The Purpose of a Service Dog

Hello Everyone


It seems like this should be a clear cut idea, a service dog is a tool to aid a person in being more independent, providing tasks that allow a person to do more and go more places. This seems like an easy concept, and people who get fully trained service dogs experience the whole world opening up for them. This is one experience that self-trainers never get to experience, and even people who get a great dog that is still maturing, find this difficult, because they are limited by their experience with their dog.


Going someplace new or places you were scared of before, takes a lot of trust with your dog. In order to desensitize them, they need to experience these places anyway. One topic I talked about before was the idea that, "I don't go to places like that anyway" really defeats the purpose. If you only train a dog to accompany you into places you are already comfortable, then the only thing that changes is you have a dog with you.

Service Dogs need jobs, if you are blind, many new places are scary, you do not know the layout, what if you trip, finding your way may be hard. Getting a dog to guide you would be a great way to feel comfortable going new places. But what if you just stick to your regular route, the places you regularly go and know, these are the same places you were comfortable in without the dog. He/she does not have to tell you how to get places and unless something has changed or a new object is in your path, you already know the layout, they have little to no jobs to perform in these instances. Day after day, sticking to this same routine will slowly diminish their skills and make them board. Many dogs thrive on the change and the challenge of the work, wanting to provide a service to you, if they do not get this task, they will stop working.


Going into new places with your dog is very difficult, especially if you have the joy of going through training with your dog, experiencing the bad along with the good. Trust is a little harder to build when you understand what can go wrong, but this is the whole reason you are going through this, to be able to go to those places and feel comfortable, to open up the world a bit more for you, not just as a companion in your small slice of it.