Transcript for video, “How to Train Your Own Service Dog” (Get Ready to Train Your Service Dog).

Hi, I'm Sharon Wachsler, owner and head trainer of At Your Service Dog training, and I’m excited to speak with you today about training your own service dog. So let's get started.

We are expert service dog trainers providing life changing results because we have over 30

years of combined experience owner training service dogs. We have worked with hundreds of owner training teams, and we also have personal experience as trainers with training our own service dogs,  so we can help your dog reach their potential, avoid expensive time consuming mistakes, and have fun with training. These are just some of the dogs and handlers that we've worked with to train fully-trained service dogs, and we would love to add your dog to this group.

In this video you will learn some legal terms and definitions for service dogs, emotional support animals, and therapy dogs, as well as the process for training your service dog, what you need to train your service dog, and how to assess your dog or find the right dog to train. Then we'll talk about next steps for you to continue in your dog training journey.

The legal definition of a service animal under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) is a dog that has been individually trained to do work or perform tasks that directly relate to the handler's disability. Under the ADA,  a disability is any physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. So it's not just about having a diagnosis, but having a condition that significantly affects your day-to-day life. Trained tasks are going to depend

on the handler's disability, so people with different disabilities may need different tasks. But even two people with the same diagnosis may need different tasks depending on how the condition affects them. We will work with you to train the tasks that are the most useful and

relevant to you, depending on how your disability affects you.

Under the ADA, there are some requirements for the dog's behavior. The dog must be house trained and under the handler's control at all times with a tether, leash, or harness, unless that equipment would prevent the dog from performing its tasks or work, in which case the dog could

be under control by hand signals or voice cues. Also, the dog cannot constitute an undue burden for your employer if you're bringing the dog to your place of employment. With regards to public access, the dog cannot fundamentally alter the nature of the service, so the presence of the dog or the dog's behavior can't significantly interfere with the sort of normal goings on of the business. We will post all of the links that appear in this presentation in

the show notes.

I'm going to talk a little bit about these different types of dogs and what each one means. Under the ADA, emotional support animals are specifically excluded from the definition of a service animal. The ADA says that the provision of emotional support, wellbeing, comfort, or companionship does not constitute work or tasks. What this means is, a lot of people for whom just having the dog helps them function better, improves their quality of life, and reduces the impact of their disability, (and this is one of the wonderful things about dogs and about owner training a service dog) the law says that this is not enough to make a dog a service dog. The dog has to do trained tasks that have to be specifically related to the handler's disability. It doesn't matter whether it's a psychiatric disability or a physical disability, the requirements are the same for both. The Fair Housing Act (FHA) does recognize both emotional support animals and service dogs, calling them both assistance animals. So if you live in no pet's housing and you have a dog or any other domesticated pet like a cat or a gerbil or a bird, and you need that pet to live with you to function optimally with a disability, you can get a letter from your doctor, therapist or healthcare provider and give that to your landlord. It doesn't matter whether the dog is trained as a service animal or not, you should get reasonable accommodation for your disability in your housing. This applies also to condos and dormitories. An ESA does not have the right to accompany you into public access situations, but you can keep it in your home. This is a wonderful document from HUD that will be provided in the show notes that you can send to your landlord. Air travel also now does not recognize emotional support animals. Air travel is not covered by the ADA, it's covered by the Air Carrier Access Act, and that law says that, again, dogs must be trained to do work or perform tasks reliably that directly relate to the handler's disability in order to fly with you as a service animal.  You will also need to fill out forms attesting to your dog's house training, their health, their behavior and their service dog training. The airlines do check with trainers, we have gotten calls from the airlines.  More information on that is available from the Department of Transportation.

