A service dog and their human are two sides of the same coin; that's how closely bound they are. Did you know, a service dog that has been on the job for even a couple of years is so attuned to their human, that they can sense even the slightest change in the breathing pattern of that human? Raising and training a service dog at home is a magnanimous undertaking and requires much more than a resilient training eithic. It requires you to give everything you have to train the dog! Read on to get an idea on getting started on one of the most rewarding experiences you'll ever have...

What is a service dog 

A service dog is a dog specially trained to perform tasks to assist a person with a disability or a medical condition. These tasks could be day to day tasks based on the handler’s needs and lifestyle or could be specialized tasks pertaining to their disability such as –

• Fetching small and easy items such as bottle, newspaper, medicines, keys, socks, etc
• Guiding a visually impaired person
• Alerting a deaf person
• Alerting a person about seizures, irregular blood pressure, blood sugar and so on
• Pulling or pushing a wheelchair and helping with better balance
• Providing support during PTSD episodes or other psychiatric conditions

Service dogs play a crucial role in improving the quality of life for individuals with disabilities by providing physical, emotional, and psychological support. In the event of an emergency, service dogs are equipped to respond a lot quicker than humans because of their keen sense to detect an emergency before it happens, by altering other humans or by providing support till help arrives.

The different types of service dogs 

From physical assistance to emotional reassurance, service dogs are trained to enhance safety, independence and well being of their owners, making them invaluable partners for life. With the advancement in the field of dog training and behavior, there are several types of service dogs out there. Each dog is trained to assist individuals with specific disabilities or medical conditions. Here are some of the most common types you’d come across –

• Mobility assistance dogs – These service dogs are trained to perform a variety of tasks such as pressing switches, pressing buttons on doors, pulling up wheelchair ramps, fetching daily use objects, serving as a brace, etc. to assist their handlers with physical disabilities including but not limited to brain or spinal cord injuries, arthritis, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy and so on.
• Guide dogs – A guide dog’s primary role is to help their partner with vision impairment get around safely. They effectively assist with navigating routes, locating objects, solving problems, avoiding obstacles and road safety.

• Hearing dogs - The primary job of a hearing dog is to alert their deaf or audially impaired humans to important sounds. They alert their human to common sounds such as doorbells, knock on the door, smoke or fire alarm, alarm clock, baby crying, kitchen timers, intruders or emergencies by making physical contact in order
• Seizure alert/ response dogs – Seizure alert dogs play a crucial role in the lives of individuals with epilepsy or other seizure disorders. Their ability to predict or respond to seizures improves safety, reduces anxiety, and enhances independence. These specially trained service dogs provide both practical assistance and emotional support, making them invaluable partners for their handlers.
• Medical alert dogs - Medical alert dogs are trained to detect specific medical conditions relating to issues like diabetes, blood pressure, etc. before symptoms become severe. They use their keen senses, especially their powerful sense of smell, to pick up on physiological changes in the body.
• Allergy detection dogs - Allergy detection dogs are trained to sniff out specific allergens in various environments, including food, air, and surfaces. Their acute sense of smell allows them to detect even trace amounts of allergens. When an allergy detection dog senses an allergen, they will alert the handler by performing a specific behavior, such as pawing, or nudging.
• Psychiatric service dogs - Psychiatric service dogs are specifically trained to perform tasks to mitigate their handler's psychiatric problems such as anxiety, depression, PTSD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and other psychiatric conditions. These tasks include interrupting anxious behaviors, providing deep pressure therapy, assisting people with bipolar disorder by stabilizing their mood through task-based interventions, providing companionship, and offer a sense of safety.
• FASD assistance dogs - Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) is a group of conditions caused by prenatal alcohol exposure, leading to cognitive, behavioral, and physical challenges. The primary tasks of FASD assistance dogs include calming individuals during moments of anxiety, frustration, or emotional overwhelm, providing comfort and stability during transitions in environments, assisting with mobility, balance, or picking up objects, detecting when their handler is becoming emotionally distressed and so on.

