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Chase Wienenga, 6, doesn't walk - he runs, from a snow-white dog with a wagging tail to a chocolate-brown dog that sits patiently while Chase pets him.  Before his mom, Heather, can catch up, he's already dashing off to another dog.  "I want this one," Chase says about every dog he sees.

But for trainer Bob Taylor, President of United States K-9 Academy based in Phelan, there is just one dog for Chase, although he doesn't know which one yet.  "Chase is here for us to meet him, to evaluate him," Taylor says. "We want to see him, what he's like, what his personality is like. I don't really know what kind of dog is right for him until I get to know him better."

Taylor approaches his work intuitively - and so do his dogs. They're trained to know what their handler is thinking and feeling sometimes before the handler knows it.  They're seizure dogs - they can sense and even smell the onset of a human's seizure up to six hours before it happens.

"When the dog detects seizures ahead of time, the person can take medicine to stop the seizure. They can stop, sit down and relax. ... It takes them out of the dan- ger zone," Taylor says.

Chase's first seizure happened when he was 3. Within a short amount of time, he was suffering from as many as 100 seizures a day.  Doctors still haven't figured out what exactly is wrong with Chase, an Apple Valley boy whose case has became well-known in medical circles internationally.  Although they have gotten the seizures under control with a variety of medical treatments, Chase is not completely out of the woods.

He's autistic, which presents its own set of challenges.

"We have a chain on the door," Heather says, "but he's learned how to open the windows.  "He has no impulse control, so he'll run out into street without even looking."  That's where a dog could come in handy - alerting others when Chase runs off, helping to locate him when he's missing and helping him find his way home.

Bob Taylor was already a skilled dog breeder and trainer when, 10 years ago, some friends with autistic children asked him for help. They were fighting with the school district and having difficulty getting the kids interested in learning.  Taylor began to work with the children and provide them assistance dogs that would help the kids calm down and develop social skills. One of the kids is now a student at Victor Valley College.  Since then, Taylor has focused his work on serving autistic families.

A former policeman with training in psychology, Taylor has developed what he says is an entirely unique way to train dogs.  Unlike other assistance dogs, which are trained to respond to commands, Taylor's dogs must be trained to a higher level of intelligence because their autistic handlers may not be able to give hand signals or verbal commands.

Taylor says his dogs can sense changes in people's brainwaves.  While that might sound like New Age hokum, it is also true that dogs can hear and smell at vastly superior levels to humans.  Detecting a change in thought patterns, Taylor says, can project sounds and smells detectable by dogs trained to be sensitive to them.  "The dogs learn to focus on you, and over a period of time, no matter what the distraction, they focus on you," Taylor says. "Pretty soon they start feeling and smelling what you're projecting out."

Autistic children are hypersensitive. They don't like bright lights or loud sounds, so their brain shuts down when they become overloaded. The dogs learn to start responding to the change in thought patterns even before they're given a signal.

Each U.S.-K-9 dog is given skills in police work, search and rescue, seizure alert and psychiatric service assistance - a complete package that does not come cheap. Each dog costs $40,000.  As a result, U.S.-K-9 has a parallel foundation, The DOGWISH Foundation that raises money for families like the Wienenga’s.