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The Gift of Independence
Copyright 1997 by Gary Wilkes
One day, a hearing impaired friend asked Mike Sapp if he had ever known of a dog being
trained to assist a deaf person. At the time, it didnt seem like a particularly
momentous occasion, but it was destined to change Mikes life.
Today, almost 20 years and hundreds of service and hearing dogs later, Mike
is the CEO and founder of “Paws With a Cause®”, in Wayland, Michigan—the largest
assistance dog school in the world—and probably the best.
In the mid 1970s, few people knew that dogs could
do more than be guide dogs for the blind. When Mike got started, it wasnt entirely
like inventing the wheel a handful of dogs had been trained to do hearing work and
several people were beginning to experiment with assistance dogs to help physically
challenged people. The process of learning how to teach dogs to provide needed assistance
was a constantly evolving process. To start, Mike had to ask himself, What should a
hearing dog know how to do? People with the ability to hear have a
difficult time understanding what it is like to be unable to hear or distinguish common
sounds. The essence of the problem was to identify which everyday sounds should be
recognized by the dog and what the dog should do when it heard those sounds. With a little
thought it is easy to enumerate the things a hearing dog should be able to
recognize. First, a doorbell, second, a knock on the door, third, a ringing telephone and
fourth, a smoke alarm. Mike knew a deaf woman whose house had been robbed while she
sleptshe had been unable to hear the intruders. If the dog could alert the owner to
a break-in, it would also be beneficial. That meant teaching a fifth set of
sounds & a fifth behavior. So, the dogs must know at least five sounds and
corresponding behaviors that would help the owner in each separate case. Now he had to
choose the behaviors. The dogs correct response to the door and the
telephone were fairly simple to figure out. The dog hears the sound, gets the
persons attention and then leads him back to the source of the sound. But what about
the smoke alarm? If the fire is in the direction of the alarm, the dog would inadvertently
take the person into danger. OK, that means that the proper response to a smoke alarm is
to get the owners attention and then lead him to the nearest exit. So how about an
intruder? Does the dog take the owner to the burglar, or does the dog lead the owner out
of the house? Maybe a non-hearing Rambo-type would prefer for the dog to bring his
baseball bat rather than skeedaddle out the back door. The fact that service dogs couldnt be trained
identically and still give the clients the best quality of service became apparent. Mike
had to make a decision. He could train more dogs if they were all trained the same. The
problem was that no two people are identical in their disabilities or in their lifestyles.
To maintain the ideal of providing real independence to their clients, Paws with a Cause®
decided that each client should have some choice over the behaviors his or her dog would
know. As the organization expanded its services to include dogs that could pull wheel
chairs, open doors and detect the onset of epileptic seizures, the commitment to
personalized training remained. Each client is video taped and interviewed so the PAWS®
trainers can provide a dog that offers a wide variety of general assistance and specific
behaviors that are tailored to the client. Living with a disability can be a seemingly endless
struggle to perform even the simplest of tasks. For most people, dropping a pen is an
inconsequential event. When you are seated in a powered wheel chair, with limited
mobility, the pen may actually be out of your reach. For a quadriplegic, a heavy
commercial door might as well be locked if there is no one there to open it. For the deaf
person the sound of a welcome guests knock on the door may go unnoticed. Being
forced to constantly ask for assistance of others can easily lead to a life of complete
dependence. For the last 20 years, Mike Sapp and the staff at
Paws with a Cause® have worked to train
dogs to do things like pick up pens, open heavy doors and respond to a knock on the door.
When they train a dog to assist in the mundane tasks of daily living, they know they are
creating a far more precious gift than a highly trained dogthey offer true
independence to people with disabilities. By living up to their simple motto, they have
improved the lives of hundreds of peopleWith a Paws® dog, disability does not
mean inability.
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