Medical Assist Dogs
Service Dogs Medical Alert Dogs
Classes and Coaching
We offer classes and coaching with lifetime support
Finding a service dog trainer can be difficult. Many trainers teach obedience in public venues and call that service dog training without realizing how different service dog training is from basic obedience or sport training.
Our goal is to give you and your dog the skills needed to handle public access, even when bad things happen, confrontations, or a fake service dog. Our course goes beyond, to teach wellness and coping techniques so that your dog can work for many years, and to prepare your dog so it doesn’t become stressed/anxious/fearful when in public.
Any trainer can teach you the skills needed to maneuver in public. They can teach your dog good manners and polite behavior.
We also teach these, but we teach your dog to ‘work’ with you. Our graduates can maneuver through crowds without leash, verbal, or hand signal cues.
We will teach your dog to ‘shut down’ and go to sleep when you stop, without cues or prompting.
We will teach your dog to ‘turn away’ from confrontations, and ignore stressors.
Our skills also include non typical skills, like finding your car in a parking lot, finding you, barking for help, entering/exiting a car safely in a high traffic area, and advanced distraction training.
We follow a professional public access test of designed to test both behaviors and skills. Your dog will learn the same techniques that our own service dogs learn.
A public access test is not required by law, in Ontario. It does make life easier for handler and dog teams. It provides the confidence to know that you, and your dog, are prepared to handle any situation.
Our public access test follows the same guidelines as service dog organizations. Most organizations require the handler to be with the organization 10 days. Our PAT test requires at least 5 days, a minimum of 4 hours a day, in a high activity area. Each day is in a different environment. For our students.
If you are not one of our students then you will need to be with us for 10 days, a minimum of 6 hours a day.
We arePsychiatric Service Dog Specialists, PTSD, Austism, Anxiety/Depression, and Self Harm.
We are also trained to help with the following: hearing dogs, support dogs, and mobility dogs.
We teach tasks designed to mitigate disabilities, provide help for primary care givers,
We will, under certain circumstances train alert and Guide dogs. While we have the experience, this is not our first focus and therefore, we will first recommend you to specialists in those fields.
Certify or Register dogs as ‘official’ service dogs. There are no current registration or certification boards in Canada. We do meet the standards of the Canadian Association of Service Dog Trainers.
We do not train dogs that have a bite history, are dog reactive, or cannot remain calm in public.
We do not provide public access training for handlers who have not obtained a doctor’s note that states a dog is ‘required’.
We do not do ‘one time’ assessments.
Why Take a PAT Test?
Certification is not needed, so why take a PAT test? The answer is simple, because it will make your life easier. You will have the score, and our letter of completion to show when people ask questions.
You also have proof that your dog passed both the skill and behavior test. This can come in handy when in a confrontational situation.
