The Possibility Dogs

by Susannah Charleson

  A psych dog can preemptively help partners like Melissa distinguish what’s real and not real. Melissa knows that her PTSD flashback episodes often involve the sensation of being followed, sometimes to the extent that she thinks she sees a figure behind her, so she can train her psych dog to indicate the position of strangers on command. The dog acts as a reality check. In that first uneasy moment in the empty atrium, if her dog does not indicate the presence of a stranger, Melissa has solid feedback: There’s no one here to follow me. Or if he does: He’s indicating a woman on my left and now two men walking out the far door to my right, but he doesn’t acknowledge the person I think I see.

  If Melissa has attempted to get away and is now lost, she can forestall the resulting panic by telling her trained dog “Backtrack,” a scent-driven task that requires the dog to find and follow their trail back through the maze of hallways, down the elevator, and to the starting point. Now acting as a guide, Melissa’s dog can steer her around hazards. If she attempts to wander onto a busy street, her dog can block her from doing so. Melissa can give the command “Brace,” and the dog will stand sturdily on four legs as a support, to help her stabilize. If Melissa falls down, her dog can stand over her and bark for help.

  It sounds a little like fantasy and a lot like Hollywood, but for some psych service dogs, this is business as usual. Partners train with their dogs for events they hope will never happen, but they train hard, expecting that they will. And in Melissa’s dog’s case, the service starts with learning basic tasks: acknowledge a stranger; find the door. Called upon to do these tasks and more—seek help, clear airways, redirect behaviors, urge housebound partners out, lead lost partners back home—psych assistance dogs must be extraordinary, and their partners no less so.

  Experts suggest that those best suited for psych dog assistance are people who naturally like and trust dogs as well as understand their own disorders. These individuals have a good idea what triggers episodes; they know how their conditions present. In many cases, Joan Esnayra notes: “Psych dog partner candidates have often been there, done that, tried the shock treatments and the meds cocktails, and are willing to make a serious investment in their own wellness.”

  A certain amount of stamina is required of handlers; the partnership comes with significant obstacles. Living in the netherworld of invisible disabilities, psych service dogs and their partners encounter frequent discrimination. While the Americans with Disabilities Act protects the partners’ rights in most public venues, the Air Carrier Access Act requires official documentation from psych dog handlers that no other service dog partners (including medical-response dog partners) have to provide. The prove-it moment, as one handler describes it—when a gatekeeper doubts you and the dog—is deeply personal, often uncomfortable, and sometimes adversarial.

  In some places, legal protections for psych assistance dogs are clear; in other places, gray areas leave room for interpretation—and trouble. An Internet search brings up plenty of examples: Handlers interrogated at airline ticket counters, angry shop owners calling the police, disabled partners or their dogs threatened in front of a host of strangers. Dogs kicked. A Georgia handler struck by a restaurant manager. A nursing home in Lexington, North Carolina, that allows the presence of therapy dogs for its patients but refuses to let an employee’s psych service dog on the premises. In one small Iowa town, officials banned a fully documented pit bull–mix service dog from living in the city limits at all.

  One handler comments, “It is ironic that beside the dog trained to help you with an anxiety disorder, you can end up in situations that would make most anyone anxious.”

  Another handler notes: “And here’s the kicker: It’s a kind of trade. For all the good help a service dog gives, that same dog makes you visible. If for you a ‘normal’ life is about being able to be anonymous, good luck. You and your dog and your disability had better be prepared for stares and questions . . . and sometimes accusations. It’s not all bad. A lot of the attention on the dog is supportive. But there’s almost always a spotlight. It slows you down.”

  In addition to wanting this help and being willing to work for it, therapists, handlers, and trainers agree, human partners must be able to provide good care for their dogs. Assistance dogs have lives and identities and needs of their own. A good partner candidate recognizes the responsibility to provide a full life for his service companion, which includes a commitment to the dog’s health and safety and allowing for downtime and off-duty play. Some handlers say they were surprised by the benefits of this dog side of the relationship—when a dog’s high energy leads the pair to agility competition, for example, and the agoraphobic human with profound social anxieties now finds herself in front of an audience, running beside her joyful dog, by choice.