Therapy dogs are dogs who, along with their handler, provide some sort of support or therapeutic benefit to a number of people. We have a number of clients who are professors, occupational therapists, physical therapists or social workers who want to bring their dog to work with them to provide a benefit to clients or students or patients. We also have clients who like to volunteer with their dogs, maybe go to a library for a Reading with Rover program or to a hospice to visit with the residents there. A therapy dog provides a benefit to a variety of people in a specific setting, in a place that has agreed to have therapy dogs come visit. So when we think about rights of public access, ESAs do not have any rights of public access. Likewise, people who have therapy dogs don't have a right to go into any public place, only the places that have already agreed to have a therapy dog program. Handlers of service animals have the right to go pretty much anywhere that the public is allowed or that the public is welcome with just a few specific exceptions. So, if you're a disabled person with a service animal, your service animal is considered your mobility equipment or your assistive equipment. If you are training a service dog that is not fully trained, that is not covered by the ADA. The ADA only covers fully trained service dogs. Each state has its own laws that relate to trainers of service animals, and in most states, you have the right as a trainer to go everywhere with your service dog in training that a disabled handler would have. But there are other states in which you have to be a professional dog trainer. In Connecticut, you have to be a professional trainer for a nonprofit organization, whereas in Massachusetts, where I live, just the next state over, anybody who's training a service animal has the same rights of access as a disabled handler. So, you need to check the laws in your state to know which law pertains to you. If you are working with us and you're one of our clients, we're happy to help you find that information. There are also some community standards. They're not written into the law, but these are the standards that we have agreed as a society that we expect from a service animal. Those standards are that the dog is quiet and unobtrusive, focused on its handler, clean, obedient, and mannerly. Basically, unless you're looking right at the dog you don't even know that it's there. That's the gold standard that we train to.

There's a lot of confusion about certification. There are programs and trainers who train the dog to a specific standard, and when the dog has achieved that standard, they certify the dog as having completed their program. We have that with our DISC program, the Dogs in Service

Certification program, and this can be really useful because it lets you know that your dog has achieved a standard that will make the dog welcome everywhere, that you know that your dog is fully task-trained and fully public access trained. You can feel confident in your dog and in your teamwork, so there's a lot to be said for that. Working with a trainer to achieve a certain training standard is very meaningful for you and for us as a society. However, there is no legal weight to certification. If you go to a website that just asks you for a certain amount of money and then sends a piece of paper or a registration number so you can say that your dog is registered or certified, that's just worth the paper that it's printed on. Often they will also include a vest and a patch, and that would be akin to if I was dressed as a firefighter for a Halloween party and I was walking down the street and I saw a house was on fire, and I decided to run in and try to save people because I look like a firefighter. We see the same thing with dogs that are not receiving the appropriate training to give them the skills and experience and confidence they need to do well in public access situations. It's really a better bet to work with an experienced service dog trainer and know when to put that vest on your dog. If there is no such legal thing as certification in the US, then what makes a service dog legal? For this we return to the legal standard that the dog is house trained, under the handler's control at all times, reliably trained to perform tasks relating to your disability, and that the dog is meeting those community standards of being clean, unobtrusive, mannerly and obedient. And while it's not required, we do recommend that you get a public access evaluation from your trainer, just so you have that certainty and that confidence of going forth into every place with your dog and knowing that you and your dog are equipped for any situation together.

Before we jump into talking about what you need to train a service dog and the challenges of training a service dog and how to succeed, I do want to take a moment just to talk about the wonderful benefits that go into training a service dog. It can be a wonderful path for the right team.There are some benefits with training your own service dog that start out with just owning a dog. For a lot of people with disabilities, just having a dog can be very beneficial. In some cases, if you have a disability, you may have dealt with discrimination, people judging you based on externals, and dogs don't care about those things. Dogs are unconditionally accepting and loving regardless of whether you are working at a job or going to school. It doesn’t matter how you talk or move or act or behave or any of those things that people often care about. Dogs don't care about those things, so that can be wonderful. Also a benefit that we hear about from a lot of our clients is that because of the dog they are getting out of the house. They're walking, they're throwing the ball, they're exercising, they're interacting with more people and socializing with the dog as a positive source of conversation with other people. Likewise, a lot of people who have disabilities that affect their ability to have executive function, or can be at loose ends because they don't have some of the externals that other folks do, can benefit from having a dog. Having a dog who needs to be fed at certain times and needs to be walked at certain times can really help them keep a structure for their day that feels good. The sensory and tactile component of dog ownership can be wonderful. For some people, the petting and cuddling and hugging of the dog can be very grounding, very regulating of the mood. We often hear from people that just getting a dog has improved their sleep because they have the  dog sleeping in the bedroom with them.

