For three years I have had an assistance dog who helps me in my daily life: Sophie. Sophie is very important to me; it is hard to put that into words. She is my assistance dog, but she is so much more than that. Because she is with me 24 hours a day, and goes everywhere with me, I notice that there is still a lot of ignorance, ignorance and confusion about the concept of assistance dog: what is an assistance dog? What does an assistance dog do? Is there a difference between an assistance dog, assistance dog and a guide dog? Why does a person need an assistance dog?
Different terms are used: assistance dog, guide dog and assistance dog. What they all have in common is that the dog provides support to someone who needs help. There are several organizations active in the Netherlands that train and/or offer dogs for support to people with disabilities. And each organization makes a choice in what term they use and how they interpret the term. They do this by explaining what the dogs they train do and for which target group(s) the dogs are used.
There is no single official, uniform term. And that sometimes makes it complicated. If there would be one fixed term used, it would contribute to more clarity and familiarity with the subject. I use the term assistance dog because this is the term used by the foundation from which I got Sophie.
Assistance dogs are trained to help people with disabilities in everyday life. People are mostly familiar with visible disabilities, such as blindness or a physical disability that makes someone wheelchair-dependent. That there are also invisible disabilities that can hinder someone is much less known and accepted.
When I walk down the street with Sophie, I am often addressed with questions like: Are you training the dog? What is the dog going to do next: guide a blind person? It will be difficult if you have to hand the dog over again, won't it? When I tell them it is my own assistance dog, because I am not visually impaired, they look at me strangely: sometimes in disbelief, sometimes apologetically.
Assistance dogs come in a variety of shapes and sizes (literally). The most, or actually usually only, known types are guide dogs for the blind and assistance dogs for people with physical disabilities: the ADL dog. The latter assists a person in the operation of All Daily Living activities, such as taking laundry out of the washing machine, opening closet doors, pressing the doorbell.
But you can teach a dog so much more. For example, there is the seizure or epilepsy dog: it senses when someone is having an epileptic seizure and then warns the person ahead of time. You have the so-called diabetes assistance dog that can notice changing body odor. This is essential in someone who has diabetes because it can indicate a hypo: this is a too low blood glucose level that can cause severe physical reactions. Then there is the signal dog: it helps a deaf or hard of hearing person to "hear" sounds such as, for example, the doorbell, alarm clock, telephone or a fire alarm by touching it and indicating the direction from which the sound is coming.
There are dogs that are specially trained for an individual, specific, medical condition a person has, such as a heart condition or brain condition.
And you have the psychic assistance dog: it is trained to recognize the signals associated with the mental impairment and the dog can then respond accordingly; for example, by physically protecting the person, making the person alert, taking them out of their "moment" (fear/panic attack), reducing pain. In my case it is PTSD, but it could also be an eating disorder, anxiety and/or panic disorder, autism or other mental impairment.
Would you like an assistance dog, but have no idea if you qualify? My tip is to first research which assistance organization focuses on your issue and take further steps from there. Good luck!
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