  The benefits go both ways. The dogs attend to their handlers’ conditions. The handlers become keenly aware that their dogs are individuals. Yes, they say, these are the dogs that make a whole life possible. These are the dogs that save us in the big moments and the small ones. But many handlers are also cheerfully honest: These are good dogs, but they are creatures with foibles too. There’s the mobility dog that hides his ball in his partner’s shoes; he’ll bring the shoes on command, then—Oops, how did my ball get here?—offer a game of fetch. The dog trained to open a refrigerator who, as a youngster, occasionally sneaked himself late-night snacks. The dog that barks at butterflies. The dog that wants a lap of morning coffee. There’s the landscape digger. The bed-hog dog. The dog that flirts with his own reflection when he sees himself in any kind of glass. That dog’s handler showed me a cell-phone capture of a dog coyly tilting his head to himself in a hotel mirror. “I could take this dog to the White House,” he jokes, “but I could never take him to Versailles.”

  How difficult is it to find a dog that’s right for psychiatric service and, with expert help, owner-train that dog to a high standard? After months of research, I hope to find out. I’ve put out the word about my intentions, and through friends, professional organizations, and social networks, people have come forward to help. Many disciplines shape this work. I need input about all of them. Assistance dog partners; therapy-dog handlers; dog theorists, evaluators, and trainers; psychologists and therapists generously offer their expertise when I ask for it. Six handlers tell me their in-depth case histories. Many introduce me to their dogs. Better informed by their experiences, I hope to find a dog with a strong aptitude for assistance, to train that dog to reach the public-access standard and to perform a handful of typical psych-service tasks, and then—we’ll see what happens.

  I’d like to be a resource for others. If the chosen dog does very well, he could remain with me as a demonstration dog to help other new handlers training their own assistance dogs. There’s also the possibility that someone with an urgent need might come forward, and, if the match is a good one, the dog could become that person’s partner. And of course, if the chosen dog proves himself unsuited—too field-driven for assistance work, too anxious in crowds for therapy, or too unmotivated for either—then he’ll have the opportunity to learn something else, or he can simply remain a loved family member, wherever his dog gifts lie.

  There are other possibilities. I try to avoid thinking about this, but progressing kidney disease has already begun to cost me strength periodically and, on the very worst days, shows up as peripheral neuropathy—numbness in my hands and feet that affects walking and particularly moving up and down stairs. Though I’m not disabled, it’s not difficult to see that in time, I might need an assistance dog to help with these issues. Not soon, I hope. I’m still working search-and-rescue. I still have more good days than bad. It’s my nature to move quickly and alone.

  But I use a walking stick on the very worst days at work. In the field, I’ve noticed that SAR colleagues are more often helping me to my feet when I have hidden for their dogs, clearly noticing something I would rather ignore. When I mention to my doctor that I am exploring work with service dogs, he looks at me t
houghtfully and says, “Well, that may come in handy down the line.” That I am planning to work with psychiatric assistance dogs doesn’t faze him. He thinks mobility tasks are also in their skill set. “You’ll be all kinds of balanced,” he says.

  6

  THE GOLDEN RETRIEVER IS frustrated. We are sitting with friends at a restaurant that allows dogs on the patio, and Puzzle is in her good-dog Down/Stay beneath the table, her head resting on her paws. I don’t think my search dog views this brilliant Sunday morning the way I do, but I can see her nose twitch and her brow furrow. I know she’s working the light winds where she lies, enjoying all the scents that make up the cool air we call Texas Champagne when we’re lucky enough to get it. Puzzle would much rather be in the field on a morning like this. She is not really a brunch kind of a dog, but here she is with me, being a brunch kind of a dog. She is very, very good and very, very bored. My friends don’t notice it, but golden owners know the breed’s great gift of communication, the power of that golden’s deep sighs. I feel Puzzle’s pointed huffs against my foot. We’ve been here for a while, and at first, every time I moved my chair, her head snapped up, like she was hopeful of parole. Now she’s refusing to look at me at all.