And having a dog often helps with mood. We hear people whose depression gets better and they are hospitalized less often, things like that. All of these examples can be benefits for some people in some cases. In terms of the benefit for training your own service dog, because you

are starting out with just a pet dog in the beginning, you have all those benefits of just having a dog sooner than you would if you were getting a trained service dog from a program. Eventually you'll have the benefits of having a trained service dog, especially if you do work with an experienced service dog trainer to help you find the right dog. The training process itself can be therapeutic in some cases. I've worked with a number of people who were training their dog to alert them to self-injuring behavior like scratching themselves or picking at their skin or to remind them of something like turning off the stove, taking their medication, or getting up when they hear the alarm. Because we're training on that over and over and over again, over a period of months, by the time that the dog is actually trained the client is also more aware of those things and they need the dog less at that point. You may also be able to spread the training expenses out over time more when you're training your own service dog.  And you may also have a little more choice in types of dogs and especially the types of tasks you train. There is something really wonderful about training your own service dog when you have a disability.

Often you are reliant on other people every day for things that you might prefer to be able to do on your own. So when you have this furry happy being who is just delighted to do what you want just because you've asked and because there may be a treat in it for them, that in itself can be a wonderful and freeing thing not to have to rely on and ask somebody else. In addition, when you

know that you have trained the dog to do the thing that you need in that moment to help you, that's a really amazing feeling of empowerment and pride, and I believe fosters a really special bond between the dog and the handler. Lastly, and this is in some ways really the most

important thing, is that if you really want to be on a journey of learning with a dog, and you really want to be in this process of working hard together with your dog every day, learning a lot about dog training and dog behavior and becoming a real training nerd, that can be a wonderful journey as well.

We're going to talk next about what you need to train your service dog. We want you to know this so that you feel confident in your dog’s success, and you know that you're doing the right things for your dog. One question that arises is, can any dog be a service dog if I work hard enough, if we train hard enough,and if I know I am really dedicated to this? Because service dogs are the training elite, they are like the Olympic athletes of the dog training world. So the question is, can any dog achieve this Olympic level of training? Unfortunately the answer is no, that's not always the case. Just like with being an Olympic athlete, there are a lot of things that have to align. For both, you need to train really hard, train every day, and have a lot of motivation and commitment. You also need to have luck. Sometimes an amazing athlete gets injured right before a big event. Sometimes a wonderful service animal develops a physical condition or gets injured or is attacked by another dog. Sometimes there's just bad luck.  Then there's also the need for innate talents and strength. If I was working with the best soccer coach on the planet and training and playing soccer every day, I would still never become an Olympic soccer player just because I do not have that innate athleticism and talent that I would need. Similarly, there are a lot of wonderful dogs who have a lot of excellent qualities that make them great dogs, but they are not innately the type of dog who's going to enjoy being out in public working every day in different public settings and being around strangers. All of these pieces have to align. The process of training a service dog can be thought of as like a pyramid because it's a very solid, stable structure. The bottom is the biggest piece that holds up the rest of it, and the foundation for a successful public access service dog is having the right dog that's got the right health and temperament and personality, and all of the training builds on top of that.

