Training your own service dog is not for everyone. It requires personal sacrifice to spend adequate time on and off the clock ensuring your working dog is always learning the right things, and not picking up bad behaviors, a ton of patience, and can be frustrating at times. Read on to find out 5 components of training to consider when training your own service dog.
#1: Behavior
Service dogs need to have outstanding behavior when out in public, and continued at home so that they are always practicing the right behavior. This means holding your dog to the same rules and standards at home and at work. This can take a lot of hard work and upkeep. For instance, if you don’t want your dog eating scraps off the floor in a restaurant, don’t let them eat kitchen floor scraps. If your dog needs to greet strangers politely and friendly, then don’t let them later jump all over friends at the house. Its fine to let them be a dog at home, run in the yard, roll in the grass, and play fetch inside, but letting them get away with poor behavior in your home will do nothing helpful to them or the training, and it will begin to unravel everything you’ve done with them.
#2: Socialization
Service dogs need to be able to handle just about anything they are exposed to, stay calm, and perform their duties without missing a beat. Many public places can be overwhelming and stressful to a dog who hasn’t been properly socialized to them. Things like bright lights, strong smells, crowded places, people of different races, people with assistance equipment, and more. Socialization is as important, if not more, as obedience and task training because your dog needs to be able to do those commands and tasks around any distraction. Socialization begins at home, and grows to include everywhere you normally go.
#3: Position & Action Training
These are your commands and tasks. Positions are commands like sit, down, come to heel, stand, etc. Actions are walking at heel, opening doors, finding help, etc. This will take a lot of time, especially depending on how fast your dog learns, what they have issues with, etc. This must be worked on a little bit each day, even once the dog is “finished” to keep them sharp, and to provide your dog with mental stimulation. At minimum, you should do an hour of work with your service dog in training throughout the day, every day, and that doesn’t even include the training that comes with structured exercise, potty breaks, and playtime.
#4: It’s a Good Idea to Record Everything
Start recording your dog’s training the day they come home. Records might be notes in a binder, daily entries on your computer or phone into a journaling app, keeping your own blog, taking videos of things in progress and finished, audio recordings, or something else entirely. Records are vital to being able to proof the your dog has been trained to be a service dog, should it ever get questioned. Additionally, it helps you keep track of where you are and where you need to be with them.
#5: Creativity
As a disabled trainer, you are going to have be really creative in how you teach things. Sure you can read books on it, or a blog, but your pain is unique to you and your dog’s personality and learning style is unique to them. Something that worked for everyone else, may not work for you. Part of training your own service dog is the willingness to sit down and think, “ok – this is the end goal. Now how I am going to teach this? What are the steps? If one step doesn’t work, how will I change it?”
#6: Patience
THERE IS NO MAGIC PROCESS. Repeat that to yourself. This will take time. If you already have a hectic life, or are in the process of moving, dealing with your condition in terms of acceptance or multiple surgeries, then this is not the time. Training a service dog is like having a baby. It takes a ton of effort, lots of sacrifices, and money. You have to be willing to on your worst days, sit down, take a moment, and work with your dog on something. This is not the same thing as adopting a pet dog. It can’t be kept in a kennel or ignored for most of the day, then worked with for 5 minutes and then ignored again. That’s not how you train an animal anyways, especially not one who needs to learn to always be at your side. That being said, you also can’t rush this. Start slow. Teach a new command in a quiet room with no distractions. Don’t try it out in public for the first time, expecting success. That will put stress on you and the dog, which isn’t fair. If you have chronic pain, your dog will accidentally hurt you more in the beginning as they are learning, which is something to be aware of.
If you have questions about anything you learned here, send me an email! If you’re hoping to learn more about working with a service dog, head over to my Consultations page.