Determining if my dog can be a service dog 

• Temperament – An ideal service dog must have certain traits such as ability to be calm and steady, sociable but not over friendly, confident in a variety of situations, environment neutrality, trainable, eager to learn and work, excellent focus and so on. Most of these skills can be taught to a dog with impeccable training and socialization. However, there are certain innate traits that a puppy needs to be born with in order to be a good service dog; they are – a natural love for human interaction, gentle demeanour, emotional resilience, high tolerance, high cognitive ability, medium to high energy and adaptability.
• Training requirements – A service dog’s training has to start from a very tender age. Many say it must begin at the age of 8 weeks. I say, it needs to start the day they are born. Between 0-8 weeks, a puppy goes through crucial developmental stages that lay the groundwork for their future behavior, learning, and social interactions. Getting them familiar to a human-dominated environment from the get go is a crucial part of laying foundation for service dog training.

• Registration – Different countries have different rules when it comes to registering a service dog. Some require official ID cards whereas some don’t. Depending on the locality you live in and the places you intend to travel to with your dog, make sure to arrange for appropriate paperwork for your dog accordingly.
• Recognizing if your dog is a right fit – “Service animal” is a versatile category. As discussed above, there are numerous kinds of service dogs. Recognizing the right kind of job for your dog is the first step towards training them. Not even all service dogs are fit for all types of jobs. For instance, your dog may be able to comfort you and your family exactly when you need it or be able to perform comforting cues such as Hugging, kissing, placing a paw or a chin on the lap; but if they’re terrified of kids or are apprehensive around new people, they are not fit to be a working therapy dog.

Can you train your service dog at home? 

Training a service dog is a massive responsibility; especially if they are being trained for specific jobs like mobility assistance, medical detection, seizure alert and so on. Even a tiny mistake could put a human’s life on stake. If you are training your dog to be of service for some kind of disability, it is best to train under the watchful eye of a professional trainer who is certified in this field.

On the other hand, if you are training a dog to be of service to you in minor household chores and there is no disability in the scenario, you can afford to take training at your own pace.

Roping in a certified service dog trainer or an in-person trainer can be an expensive affair. It may potentially cost thousands of dollars to train a service dog end to end. Having said that, training and raising a service dog for a disability requires utmost care and responsibility on the handler's part. When training a service dog at home for a disability, it is recommended to not only scout information from authentic sources but also rope in a professional right from the start to keep you on the right track.

A virtual dog trainer can help you get started on learning and mastering basic obedience - the foundation of any kind of advanced dog training. 

Homeschool by LAY LO is a great virtual training program that is lead by certified trainers to help with building the basics with your puppy needed before enrolling and beginning any service training. You can train with them on your own terms with 1:1 live video calls up to 3x per week. From behavioral questions to nutrition tips, our dedicated team is here to answer any questions you have so you can stop asking google and gain some peace of mind. Our trainers will work with you on your training goals, answer your questions real time, all while keeping you accountable for your progress. The beauty about training with us is that you can rest assured with high standards of effective training, ongoing assessment and feedback and minimized risk of incorrect techniques.

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Training a service dog at home – A step by step guide

1. Setting training goals

Your training goals with your service dog will be dictated by the job your dog is being trained to perform with regards to the handler’s disability, your lifestyle, your dog’s personality and learning ability. Set SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time Bound. This will help you make sure you’re on the right track and are working towards an attainable goal with visible progress. Break complex goals into smaller, manageable steps. Dogs learn better with incremental training, and this approach helps avoid overwhelming them.

2. Start off by mastering basics

While service dogs are capable of performing hard and complex cues on command, basic obedience cues remain the foundation of any kind of advanced training. Your service dog must be able to perform simple cues such as Sit, Down, Stay, Come and other impulse control commands without hesitation in a variety of situations. Moving on to complex tasks without perfecting simple behaviors is a bad idea.

3. Task training

When training a service dog at home, steer your training in the direction of the tasks your dog is expected to perform. For instance, if you are training your dog to be a Mobility assistance dog, they will be expected to perform tasks such as providing physical support, helping with daily activities, and improving their handler's ability to navigate different environments. Introduce your dog to these tasks on an introductory level while working with them on basic obedience.

Once a task is learned, it’s important to include maintenance goals to ensure the dog retains the skill. Regularly revisiting previously learned tasks will help solidify the behavior.

4. Focus on excellent socialization and environment neutrality

Service dogs accompany their humans everywhere they go. This means they would be interacting with a wide variety of people and animals on a daily basis. Furthermore, they would be stepping foot in a plethora of environments and locations. This calls for not only excellent socialization skills, but also expert levels of environment neutrality.