Let's talk about what temperament or personality characteristics make a dog the most likely to succeed at and enjoy working as a public access service dog. We're not talking here about training. We are happy to help you train your dog to be the best version of themselves to achieve their best results as a service animal, but we're talking about who your dog innately is, and we're talking about adult dogs (I'll talk a little bit more in a moment about how we assess puppies.) If you have an adult dog,  is your dog very social? Does your dog like any type of person, whether they're an adult or a child, no matter how they move, what size they are, or what color they are?

We're looking for a dog who's really comfortable and happy to be around strangers. Likewise, a dog who's very comfortable with newness, new situations, new sounds, smells, places, and surfaces. We’re looking for a dog who's really confident and easy going no matter where they go. They're sort of happy-go-lucky, with that surfer dude personality where nothing really bothers them and everything just rolls off their back, and they like to experience new things. A dog who is not sensitive to loud or unexpected sounds, because those can occur at any time in public situations and we just don't have any control over them. Dogs who are sensitive to those situations are constantly going to be under stress, wondering when the next sound might occur.

We're looking for a dog who doesn't have reactive or aggressive tendencies, which would include behaviors like barking, lunging, growling, or biting. We want a dog who, when something stressful occurs, is gonna try everything else in its repertoire, and aggression would be a last resort. For example, if your dog's paw gets run over by a shopping cart, or their tail gets stepped on by somebody, or a small child runs up and grabs their face, your dog would wag its tail or roll over onto its back or go behind your legs. We’re also looking for a dog who's generally healthy, doesn't have chronic allergies or pain issues or any sort of ongoing significant health issue, as well as a dog who generally isn’t distracted by or concerned by other dogs. However, if your dog is friendly with other dogs and is maybe a little bit too friendly, that's often something that we can work on with training. We like a dog who has a limited interest in chasing after everything. If your dog is obsessed with bunnies or squirrels or birds or gets very distracted by a leaf blowing down the street or a plastic bag blowing down the sidewalk, it's going to be difficult for your dog to focus because there's always going to be movement around that's going to be drawing their attention. We like a dog with what we call an on/off switch, which is a dog that has a moderate energy level who's happy to work for a treat, and equally happy to lie down and do nothing and take a nap. Being a service dog usually involves two jobs. One job is to work and the other job is to tolerate boredom. If you think about a typical day, it might be something like this; you walk to the bus and while you're walking, your dog is working and walking beside you. Then when you're on the bus for 20 minutes, your dog is just lying at your feet doing nothing. Then maybe you're walking to class, or to school or to your place of work, and while you're walking again your dog is working. Then when you get there your dog is laying there for a couple of hours under your desk doing nothing and you need your dog to be easily able to just take a nap. So that is often a service dog's day,  periods of lying around doing nothing mixed with periods of working.

We need a dog who can easily do both, so usually we're looking for a moderate energy level. If you're an extremely active high energy person then you might want a slightly higher energy dog. Or for some people, a lower energy dog works well. But typically we're not looking for a real high energy dog. Food drive is definitely helpful. By far it's easiest to train a dog who's highly motivated by food because that's much easier than training a dog who's motivated to chase a tennis ball,  if you're trying to train a dog to walk by your side in a grocery store or lie down in a conference hall.

I'm going to show that previous slide again and pause the video. When I do, I'd like you to ask yourself, for each question, is this my dog? For each point where it definitely describes your dog, give them a point. If you don't feel like that's your dog, do not give them a point. Then tally up their score. Also, make note of how many of the points are in green and how many of them are in yellow.Take a minute now to score your dog on these areas. Just press pause on the video and when you're ready, come back and press play.

Again, this is just focusing on whether your dog is going to be happy as a service dog; whether they are going to flourish and be successful working on a frequent basis in public.  It's not a measure of how wonderful your dog is. Many, many wonderful dogs that I have worked with or that I have lived with myself would not score well on this. It’s just not what they want to do with their lives. But that doesn't mean that they can't do a lot of other amazing things. Many, many dogs love to do service tasks in the home and can be very helpful as home-only service dogs. We're happy to help you train your dog to do tasks in your home, if that's of interest to you.