  Since I have a dog like Puzzle in the house, my friends wonder why I spend time looking for another dog to train for service. The whole find-and-train-a-rescued-dog initiative they understand (although it could take seriously forever, as one friend put it), but the lines between search and service are blurry for them. All it takes is a smart, friendly dog who’ll learn to do something and do it reliably, right? They know Puzzle well, and it seems to them she’s right on point to train as a service demo dog, or even as my own assistance dog, if I need one down the road. Another trick in her bag of tricks, they say. What could be a more natural add-on to her resumé?

  They’re right, at least in the broadest strokes. Puzzle is smart, friendly, and polite in public. She is eager to learn new tasks, and she is bonded with me. She’s theoretically perfect. The fine points that don’t make assistance work right for her are more difficult to explain. Though Puzzle’s aptitude testing early on as a puppy (at six and ten weeks) and later as a young dog (about seven months old) showed all those good qualities of engagement, eagerness to work with a human, and stability we want in a working dog of any kind, early training with her also made it clear that she’s a field dog at heart. Puzzle is strongly independent, and given a choice between a job that requires her to be at a partner’s side on a leash all day and a job that allows her to blaze an off-lead trail to find a missing person with her human partner in follow, Puzzle would always choose the latter. Her affection for me is deep, but that affection formed in the field.

  Sure, Puzzle has shown genuine concern for me the one or two times I’ve been hurt, and yes, I’ve realized recently she can identify the chemical changes created by my kidney condition. She gets a little more attentive, seems to know when I’m going to have a bad day before I do. While I have no doubt Puzzle could be trained to do assistance work, I am just as certain she shouldn’t be. Puzzle has little desire to go everywhere I go if there isn’t a search at the end of it, and I could ruin a good dog by forcing her in that direction. I’m looking for the dog that not only can do assistance work, but wants to.

  That said, Puzzle’s love of orientation—a fairly common psych-service task for dogs with a gift of nose—can teach me a great deal. She has already shown me her location skills in the search field, of course, where she has long been able to make her way back to incident command without much guidance from me. Though I can only guess how she does it, I believe she remembers the progression of scent and its changes as we move through an area. These are landmarks by nose, so for her, it’s a matter of leading us from the edge of a cow pasture back to the smell of the creek, and then to the field where hay has been mown, and then to the abandoned gas station, and so on. The unique scent of each space, although too subtle for me, probably paints the world much more clearly to a search dog.

  A few years ago, Puzzle and I were traveling a lot. I was already thinking forward to psych assistance dog orientation tasks, and it seemed like a good opportunity to explore her skills. We made a game of it. We’d check in to a hotel room, leave the hotel for a walk, and on return, I would say, “Where’s the room, Puz?” and let her lead me there. Where is a word she already associates with searching, and it didn’t take much for her to learn what Where’s the room? meant. At first, I didn’t ask until we got off the elevator on the right floor, and then I’d let her choose which corridor, which turning, and which door amid all the identical ones was the one to our room. On later travels, I’d ask her in the lobby, and invariably she’d lead me to either the elevator (did she identify it by our previous scent? Or did she remember it visually?) or a stairway. While Puzzle certainly can’t choose the elevator button to push—she doesn’t bark five times for the fifth floor, by any means—the few times we were in an elevator by ourselves, she could discriminate which floor we should get out on if I pressed three or four buttons and had the door open on multiple floors. She would stick her nose out and make a yup-or-nope decision. Once on the correct floor, she seemed to find it easy to choose the hallway and the correct room—even after going into and coming out of that room only once.

  All of this must be strongly related to her search work. We talk about a dog’s baseline scent—the scent landscape a dog paints when he enters a particular environment. Just as we identify visual landmarks in new places, the dogs seem to create their own scent-driven ones. (They may also be making visual connections, but if so, my dog, at least, isn’t telling.)

