The Present day Assistance K9 as trained by almost every major organization that supplies the field of disabled persons is out dated and far from being able to meet the life threatening needs of that community.
The field of schools providing these dogs seems to be caught in the grips of a “4-H” type of mentality, and providing dogs that are not capable of meeting the real needs of those who handle them. On a scale of 0 to 100, the normal working Assistance K9 would score from 25 to 40 %, which is far from acceptable. These dogs lack many important abilities that would make them much more capable of helping their handlers in everyday real life situations which they encounter constantly. For the most part they are trained to do menial tasks which do not require technical or complex skills, and perform on a lower level of intelligence. For this reason, many disabled people consider them as much of a detriment as they are a help, and would rather try to do without an assistance K9 than to have to put up with the problems involved in ownership.
Unfortunately this has become the norm, and those institutions producing these dogs have become complacent, ignorant, and “blind” to the situation. Because of their lack of education and the lower level of their own abilities, the breeders, trainers, and administrators simply continue to produce one dog after another without regard to the needs of their market. Since these dogs have been accepted and can be certified, they feel no need to change or enhance their specific programs. However, at numerous home shows, expos, demonstrations, and presentations, we have found 1,000s of frustrated, disappointed, and very concerned disabled people, who have come to us and were deeply moved to find that we offer a much better alternative. Our dogs do things that other organizations have told them were impossible. We produce a mentality and an understanding in our dogs psychologically that other organizations are not capable of duplicating.
A COMPARRISON
• To date, the Service Assistance K-9 world is greatly restricted, and unless you fall into the slim parameters of the very specific programs offered by each of the various privately funded Assistance schools, you are out of luck. IF you do, take a place in line, where you stay for about three years before you are re-evaluated for a chance at a potential trained Assistance K-9. We have no waiting lines, and produce K9s for all disabilities.
• Each of these schools has chosen a definitive direction, and only teaches their trainers to train their selected dogs specifically for those applications. Unfortunately, they cannot continually deviate to meet each client’s individual needs without expanding their schools serviceability, so they don’t. Our K9s are CUSTOM trained for the individual.
• Simply put, their trainers are selected from beginning or lower intermediate applicants, and have not developed the advanced skills necessary to understand and implement the changes in training needed to accomplish their client’s individual goals. We have three WORLD CHAMPIONS on staff, and do advanced skill training daily.
• Their dogs are trained according to their chosen academic structure, and the recipient is supposed to adapt to the dog. Specific client personality, lifestyle, and mental concerns and needs are not addressed. If a client does not fall within the selective requirements for a dog, they are not even considered, regardless of their merit. We tailor our training for each K9 according to the person we are training for.
Others take their dogs as they come. They are raised in normal homes, and transferred for special training to the Academy of choice. These Academies evaluate each dog and only about 50% are accepted. They then teach them the needed behaviors to make them Assistance K9s and again, many to not pass. This at first sounds selective and professional. However, when you look at the overall picture you realize that it is a tremendous waste of time, effort, and dogs. The reason for this failure is that they are not professional enough to develop a way of working with a dog that naturally possess too much drive, too little focus, or too much temperament. We, in comparison, because of our education and experience, can alter all these things, and modify these dogs’ behaviors so that they will naturally behave exactly as we desire. We teach each dog to go in “training mode”, relax, focus, and perform. Through the process we modify hyper tension, raise the maturity level, and teach the dog to ignore all distractions, etc., naturally.
Through his research and experience as a Neuro Psychologist, Bob Taylor worked with leading Doctors in the fields of Psychology & Psychiatry, Biology, Physics, and Neurology for several years, to:
1. Create a way to inductively categorize both the brain and its many parts and processes, and the related glands and the Neuro/muscular system into an understandable comprehensive model.
2. Use this model to understand the specific biological processes used by each dog to receive, process, and create behavior.
3. We then created a working psychology, showing how the related thought process, the learning process, and the decision making process all work together.
4. We finally used this knowledge to develop methods that teach the dogs to be “brainwave” and body functioning sensitive.
We have further combined the talents and behaviors of a Police dog, Detection dog, Search & Rescue dog, Psychiatric dog, Assistance dog, Guide dog, and Therapy dog together, to produce dogs that contain all the abilities, behaviors, and performances of these combined fields in our K9s, who literally do phenomenal things for our recipients:}
• Our K9s come in all sizes, temperaments, and dispositions.
• We purchase only TOP QUALIFIED dog for training, to place with our recipients.
• Our trainers are Internationally recognized as Champions for the fields of Police, Detection, Search, Obedience, and Assistance K9 training.
• Our President is a multi-University Graduate with Degrees in the areas of Psychology, Philosophy, Biology, & Physics, a multi-national and world dog sports Champion, who has been the California Superior Court K9 Expert for 20 years, trained 1,000s of K9s for satisfied owners, and written 4 books on Canine Behavior & Training.
• The methods and structures we have created, designed, and developed for training are certified by world class Physicians such as Doctor David Kelso, The VICE PRESIDENT of the AMERICAN RED CROSS, who is also the F.E.M.A. Director for Disaster K9s for Northwestern United States.
• Our staff are professionally trained and certified to work with Assistance K9s in advanced, complicated levels training.
• Our Canines are carefully selected and trained with extreme sensitivity on an individual and customized basis and level, with lifetime guarantees for performance, for each client that retains us. As we have proven and you will find, there is literally no comparison between the quality and performance of the K9s we produce and that of other known schools.
• Our K-9s are carefully trained to achieve phenomenal results with a variety of handlers affected with a number of debilitating disabilities and developmental disabilities such as seizures, a variety of nervous disorders, a variety of mental disabilities, and several varieties of Autistic type disabilities.
The most intriguing characteristic found in this K-9 is that they have been trained to become sensitive to the biological workings of their handler to the point where they can see, smell, feel, and sense the correct and incorrect mental/neural responsiveness in their handler, often to the point of recognizing and compensating for their handler’s disabilities, and sometimes in doing so save their very lives. We have witnessed this exchange over a period of 10 years with great success. A natural dogs’ senses are much stronger and usable than ours and a dog that has been trained to focus those same senses to understand and communicate with their handler can detect and respond to needs that can mean the difference between life and death for that handler.
Our K-9s pick up and retrieve items and open doors, but are even more focused on assisting their handlers in being able to live normal lives, and in saving their handlers from the affects of their disabilities by paying attention to normal and abnormal brain and body functions, alerting the handler to potential disasters. I can take a blind person away from his guide dog and guide him around myself, but I can’t smell his blood, hear his body working and feel his body react to what his brain is feeding it, or be aware of how his nervous system is working. Our Psychiatric K-9s do. Their jobs and responsibilities are a far more serious and affect total mental health of their clients on a much more intense level than the normal K-9.
If you want a better dog, call USK9 at 866-875-9364.
Bob Taylor, President