But for working in public, the higher the dog scores, the greater the likelihood that they are going to flourish, enjoy, and succeed. If your dog scored a 10, congratulations, that's a perfect score. We would love to help you train your dog. If your dog did not get all of the points in the green zone, didn't get both of the points in the yellow zone, or if they got a score below seven, they're unlikely to be a good candidate as a public access service dog. Again, it doesn't mean that your dog can't be trained to do a lot of other things, but it's probably not going to be a good option for your dog moving forward with public access service dog training. If your dog did get a high score, did get all of those green points, and probably got all of the yellow points, then your adult dog is in a good position to move forward with training.

If you have a puppy, it can be a little bit harder to assess because their temperament may not be fully obvious yet. For a puppy we're typically looking for one that's not showing a lot of timidity or fear, and not showing any early signs of reactivity. We like a puppy who generally wants to greet people, may show some caution with dogs that are unfriendly or overwhelming, but is typically pretty confident and eager to explore and interact with dogs and people in new places and situations. The puppy may again show a little bit of caution  with new things but is overwhelmingly interested, curious, moving forward, happy to interact, and even if excited or distracted in a new place, is still interested in taking some treats. Again, we're looking for a puppy who has a limited prey drive.  In the beginning, if your puppy is a little too interested in your cat, and wants to chase your cat, its ok if they learn pretty quickly that that's not acceptable. A promising puppy may want to initially chase a squirrel or a bunny, but isn't obsessed with every car that goes by or every bird that it sees, and starts to lose some of that chase behavior as it matures.

Another thing that you need for training your own service dogs is a lot of time. It is a full-time job, usually for the first couple years where you're intensively training. So you need to ask yourself, do I have a lot of spare time every day to devote to this? Generally we see people have more success if they have more time to devote to training. And it's not just about the number of hours that you're training, it's also the mental real estate that it takes to plan the training, and to organize your life around preventing bad behavior. Incorporating enough management and enrichment for your dog every day really takes a lot of mental energy. For example, if you have a puppy that you're raising as a future service dog, this might be an example of what your morning would look like. It's not that you're doing so much training as much as you are thinking about where your dog is every moment and making sure that your dog is not doing anything to learn any bad behavior. You're maximizing your dog's potential for success all day long, and that can be quite a lot. You also need to really love training dogs. Usually everyone who contacts us loves dogs. There's a lot of things you can love about dogs besides training. You can love playing with them, grooming them, walking them, snuggling with them. But training is a very repetitive process. It takes a lot of diligence and commitment. It's a slow process of changing your dog's behavior over time, and some people love that, but not everybody does. You also need to have some mechanical and physical skills to train your dog, but usually that's not a big problem.

We're happy to work with people with any type of physical disability or condition. Usually it is something you can learn over time with practice and we're happy to adapt our training procedures to work with everybody. But there are also mental skills required.  You need to be able to follow instructions, keep track of your dog's training, be able to commit to it every day, and have the emotional capacity to deal with it, which can be challenging because your dog’s training is a long-term process that doesn't have a known outcome. There are also expenses involved. We do our best, which I'll talk about in a moment, to make it affordable for everybody. But, just having a pet is a large expense, and when you add on the expenses that go with service dog training, it does add up, so that's something that you need to be prepared for. The cost for training a service dog can vary a lot depending on how much you are able to do on your own and how much support you need, as well as how fast your dog learns and your dog's overall aptitude. We generally recommend budgeting between to $7000 to $10,000 at the current inflation rate.

