Service dogs are out and about in the community, opening doors for individuals with disabilities, including “invisible” disabilities like post-traumatic stress disorder. Therapy dogs and their owner-handlers are trained to help third parties. How are these animals trained? Where are they allowed to go? This week’s article covers assistance animals, with a focus on service dogs. Next week, we take a look at therapy dogs.

The U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) defines an assistance animal as “an animal that works, provides assistance or performs tasks for the benefit of a person with a disability, or that provides emotional support that alleviates one or more identified effects of a person’s disability. An assistance animal is not a pet.”

According to the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, service animals are a special kind of assistance animal, to which an owner-handler has the right of accompaniment. Service dogs have been trained to do specific tasks for an individual with a diagnosed physical or psychiatric disability. Psychiatric disabilities include conditions like PTSD and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and are diagnosed by medical doctors.

The Air Carrier Access Act specifies that airports and airplanes are places where service animals are considered “reasonable accommodations,” and permitted without additional fees.

Emotional support animals (ESAs), on the other hand, provide “companionship and emotional support for those diagnosed with a psychological disorder,” the American Veterinary Medical Association explains in a 2022 whitepaper. The use of an ESA must be supported by a medical or mental health professional, but the animal – which may be of any species – does not have to be trained to perform specific tasks.

ESAs are treated differently from service animals under federal law. The ACAA was amended in 2021, for example, to clarify that airlines may treat ESAs as pets in its policy development and enforcement. However, ESAs may qualify as reasonable accommodations under the federal Fair Housing Act.

Serious training

for a serious job

Educated Canines Assisting with Disabilities (ECAD) is a nonprofit organization that breeds and trains service dogs. Founded in 1995 by Lu and Dale Picard, ECAD has placed more than 350 service dogs with individuals around the country. Before being matched with an individual owner-handler, each ECAD dog receives up to 1,500 hours of training over a period of 18 to 24 months.

ECAD is accredited by Assistance Dogs International (ADI), the standards of which include “Organizations train dogs to be stable, well-behaved, and unobtrusive in public.” The Picards studied in Santa Rosa, Calif., with Bonnie Bergin, the creator of the “service dog” concept.

All ECAD dogs are specially bred Labradors and golden retrievers, whose mothers have just four litters over a lifetime, before becoming ambassadors for the organization. From eight weeks of age, ECAD puppies are trained by nursery teams that accustom them to parks, trails and traveling in vehicles. The next step of training, dubbed “ECADemy,” teaches the dogs to behave properly in places where pets are not welcome, like malls and movie theaters. During the ECADemy intermediate phase, the dogs learn roughly 60 commands.

Thirteen days of additional training are provided in the ECADemy advanced phase to each team of an owner-handler and a dog once the match is made. After successful completion of this program, the pair is certified as a team.

In addition to matching service dogs and individuals with disabilities, ECAD matches “facility dogs” with nondisabled owner-handlers. Lu Picard provides some examples of work that a facility dog might do. A person with PTSD receiving psychiatric therapy might talk to a facility dog instead of speaking directly to the therapist, because it allows him to say more. In this situation, an employee of the clinic owns the dog; the patient benefits from it while on-site.

A facility dog might also be used by a rehab clinic to help with an individual recovering from surgery but lacks the motivation to do the prescribed exercises. A physical therapist might develop a treatment plan that involves the patient throwing a ball to the dog, rather than completing arm movements in isolation. “The dog could be at the rehab facility all day long, and have a caseload” of patients with whom it works, Picard elaborates.

A costly program, with costs largely met by fundraising

When an individual comes to ECAD to request a service dog, the future owner-handler’s journey has just begun. A person with a disability who requests an ECAD dog today contributes $500 toward the training of a dog that will be ready in early 2027. (This fee is “enough to pinch you,” Picard believes. “It’s not enough to hurt you if you decide you’re going to start, and not finish.) At ECAD, the person meets some fully trained dogs, with a variety of personalities, and tells the staff which traits in each dog are appealing and why.

When the person returns home, a fundraising coach from ECAD contacts him to begin the process of raising the additional $31,000 that the nonprofit has budgeted for his dog. The contract for a service dog from ECAD includes a commitment to fundraising and to making media appearances on behalf of the group.

Picard says it can take from nine months to a full year for the future owner-handler to raise the funds for his dog – work that, in her opinion, is an appropriate test of the client’s dedication.

“If you give $500 and you don’t work with the fundraising coach,” she says, “then you’re never going to take care of that dog the way it needs to be taken care of.”

Fake service animals problematic for people with disabilities

More than 10 years ago, the national press began reporting on a perceived increase in individuals trying to pass their pets off as service animals. The AVMA cites a 2013 CBS News report on “illegal fake service dogs,” and points out that pretending that a dog is a trained service animal is not difficult. The ADA does not require service animals to wear signage or special vests – and even if it did, phony vests are easy to come by – and there is no single, national accreditation for service animal training programs.

It’s easy to see why putting a “service animal” vest on a pet is tempting. Service animals are permitted, without pet fees, on airplanes, and are allowed into places like restaurants where pets are typically banned. However, untrained pets brought into public spaces masquerading as service animals pose problems for members of the public, real service animals and the pets themselves.

“A pet,” the AVMA explains, “may react negatively to a stimulus, such as a wheelchair, if it has never come in contact with one before. Service animals, conversely, have been trained, for the most part, to be accustomed to wheelchairs and not react when encountering one.”

Fake service animals can make life more difficult for people with trained service animals. According to the AVMA, fake service dogs have even attacked real service dogs. And poor behavior by fake service animals can prejudice public establishments against legitimate service animals.

Trained service animals, on the other hand, can make a meaningful difference in the lives of people living with disabilities. For example, an ECAD-trained dog named Nova was recently provided through Project HEAL to a veteran with PTSD.

Nova helps her owner-handler by executing a “block” command to carve out a safe space around him, as well as serving as a communication bridge in situations when unwelcome conversations with strangers are inevitable. Service dogs provided to people on the autism spectrum through the Canine Magic program are trained to execute an “anchor” command, keeping a child in place if he tries to run toward a hazard, like a body of water.

More information, including how to get involved or donate money, is available online for Educated Canines Assisting with Disabilities (ecad1.org/). Please note that ECAD is just one of many dog-related nonprofit organizations; this article is a feature, rather than an exhaustive inquiry into the manifold groups sponsoring animals doing good in their communities.