The hunt is hosted every Good Friday and in nine Canadian cities: Barrie, Brampton, Calgary, Guelph, Kitchener, London, Oakville, St. Catharines, and Windsor.

Help us exceed last year’s total of $100,000 raised. Select the location nearest you to register and start fundraising today!
Barrie, Brampton, Calgary, Guelph, Kitchener, London, Oakville, St. Catharines, Windsor

Visit our Easter Egg Hunt page for more information.

We start off with our volunteers that assist us with whelping (puppy birth). These people have a female dog in their home and go through the entire pregnancy and everything that goes along with it. Then, after about 8 weeks, the puppies are born and the real fun begins. These puppies often require around the clock care. The puppies remain in the Breeder Caretaker’s home for eight weeks after birth.

Next up are the Puppy Raisers. They receive their puppies at 8 weeks old and live with them until they are recalled for Advanced Training at our facility. This means the puppy raisers go through the not-so-fun part of a dogs life (for their owners at least!) They go through the housetraining, the chewed shoes, the accidents in public, the adolescent rebellious stage and everything else that goes along. Then, just at the point when their dogs are becoming angels, they are brought into Advanced Training. Many of our Puppy Raisers begin all over again – raising a new puppy at 8 weeks and continuing the cycle. Some of our Puppy Raisers have raised close to 10 dogs!

Once the dogs come into Advanced Training they also require some volunteer help. Every night, a team comes out to the kennel and walks, grooms and “read and relaxes” our dogs. This is a vital part of training and is essential to ensuring our dogs are comfortable around people. On the weekends, our dogs go out to volunteer homes to rest and relax. These volunteers come and pick up a dog on Friday afternoon and bring them back Sunday nights. They give them some love and lots of sleep and send them back ready for another week of intense training. They also allow us to see how the dogs do in a home environment, something that will be very important to their future companions!

We can’t forget about those that help us with the maintenance and administration of our organization. From cutting the grass to putting up news sheds to planting our beautiful garden, from folding pamphlets to stuffing donation envelopes to helping with our events a bookkeeping, we really couldn’t do it without them. They help our day to day operations run smoother and free up some time for us to do what’s most important: training dogs to go to deserving kids who need them and raising the money to do just that (and of course everything else that goes along with it!)

So we’d like to take this time to thank each and every one of our volunteers. We wouldn’t be able to do it without you! You make our lives a thousand times easier and it is thanks to you that we have found so much success over the past 16 years. THANK YOU FOR ALL YOU DO!

And thank you for reading our Dog Blog this week! We hope you’ve learned a lot about ADI, NSD and our dogs!

The PAT tests skills such as remaining calm when greeted by a stranger, remaining in a down stay while being approached by a shopping cart, ignoring dropped food and remaining in a heel position while walking. Each service dog team places completes this test annually for the first 3 years of their working life and then every 3 years following until retirement. The skills on the PAT represent a minimum; NSD strives to far exceed the expectations by the time the dog is placed with a child with autism. A sample of the PAT can be found on the ADI website.

The ability to pass the PAT is not the sole determination of whether the dog will be put to work. All of our dogs are evaluated for health, personality and temperament throughout their training process. The PAT ensures that everything the dog has learned can be put into practice.

Tomorrow we’ll be doing a special blog recognizing all the important people that help us fulfill our mission. We can’t thank them enough!

Although the roles of assistance dogs have evolved quite a bit, the laws and people’s perceptions have been slow to follow. For instance, although National Service Dogs has been training and placing dogs for over 15 years, our Certified Service Dog Program is still seen as a new program by government standards and is not recognized in a lot of the legislation.

All assistance dogs placed by member organizations of Assistance Dogs International must pass a standardized test for public access, called the Public Access Test (PAT). By passing the PAT administered by a staff member of an accredited assistance dog organization, assistance dogs are granted access to public places like shopping malls, restaurants, movie theaters, grocery stores, and public pools – more about this in tomorrow’s blog post!

It is unlawful to discriminate against an individual accompanied by a certified assistance dog. Assistance dogs are always the exception to a “no pets” policy and are free to accompany their handler anywhere the public is customarily admitted.

Tomorrow we’ll be talking about the standards required for assistance dogs to gain and maintain public access. Come back and read us again!

