Q. What about dogs that help with chronic illness or disorders? A. Dogs have the ability to recognize odors that are so faint that they’re in parts per tril- lion. Someone once explained it in visual terms: Let’s say what we could see from a third of a mile away, a dog would be able to smell with equal clarity from 3,000 miles away. It’s stunning. It’s not difficult for them. They recognize all kinds of changes that
happen in our body. There is a change in the volatile organic compounds released through our skin and sweat and exhalation. Once dogs begin to associate a particular smell with the particular problem, they of- ten spontaneously begin to alert people to oncoming issues. And we can teach them to do it. That’s easy.
Q. How do you teach them? A. What you need is a dog who feels safe enough to say something. That’s why we don’t train dogs anymore. I know that sounds nuts, but we don’t train. We educate. We don’t worry about sit down, or stay.
We teach them to answer binary ques- tions: Yes, no. Or we teach them to reason through things so that they can come up with solutions on their own. We call this the Bond-Based Approach.
I’ve done this for 30 years, and since we’ve gone Bond-Based, I’ve been astonished. We have dogs who can pick out the letters in their name in order from letters spread on the ground. When I was young, all this dog training
stuff was not very common. Our dog was just always a member of our family, and he or she learned what they needed to know in order to fit into the family. You didn’t go to classes and teach them things. They just learned what they needed to know. I think that in becoming so fixated on
this weird idea of obedience we’ve done a disservice to our dogs and to ourselves. We got so focused on telling them what to do that we stopped asking. And it’s only when we ask that they can show us the true range of what they’re capable of.
Q. What about teaching them to be service dogs? A. If we tell them that if they do this, they get food, they get frightened, because we
Cheeto learns to differentiate positive and negative COVID-19 samples.
control everything that keeps them alive. They become focused only on what do I have to do to make this person like me enough to feed me. They can’t learn; they won’t do new things. They won’t tell you, I think a sei- zure is oncoming. Because what if they’re wrong? You might be upset with them and not feed them. So we never withhold food pending the dog somehow pleasing us. Those things are free. You get them because you breathe and because you are my friend. It’s been pretty amazing, the changes we’ve seen in the dogs.
Q. Can you talk a bit about how dogs help in crisis situations? A. We just need them so badly. Have you ever noticed how every time something ter- rible goes wrong in our world, from 9/11 to COVID, we turn to the dogs? They’ve been our partners for so long.
We tell dogs things that we don’t tell other
people. You know how people say dogs are nonjudgmental? I have to tell you, I don’t think that’s true. I think dogs are extremely judgmental. They simply judge based on what’s truly important. Are you good? Are you kind? We had one man who hadn’t said a word
in three years, since he had begun to have memory problems, come out here and sit with a puppy. And he told her everything. His speech was a little confusing at times, and the dog was perfectly fine with that, which encouraged him to continue. I think the more afraid we get, the more
we need that interaction. It is God mani- fested in a way, I think; the feeling that no matter what, it’s going to be okay. I don’t know how we got lucky enough to have this completely different species sign up to partner with us, but we did.
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