Training options
OBEDIENCE TRAINING:
Just like children, an obedient dog is a blessing to all who know him (except perhaps the person who suffers from allergies). From the time our puppies can leave their mother, we begin basic obedience training—come, sit, stay, down, and so forth. Having these basic skills ingrained is absolutely essential for any dog hoping for a career in service work.
SCENT TRAINING:
People have roughly five million scent receptors in their noses. Dogs have 300 million in their sensitive snouts! This explains how our specially-trained diabetes alert dogs can detect the scent of a diabetic who is experiencing the chemical change of falling blood sugar. They are also trained to alert their person when this change occurs so the diabetic can “correct” their low before it becomes a problem. The same is true for our Crohn's alert dogs. They can smell the change in their person before the Crohn's attack comes. Some of our dogs have even learned to smell and alert the biochemical change in someone who suffers from seizures.
Our dogs have had incredible success with detection work as well. We are proud to have Remi win the Top Rookie Drug Dog in Texas for 2017.
We have found dogs love to play hide and seek scent games. This can prove helpful in finding lost arrows which missed their mark and are buried in the grass. It can also help a diabetic to find his/her meter by asking the dog to find it. God has given Labradors fantastic noses they love to use, so we might as well leverage it for multiple benefits.
SERVICE WORK:
Service work means different things depending on the service dog. An autism service dog would be trained to stop the stemming behavior of their autistic child. Mobility service dogs would be trained to open doors, retrieve objects for the handler, and many other tasks. Crohn's and diabetes alert dogs will mainly focus on scent training.
Under the ADA (American Disabilities Act) fully-trained service dogs are allowed to accompany people with disabilities in all areas where members of the public are allowed to go. (This does not include therapy or emotional support dogs.) Our service-dogs-in-training spend hundreds of hours in the public arena so they will be well-prepared for accompanying their companion wherever they may need to go.
Our training is customized to the specific needs of the handler and family into which they will eventually be placed.
Puppy Jump Start Program
Our Puppy Jump Start program is ideal for the 8 week old puppy. It is typically a 2 month in-house training that will focus on: recall, sit, stay, down, leave-it (impulse control), crate training, leash training, socialization, house manners and house training.
This training program is open to any puppy. It is not a requirement for the dog to be from our breeding program.
Service dog program
Our service dog program is carefully tailored to the specific needs of the client. We have trained dogs to assist handlers with; diabetes, crones, PTSD, autism, seizure response and more. This program typically consists of 6-20 months of training. We will include one-on-one sessions with you to teach you how to continue the training when the service dog is placed with you. We will also have sessions to teach you how to handle the dog in public settings and work through any struggles you and your dog might have in the transfer process.
All the service dogs we place will have passed their AKC Good Citizen test and are fully trained for public access. Each service dog must have at least 3 tasks that they perform to help their handler in their particular disability.
We prefer training dogs from our kennels, but are open to the idea of training a dog that you may already own. Contact us to explore this idea further.
Interested in training options?
We can train a pup you purchase from us or a pup you already have. Reach out to begin the discussion!