For many people, man’s best friend serves an invaluable role. Service dogs allow many to live their lives to the fullest, but the dogs aren’t born ready to work, many hours are put into preparing dogs for duty. “We start out with our normal, typical routine. We go out side, we eat breakfast we go […]
Service dogs include dogs for mobility, vision, hearing, developmental disabilities, diabetic alert, seizure alert, and psychiatric support. They are trained to “provide work or perform tasks related to an individual’s disability.” When accompanied by a service dog, the individual with a disability is afforded some public access protections (Parenti, Foreman, Meade, & Wirth, 2013). Current […]
With the increasing demand for assistance dogs by individuals with physical and/or psychiatric disabilities (Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability in State and Local Government Services, 2010), rapid growth is expected in the number of provider organizations that acquire, breed, train, and place dogs with individuals with disabilities. Unfortunately, there is a lack of information […]
The use of animals in various assistive, therapeutic, and emotional support roles has contributed to the uncoordinated expansion of labels used to distinguish these animals. To address the inconsistent vocabulary and confusion, this article proposes a concise taxonomy for classifying assistance animals. Several factors were identified to differentiate categories, including (1) whether the animal performs […]
Man’s best friend may also be a veteran’s best therapy. Faced statistics from a 2011 report on the needs of veterans returning to the labor force that showed a higher-than-average unemployment rate and a threefold increase in post-traumatic stress disorder over the last decade, a team of West Virginia Universityresearchers and an area non-profit are […]