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SSigDOGs - Social Signal Dogs & Orientation Guides for Autistic People

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During the late 1980s, having read about assistance dogs for people with different disabilities, I began thinking that a service dog might be able to help me with some of my sensory processing problems. What I initially had in... See more » During the late 1980s, having read about assistance dogs for people with different disabilities, I began thinking that a service dog might be able to help me with some of my sensory processing problems. What I initially had in mind was a dog that would help improve my mobility in the community by doing a little bit of signal work and a little bit of guide work. While I do not have a diagnosed vision or hearing impairment, autistic sensory difficulties often interfere with comprehension of things I see and hear. At that time it was not uncommon for me to walk off curbs into the street, or walk past my house without realizing it and find several blocks later that I didn't know where I was, or fail to hear bicycles coming up behind me until they almost ran into me. I hoped a dog could help make it safer for me to get around. I began calling training programs for service dogs, but could not find one willing to train a dog for an autistic person. Most of them told me they simply didn't have staff who were knowledgeable about autism. The director of one program told me that it wouldn't even be possible to train a service dog for an autistic person, because a dog could not be trained to meet my needs and because an autistic person would not be capable of handling a dog in public. At that point I decided to give up on programs and train my own dog. I had been training my own dogs in general obedience for about ten years, and I had a dog called Horse that I thought would be a good candidate for training as a service dog. I spent about a year training Horse, but it didn't take that long for me to realize how much a service dog would improve my quality of life. During one of our first training walks, Horse (on her own initiative) guided me around a mud puddle on the sidewalk that, had I been out walking on my own, I would have walked right through--not because I couldn't see it, but because I couldn't do the motor planning quickly enough to identify an alternate path to avoid it. But the benefits went beyond small things like mud puddles. I found that with my dog by my side, my overall awareness and orientation to my surroundings was better. I actually understood more of what I saw and heard when I had the dog to direct my attention to the particular things in the environment that were important for me to attend to. Horse's working career was tragically cut short by cancer, and I began training my second service dog. Ewok performed flawlessly in training, mastering tasks more quickly than any other dog I have ever trained. But when the time came to start working under real-life conditions, she didn't do so well. I had selected a dog that was friendly and outgoing, because autism makes it especially hard to understand and participate in social interactions. Horse had been a dog who responded well to people, distinguished between familiar people and strangers, distinguished between people who just happened to be standing near me and people whose body language indicated they were trying to get my attention--all things that are very difficult for me to do. I had hoped Ewok would share Horse's ability to be attentive to other people's social signals while maintaining her primary focus of attention on me, but I have since learned how very unusual Horse was in that regard. Ewok was so tuned in to other people that she wanted to socialize with everyone she met, and she was too easily distracted to be a reliable service dog. She made a successful career change to being a therapy dog at a nursing home, and was eventually adopted by a young woman who was recovering from a brain tumor. I then trained Emmy as my third service dog. Emmy was absolutely devoted to me, as Horse had been. She performed routine guiding and signaling tasks that improved my orientation and safety in the community. When my balance began to deteriorate, Emmy got a special harness to help support me on stairs and help me up when I fell. But Emmy, unlike Horse and Ewok, is shy and reserved. She didn't get distracted by other people we encountered; she simply ignored them, See less »

Tags:

asperger's syndrome, autism, sensory integration, sensory modulation, service animals, special needs

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SSigDOGs - Social Signal Dogs & Orientation Guides for Autistic People

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