Environment neutrality refers to the dog’s ability to remain calm and unaffected by distractions or changes in its surroundings, regardless of external stimuli like noise, people, animals, or unexpected events. When working on socialization for your service dog, focus on –

• Adaptability
• Distraction resistance
• No reactivity to sudden stimuli
• Calm behavior in a variety of settings
• Public access training
• Ability to maintain focus on the human/ handler

 5. Proofing the training

When it comes to training a service dog at home, it is quite straightforward to teach them new and complex behaviors in a home-setting. The challenging part is to proof your training in different environments. Dogs can have a hard time generalizing things they have learnt in different situations merely because of the number of distractions and stimuli present in different environments.

A good way to proof your training would be to practice all cues with the factor of 4Ds – Distance, Duration, Distraction, Diversity. For instance, you can confidently say that your dog knows how to stay if they can perform the cue for a considerably long period of time, from a distance, in the presence of distractions and in different environments. 

6. Every interaction/ experience is a training opportunity

A dog is always learning, whether you’re proactively teaching them or not. They are learning when you’re communicating with them, when they’re sitting alone inside a crate, when you communicate with other people, they are learning when you give them attention, when you ignore them, when you yell at them, when you praise them; every interaction with your dog is a learning opportunity for them as well as you.

Exposing them to different experiences is also an excellent learning and socialization opportunity for your service dog. It is crucial for you to keep a close eye on them wherever you go because you want them to learn and respond to environment stimuli like a service dog and not any other pet dog.

7. Your dog is always on the job

Once a service dog has been trained and assigned for a specific job, they are always on the job. For instance, hearing dogs have to be alert 24*7 towards different sounds and events to be able to alert their owners. Seizure alert dogs have to be attuned to their owner at all times to be able to detect a seizure in time.

This is primarily the reason why we must never pet or interact with a service dog that we come across on the streets. A minor distraction can cause a grave mistake.

8. Exposing your dog to the difficult stuff

The life of a service dog can be riddled with challenges. Exposing service dogs to difficult or challenging environments is an essential part of their training. This process ensures that they can perform their tasks reliably, even in situations that involve stress, distractions, or unexpected events. For service dogs assisting people with disabilities or medical conditions, they need to remain calm in emergencies like medical episodes (e.g., seizures, fainting). Some service dogs assist individuals with PTSD or anxiety, where the handler may exhibit signs of distress. The dog needs to remain calm and provide comfort. Depending on the task you are training your service dog for, make sure to expose them to stressful scenarios very carefully. Roping in a professional may help.

Service dogs vs emotional support dogs vs therapy dogs

Service dogs are particularly trained to perform tasks which will help mitigate a person with a disability. They undergo extensive and specialized training to perform these tasks reliably in all kinds of settings without succumbing to distractions and environmental stimuli. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), service dogs are allowed in all public places (restaurants, stores, markets, hospitals, airplanes, etc.). They have full access rights because they are considered medical assistance, not just pets.

Emotional support dogs are trained to provide comfort, companionship and assistance to humans with emotional and mental health challenges. These challenges could be anxiety, depression, PTSD and so on. These dogs are generally not expected to perform specialized tasks designed to assist the disabled. Their primary role is to provide comfort by being near their owner. They are not granted full public access rights like service dogs. However, they are protected under certain housing laws (Fair Housing Act) and, in special cases, under airline travel laws. 

Therapy dogs provide comfort, companionship and affection to people in a variety of environments such as hospitals, offices, courts, schools, nursing homes, and disaster areas. They are specially brought to these facilities to offer emotional support and bring a smile to people's faces. They undergo specific training to be well-behaved, affectionate, and social in various environments. They do not have public access rights under the ADA. They are only allowed in specific places where they are invited or approved (e.g., schools, hospitals).  

Final thoughts

Service dogs have the sense to impact the overall mental and emotional health of their handlers while fostering a sense of autonomy and dignity. Training a service dog at home requires a whole lot of expertise, a solid training plan and resilience on the part of the dog and the dog parent to get through the most challenging training tasks. The end result, however, makes it all worth it.

 Author Bio: Siddhika is a certified dog trainer, behaviorist, and professional pet writer. Over the course of her dog training career, she has gained 3 certifications accredited by KCAI (Kennel Club Accredited Instructors) in the field of dog training and behavior, viz - Basic obedience course, Therapy Dog Training Course and Canine Aggression Course. She has the qualifications and experience in the theoretical as well as real-life applications of science-based dog training techniques.

With the expertise to write about a plethora of dog-related topics and a personal interest in dog cognition and behavior, Siddhika is an out-and-out canine nerd.