By Ian Miller
It’s the “dog days” of summer here at The Golden Scoop, and on Saturday, May 21st, we hosted Coffee and Canines by Canine Companions, a nonprofit organization that trains service dogs for use by people with disabilities. When I pulled up in the parking lot that morning, a group of people were sitting under a blue canopy, three dogs lying on the ground beside them with their tongues lolling out, wearing yellow service vests.
“Canine Companions is the largest and oldest service dog organization in the country, and this year, we’re celebrating our 50th anniversary,” said Sherri Bryant, Canine Companions “volunteer puppy-raiser,” as it says on her business card. “These are all service dogs in training,” she said, indicating the dogs wearing yellow training vests with SERVICE DOG stamped across the back. “We are all . . . volunteer puppy-raisers, and what that means is that we get a puppy when it’s eight weeks of age and we train it in 30 cues or commands, and then we give it a lot of socialization opportunities out in public, doing lots of different experiences: sights, sounds, textures, everything we can possibly think of to expose the dog to, to give it a good training and foundation.”
Following the volunteer socialization period, the dogs are returned to Canine Companions at around eighteen months of age, to be further trained by a professional service dog trainer. They are taught an additional 15 cues and undergo rigorous testing for obedience,
temperament, self-control, and other necessary skills a service dog needs to have. Then they are paired with a person on the waiting list, free of charge, and begin the next chapter of their lives as working dogs.
“The individuals with disabilities come in to be matched with a dog, and . . . [the professional trainers] know the dogs, they know the individual, they know which dogs might work well with an individual, and then they let the dogs select the person, essentially. They want to see that emotional bonding, they want that dog to be really attracted and bonded [to the person.]”
The matched individual also receives instruction on how to manage the dog and learns the dog’s trained commands. During the matching process, which takes several weeks, they reside at one of Canine Companions’ six national centers, so they can have constant
one-on-one interaction with their service animal before taking it home.
Canine Companions has placed over 8,000 of these “graduate teams” since its founding in 1975. Approximately 1,100 service dogs are trained by Canine Companions each year, with over 2,700 active service dogs currently in use around the country.
“The highest compliment that a puppy-raiser can receive is . . . ‘I didn’t even know there was a dog there!’” said Sherri. “That’s the hallmark of a real service dog, [which is] that it’s not disruptive and you really don’t even know it’s there.”
To learn more about Canine Companions, visit https://canine.org/
Find the Golden Scoop at these locations:
9540 Nall Avenue
Overland Park, Kansas 66207
913-284-804410460 W 103rd Street
Overland Park, Kansas 66214
913-232-9639Hours:
Monday – Closed
Tuesday-Saturday: 8am-7pm
Sunday @103rd: 9am-5pm
Sunday @ 95th: 1pm-5pm
