Working with Service Dog Owner-Trainers – Clients
Are you getting calls from clients asking for help training their own service dog? Are you wondering whether to take these cases or refer them out? Working with service dog owner-trainers can be both challenging and rewarding.
From the initial inquiry, to consults, lessons, and a long-term training relationship, working with service dog owner trainers (OTs) can have significant differences from working with pet dog clients. Quite apart from dog-training expertise, OT cases may require us to navigate tricky legal, business, human health, psychological, and community considerations. Pet dog trainers may find this work rewarding, challenging, overwhelming, confusing, or distasteful. Trainers who take on service dog clients without adequate preparation may cause unintentional psychological or physical harm to the client team or damage to their business. This presentation will address some of these differences and help you decide whether this work appeals to you.
Speaker: Sharon Wachsler, CPDT-KA, KPA-CTP and Barbara Handelman, M.Ed., LCMHC, CDBC, (Moderator)
Access to the recording is for 32 days.
This presentation will address trainer questions such as:
- Should I offer pre-adoption consulting and assessment to help clients find candidate dogs?
- How do high levels of chronic stress/distress in the client’s life affect the dog-client-trainer relationship and approach?
- Should I modify lesson, package, and billing structure to provide OTs additional support?
- How do SDiT training standards differ from pet standards in terms of choosing behaviors or level of handler skill or reliability?
- How familiar and comfortable do I need to be with mental and physical disabilities? What is disability culture and etiquette? How do I help clients choose assistance tasks?
- Am I ready to cope with more “high-maintenance” clients? Am I prepared to set up progress meetings, meetings with client’s healthcare providers, or offer support between lessons and work with clients on a weekly basis for years?
- How should I adapt training equipment and methodologies for the handler’s disabilities?
- How should I prepare to address topics like career change (“washout”), rehoming, and/or retirement?
We’ll also address common trainer questions such as:
- How do you know if the client is truly disabled and needs a service dog?
- How do you proceed when the dog needs training but is an inappropriate SDiT prospect?
- Is there a way to work with clients whose physical or mental disabilities pose barriers to your usual training instructions or methods?
- When and how to turn away a client or refer them to another trainer?
By the end of this workshop, participants will have a better sense of what working with service-dog owner-trainers may require of them, whether they are interested in delving into this specialty, and if so, how to choose which cases to take, and how to refer cases that are not a good fit.
Cost: $25.00 USD
CEU’s Available:
2 IAABC CEU’s
2 CCPDT CEU’s
2 ABCDT-L2 CEU’s
2 NADOI CEU’s
2 PPAB/PPG