Guide Dogs are used by individuals with visual impairments. They help their handler by avoiding obstacles, navigating steps and curbs, and avoiding traffic and dangerous situations. Guide dogs wear a special harness that has a raised handle on it which provides an outlet for communication of the dog’s body movement and provides the actual guiding. Larger breed dogs are used in order to allow the handle to comfortably reach the handler. Guide dogs must be extremely obedient and highly focused on their handler.

Hearing dogs are used by individuals with hearing impairments. They are trained to alert to different sounds including but not limited to the phone ringing, smoke alarms, the doorbell, name calls and much more! They are trained with hand commands so high focus is a must. There are relatively few breed restrictions on these dogs; any size will do! Hearing dogs wear orange, either on their vest or leash.

Service dogs for individuals with disabilities other than those related to vision or hearing. Autism service, seizure alert, diabetic response, mobility assistance, and mental health dogs are all common. These dogs are trained in a variety of ways to complete the tasks specific to their handler. The breed and temperament is matched to what is required of them.

For more information on assistance dogs, please see the ADI website at www.assistancedogsinternational.org/aboutAssistanceDogs.php.

All of these dogs must meet the standards that ADI sets out for public access. Come read on Thursday to find out what this entails! Tomorrow we will be discussing the laws surrounding public access for assistance dogs and their handlers.

Accreditation by ADI ensures proper procedures are followed by everyone involved in the accredited organizations. Members of ADI meet regularly to share ideas, attend seminars, and conduct business regarding such things as educating the public about Assistance Dogs and the legal rights of individuals with disabilities partnered with them, setting standards and establishing guidelines and ethics for the training of these dogs, and improving the utilization and bonding of each team.

National Service Dogs has been a member of ADI since 2000 and has been fully accredited since 2008. This means our dogs meet or exceed the strict standards set out by ADI, ensuring they are ready and prepared for a life of service. They are tested regularly to ensure these standards are being upheld. ADI also stipulates that dogs are provided to approved families free of charge, without the obligation of having to fundraise.

This week is International Assistance Dog Week. The aim of this celebration is to improve the awareness of assistance dogs, honor puppy raisers, trainers and the dogs themselves. To celebrate, we will be going over many topics related to ADI and assistance dogs, including the many different types of assistance dogs, accessibility laws, and the standards dogs must maintain to be certified for public access. We look forward to sharing all of this information with you.

For local events celebrating International Assistance Dog Week, visit www.assistancedogweek.org.

Tomorrow we’ll be discussing the many different types of assistance dogs and what they do. Stay tuned!

For more information on IADW, visit www.assistancedogweek.org.

So for the steps example, you would click when your dog looks towards the step. Once he’s consistently looking towards the step after receiving his reward, you would raise your “criteria”. This would mean that he only gets a click and a treat for the next increment, which would probably be walking towards the step. You would progress in these small increments until you reach the desired behaviour.

This training is invaluable as it engages your dog’s mind. He has to think about what you want from him since you aren’t telling him – just rewarding him when he gets it right! The trick to shaping is making your chunks as small as possible and increasing your criteria slowly so your dog can understand what you want from him.

For lots of good tips on shaping and clicker training, check out Karen Pryor’s website and watch this video of her shaping a dog to blow bubbles in a bowl of water. Notice her criteria progresses quite slowly. Also note that the dog in the video had prior experience with clicker training and knew that the click marked desired behaviour – it won’t be this easy right off the bat! With a little time and patience, soon you can have your dog completing tasks you never thought possible!

Clicker training is used by more than just dog trainers. It is often used in research and in exotic animal work. In non-traditional settings the type of clicker used can be matched to best suit the situation. For example, dolphin trainers use a whistle to denote good behavior because the sound of a whistle travels better through water than a normal click or marker word. Clickers also do not have to be an auditory signal; any sensory stimulus (such as lights, smells, physical touch) is a candidate for being used in clicker training. Clicker training is often used in zoos to teach controlled movements between pens and improve safety during handling for health checks and other close human-animal interaction.

Karen Pryor is a well-known expert of clicker training. Her methods have been used by many and her website is a fantastic resource if you are looking for tips on how to start training with a clicker or on how to better improve your clicker techniques! Here she is demonstrating her abilities with an unlikely subject and a non-traditional clicker.

Clicker training can be used in close conjunction with other strategic training techniques such as shaping to create more complicated behaviors. Stay tuned until our next training blog when we discuss shaping and how it can be used to teach your dog everything you’ve ever wanted it to know!