We do have a scholarship fund that we use to defray costs for people who are low income. We provide small discounts for people who are low income and have disabilities, and when you are further along in your training, if the only thing that's holding you back is financial, we will provide larger scholarships if we have the funds. We get donations for our scholarship fund, which was named after one of our clients whose service dog we trained. It was set up in his memory by his family. There are also ways that you can do personal fundraising. We have a lot of clients who have raised a significant amount from friends and family, coworkers and community. That can be very helpful. If you are a client of a state agency (those are called different things in every different state), you may be able to get funding through that state agency. For example, here in Massachusetts, we're a vendor for the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission, so

that's worth looking into.There's also internal resources and external resources that can

be important. You do need to have the ability to cope with the unknown of the process and to have the support to keep going with this day in and day out when your disabilities might be flaring up and making life difficult. One really important consideration is whether everybody that you live with supports you getting and training a service dog. Dogs learn from everybody that they live with, and if there is somebody who is sabotaging your training instructions, whether intentionally or accidentally, that is going to make it really hard for you to succeed. So whether it's people in your life who are providing emotional support and encouragement, or whether it's somebody who can help walk the dog on days when it's difficult for you, you definitely need to know that you have all the support that you need to move forward. If you have that and you have the right dog, the next step is to start training your service dog. If you don't have that dog, then the next step would be to find the right dog to train. We can help with that too. A qualified service dog trainer can help you with both of those components, finding the ideal candidate or training the dog that you already have.

Let's talk about who is a qualified trainer. We'll start with pet dog trainers. Pet dog trainers should have a certification from a science-based objective certifying body showing that they have the basic knowledge that they need to be a trainer and charge for their services. That's the ideal.

If not, then a certification from a reputable science-based vocational trainer course is also good, such as Karen Prior Academy or someone with a Certificate in Training and Counseling (CTC) who graduated from Jean Donaldson's Academy for dog trainers. You want to work with somebody who uses reward-based training and positive reinforcement, meaning that

they're not using choke chains, shock collars, prong collars, or that type of thing.

They should know dog body language, how to interpret what your dog is saying with their body language and should help you to learn that. There should be a good relationship with you such that you trust them and you feel comfortable with them, and you feel like they respect you and listen to you. That's the baseline of what you want for a pet dog trainer. A service dog trainer should have all of those components to start with and then also should understand service dog laws and terms, community standards, the training path for training a service dog, and how to do public access training and task training. They should understand your disability and its impact on your life, how it affects training and be able to adjust things to work for you so that you and your dog can succeed together. They should have a lot of experience with service dog training and teams, as well as experience with behavior assessment and the selection of dog, and how to progress dogs or career change dogs.It's important to start your journey with a qualified service dog trainer because they can help you get off to the right start with your puppy, maximize your puppy's early developmental weeks that are so important, and develop your training and handling skills for the rest of your dog's life, and even for your next dog if you choose to keep going with training, so you are not dependent on the trainer to make progress, and you can keep making progress on your own. It's important to work with somebody who really understands your dog because they've worked with hundreds or thousands of previous dogs as a trainer, and one that covers what to train and how to train it for future service tasks, so that they're setting your dog up to succeed with public access training and with task training because they know what's coming down the road. Sometimes, with pet dog trainers, you start out training your dog in a class, and then later when you switch to service dog training you have to retrain some things because they were trained in a way that's not as useful for your disability or your needs with a service dog.

So that's a benefit of starting with a service dog trainer from the start with your puppy. Working with a qualified service dog trainer is going to help you be confident that you know you're raising your puppy right, that you're less stressed out about this long process, that the training is efficient and effective so you're saving money and time over the long haul because you don't need to retrain things and you're preventing future training problems from the start.

You want to have a clear pathway and a training plan so you know what is coming next and can plan for it in terms of time and budget and emotional resources. You want to work with someone who's always going to provide you with a lot of support, information and resources. We are reality check often for our clients and a sounding board since this is such a long process that

is so important. You're pinning your hopes on a better life and a better future for yourself on things going right with your dog,  so we are always there for our clients. We have a client portal that has hundreds of training tip sheets and videos that you can access for the rest of your life.

We are also available for private lessons in between classes, and to answer questions both through our private Facebook group and by email.