  That lifting of the nose and making a yes-or-no decision is also part of search. On the very fast clear-building search drills, a dog has to be able to stick his head into a room and, in just that tiny moment, decide whether there’s human scent there or not. I think there’s an essential relationship between that and Puzzle sticking her head out of the elevator to sample the smell of the corridor, only in this case, she was searching for the remnant scents of us.

  One autumn, I was invited to give a presentation at a beautiful lakefront spa in Austin, Texas. Puzzle and I drove down from Dallas, arrived late at night, and received the key to our cabin. It was one in a row of about forty almost identical cabins along a short bluff. Even though we’d been driving a long while, the idyllic setting, flush against a lake where we could see white birds skimming low, was too tempting not to explore. We got to our room, unpacked, took a quiet walk, and went back in for the night.

  The next morning Puzzle and I set out to walk again, and this time I decided that we’d take the cinder path that fronted all the cabins and go as far as it went west and then come back again and go as far as it went east. Then we’d take the staircase at the east end to get down to the lake. It was a lovely morning. Passersby were friendly. Many of the spa visitors were having coffee on the porches of their little cabins, and we lingered with some of them before continuing on. After descending the far stairs and exploring the lakefront for an hour or so, we headed back to the cabin, and I decided to take a central staircase that we’d never used up to the bluff’s cinder path. I dropped Puzzle’s lead at the base of the steps, took up my phone and started the video camera, then said, “Where’s the room? Take Me Back, Puz.”

  We’d been working on this the way an assistance dog must do it, and Puzzle had learned that when given the command on-lead, there was to be no trailblazing—it was a signal to go slowly enough that a human could follow at a walk. She moved calmly upward.

  We arrived at the top of the steps in the middle of the cinder path. This was the path we’d taken this morning, end to end, and we’d done a little bit of it last night too; certainly, our scent was scattered all along it, but there should have been at least a little more of the smell of us at our own cabin. I wondered. We had been in this place less than a day. We’d gone in and out of our cabin only twice. Since she was still working the orientation command, whic
h cabin would Puzzle choose? And how would she distinguish between our cabin and the identical porches of those we had visited?

  At the top of the steps that led to the cinder path, Puzzle took a step forward, paused, turned her head left, then right, then left again, trying to decide. “Work it out, Puz,” I said, the words of encouragement we used on searches too, and a moment later she chose to head left, lowering her nose slightly and trotting along the path toward our cabin, dragging the lead. I followed behind with the camera. As we passed each cabin, she turned her nose in the direction of its doorway and then rejected it—just a flash of a scent check. This one? Nope. This one? Nope. Until she reached the steps to ours. She turned right, led me to the door, and looked back to beam at me. It was the same expression she made on some search finds, happy with the challenge and confident she had it right. She did.

  I understand the process. I like to imagine the dogs’ thoughts as they mark scent landmarks the way we would note visual ones (I remember passing this convenience store and this house with the funny mailbox, a human might think, only for a dog it might be: I remember passing this splash of bleach on the sidewalk and this cabin with the faint scent of Tiger Balm, and, oh, two squirrels scuffled right about...here). Still, the demands of scent discrimination in a place where every doorway seems, to me, identical; the ability to trace scent back to a starting point—it amazes me every time. Take Me Back was a command we’d continue to work. A search dog’s talent, a service dog’s task—it might be a skill Puzzle could share.

  7

  A 2009 NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO story underscored what most of us who work with dogs already knew: While the homeless-animal population has long existed, the Great Recession has made things worse for American pets recently. In some areas, intakes have increased annually up to 400 percent. Surrendered dogs are often healthy pets that are up to date on their vaccinations and have been neutered or spayed but have to be given up because their owners have lost jobs, or homes, or both, and they need to find safe places for their dogs to go. It’s a desperate choice made with loving intentions, but for these surrendered pets, too often there are not enough adoptive homes to go around. Rescuers have had to work even harder than usual, trying to maximize adoption events and social-media exposure to give more homeless pets some kind of hope.