New Challenges

Yesterday I attended an 8 hour training session to learn more about training Sabrina for a pet therapy program. The training was without our dogs; strictly a handler-focused workshop. I decided to try and register Sabrina through a larger, more established, more well known, international organization. In three weeks, Sabrina and I will try to pass both a skill test and an aptitude test. If we succeed and overcome the 60% failure rate, we will be offically registered pet partners with Massachusetts Pet Parters (MPP), which is a subdivision of Delta Society. Massachusetts Pet Partners

The day was long and full of important information. We have a training manual that is over an inch thick and all the participants had to participate in a variety of small group and role-playing activities. We are expected to read the entire manual before test day. I was impressed how seriously they took the training and certifying teams for therapy work. Although at times, I admit, it did seem a little over the top.

Riley was certified through another local pet therapy program. The training workshops were very different. Riley and I attended 7 hour and a half sessions together. We spent part of the time listening to the instructor and the other half of the time practicing skills. We had opportunities to practice teaching our dogs to "leave it", walking around wheelchairs, approaching people in walkers, and how to walk our dogs down a crowded corridor. It was more of a handler-dog training session. I loved the hands on training and practice. I felt the criterion for certification, however, was loose and in my opinion, irresponsible. They passed a lot of people that I felt clearly did not have control of their dog nor a good understanding of their dog's behavior. Many people left the workshop without a good understanding of how to advocate for their dog. Basically, a lot of people who just think their dog is cute were certified and set loose to bring their dog to potentially volitile and unpredictable environments. This includes myself.

MPP spends a lot of time talking about all the potential challenging situations we may find ourselves in and how to advocate for our dogs' well being. They stress that your dog is NOT an entertainer. They are trained to provide a service, which could include entertainment, but is much more than that. They teach people how to look outside of themselves, socialize, they teach empathy and elicit nurturing emotions. However, as thorough as this training was, we as handlers are expected to train our dogs for the skills and aptitude tests on our own. This means I need to find ways to expose Sabrina to a variety of environmental stimuli on my own. It is a rigorous test and we will get marked down if we need to command our dogs multiple times to perform the skills. They obviously take the testing very seriously. What I also like about their testing is that they specifically state what type of envirnment they feel your dog is capable of: predictable or complex. I now realize that the environment I have Riley in is complex (high stress, highly unpredictable, lots of change, etc) and he would have done so much better in a predictable environment.

I plan to bring Riley on test day to see if I can register him through MPP as well. We have a lot of work ahead of us in the next three weeks and I hope we can do it! Keep your fingers and paws crossed for us!!