If you are looking for the right dog to train, you want to watch our webinar. It's a three hour webinar that provides information on a number of different aspects of finding the right dog to train. After that, if you go forward, we have a consultation option and we provide dog search support. The webinar on finding your dog provides information to help you choose the best option for you and your family. It's really to help you think about all of the different options and determine what will work best, whether getting a fully trained dog or training your own is best. Would a puppy or an adult be better for you, or a breeder versus a rescue? It covers how to assess breeders and the most important traits in your dog. You can purchase the webinar and get started with the process right now. Once you do that, then you can meet with us for some

individual guidance on how to find the right dog for you. We will provide you with options, help you with assessment testing and selection, and answer all of your questions. Once you have your new dog then you would want to start in our Dogs In Service Certification course.

Our DISC classes are geared to owner trainers specifically. Pearl DISC is geared to puppies, but it's also appropriate for adult dogs. We've had a lot of both adults and puppies make their way through PEARL DISC and find it really helpful. PEARL DISC is a 10 week course. It focuses on all the puppy raising essentials, but also provides advanced handler and trainer skills so you are developing your skills along with your puppy. It provides foundations for future task and public access skills, as well as all the basics for a good life with your dog, no matter what happens. At the end of the course, you take the PEARL DISC assessment and then advance to the next level, Bronze. The great thing about our DISC classes are that they're convenient because you can train your puppy from anywhere since they're taking place online. Even though they are online, you are getting live coaching from a trainer; it’s not just a recording.  You are meeting with your trainer every week, getting individualized instruction and coaching, there's no cookie cutter training with us, and we are always working with you, your disability, and your dog to make sure that you are succeeding and are proud of your progress and of your dog. Later, we are happy to help with advanced training, whether that's public access or task training. We can help you understand your dog's trajectory, where they are now, where they need to go, and create a training plan that's specific to your disability and training tasks and needs. We can answer your questions and provide ongoing support with efficient and effective positive training for you and your dog. The options that are available depend to some degree on where you're located. If you are local, you have every training option: in-home, in public, on-site or online training. We offer day training where we train your dog for you, as well as coaching where we teach you how to train your dog. We do a lot of hybrid options, so people can do some online training with us and then periodically travel to us for onsite training, or do a combination of group training where they start with our DISC classes and then also add in some private training later. If you are in the broader region, the northeast or national, we offer online coaching no matter where you are.  For a lot of folk we do hybrid packages so that they train with us online and then every once in a while they travel to train with us here on site. Board and train is also an option for some dogs who are further away. And we really love to do team training, where you can train with us online and we can refer you to a trainer in your area that we'll team with so they can do some individual on site training with you as well. We provide a combination of options depending on what works for you and your dog. Typically if you have a puppy, we're going to recommend you work with a trainer in your area for puppy kindergarten or puppy day training so your puppy is getting positive experiences with new people, places, things, et cetera, and you're getting a local skilled trainer's eyes on your pup's interactions with novelty. Later down the line when your dog has completed their Bronze DISC class and your dog needs to be assessed for their Bronze DISC, that assessment would be done by a trainer in your area. We offer all the DISC courses, including puppy and basic training in Pearl and intermediate training in Bronze, for a lifetime of handling and training skill. We also offer private public access and task training, and a public access evaluation when your dog completes all their training. Upon completion of this you get a letter of attestation, cards with information answering questions about your dogs that you can give out, and an embroidered badge that goes on their vest. And we are always available to help with any type of training solution where your disability is affecting training. If you are a professional pet dog trainer and you have questions about service dog training, we're happy to help. We do consultations for professional trainers on service dogs. We also offer mentoring for anyone who is a a trainer or wants to be a trainer, and workshops, webinars, and seminars on all aspects of service dog training.

So we would love to get started with you on your journey to having a better life with your service dog by your side. I hope this has been helpful and we wish you and your dog all the best in your journey.