapeutic aides to people with autism. A few have even been leashed to autistic children, trained to keep their human partners from wandering. But Jake, like many autistic children, is extremely sensitive to weights and textures. When a teacher tried to affix a beeper to him that alerted her when he left the area, he repeatedly tore the device off.

About a year and a half ago, Marie started considering ideas with her two daughters and her husband, a sergeant in the LAPD’s Hollywood Division.

“We tried pagers and we tried alarms,” Marie said. “I thought, ‘There’s got to be a way we can find him.’ . . . So I said, ‘What about a dog?’ They’ve got Seeing Eye dogs and tracking dogs. I couldn’t just sit around as a mother, watching my girls be tormented while they don’t know where he is.”

Bob had seen enough police dogs in action to believe it was feasible.

“I’ve seen dogs in the field track suspects and do article searches,” he said. “And Marie said, ‘Even if [it doesn’t work], we’ve got to give Jake that chance.’ So I came around.”

As a result of Marie’s research, there are two new characters in the lives of this close-knit family: Boo, a big-pawed, excitable female Lab, and Andy Jimenez, an Anaheim police officer who spent years with that force’s K-9 program and now runs a private dog training company.

Although Jimenez had never met the von Voigts when he took Marie’s call, he has been volunteering his time to train Boo for the task. The Wish Makers, a nonprofit organization in Chico, is accepting donations to help pay Jimenez for his services, which by his estimates are worth about $15,000, including follow-up training. In exchange, Marie has been helping Jimenez with secretarial work at his office.

“When she called, I said, ‘Give me some time to figure out how we’re going to go about it.’ Then I got on the Net and on the phone to all the trainers I knew. Everybody was encouraging, and they’re eager to know what’s going to happen--because nobody’s ever done this before.”

For a month, Boo has been splitting her time between the von Voigt home and Jimenez’s training facility. Jimenez said there’s no guarantee that he’ll be able to get Boo to track Jake, but after a month of training the dog to hunt for the boy’s old shirts, he’s pretty sure she’ll at least be able to point his parents in the right direction.

“[That’s] our minimum goal,” Jimenez said in his Yorba Linda office last week. “That will cut down our search time. I think we can get that out of her, but I’m not in the position yet to say, ‘Yeah, she can lead us to the promised land.’ ”

When Boo is at the von Voigt home, she and Jake inhabit mutually exclusive worlds, even when they’re in the same room. Boo has not yet entered the small circle of creatures that Jake acknowledges, and she may never do so. Although learning to interact with strangers is one of Jake’s main goals at school, his only playmates at present are his sisters Melia, 9, and Alana, 12. The girls have made some of the biggest breakthroughs with Jake by simply doing what comes naturally to siblings: playing London bridge and ring around the roses, turning off Jake’s beloved TV and persuading him to horse around.

Jimenez, who has met Jake only briefly, hopes that Boo will make a similar breakthrough.

Like many autistic children, Jake can be driven to intense episodes of rage or grief by slight and inscrutable changes to his immediate surroundings.

He understands about 20% of what he hears, his mother said, but he is unable to process many instructions, making an act as mundane as a brushing his teeth a potential struggle: The texture of a brush drives him to distraction, but he loves the taste of toothpaste and tends to swallow it.

Marie said there is a payoff, however.

“With Jake he’ll always have this innocence of love,” she said. “Once you’ve gotten to know him, he’ll hug you, he’ll kiss you--it’s unconditional. He’s uncorrupted.”

These days, Marie said, Jake tries to get out of the house once or twice a day. Because he can unlock all the doors, she often employs the girls to help her watch for him as he slips out of the bustling house.

Autism researchers say elopers are usually not running from the safety of home, but toward a particular obsession or a general desire for heightened stimulus. Marie believes Jake is compelled to run by a desire to experience new things, a desire that his brain cannot regulate properly--a phenomenon similar to the way others with autism cannot recognize they are full, and eat past the point of satiation.

“He likes to explore, wants to be in movement,” she said. “He’s looking for the feeding of certain senses.”

Jimenez estimates that it will take about three more months to complete Boo’s training.

Marie von Voigt has high hopes that Boo is the answer.

“When Andy came and tested Boo, she passed all of her tests,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like we were meant to have this dog.”