To the dogs!

Week One, Day 1 and Day 2
Settling in, learning the lay of the land and getting started

Dog Camp this week is a combination of classroom lectures and practical exercises with take home quizzes. CCI volunteers arrive in the mid-morning as busy bees in the communal kitchen preparing delightful lunch salads, entrees and desserts. The volunteers are CCI "puppy raisers" who raise and socialize their assignments for eighteen months. Then the dogs are turned over to CCI kennels for training, which takes 6 - 9 months. About 60% of the dogs make it all the way through to becoming a certified Service Dog.

Day 1 classes were Orientation to Team Training, Orientation to the Canine, Correction, Command Introduction, and Kids & Dogs.

There was a lot of information but the bottom line: Dogs are emotional, reactive pack animals. We must be the Pack Leader, handle our emotions, be at-the-ready to praise, correct and react to their reactions to distractions. Yikes, this will be real skill building work.

After the lectures, Day 1 practices began with working with a fake dog - actually, a rolled up rug dubbed Carpet Dog. A trainer held and moved Carpet Dog as the student worked with it. Commands were Sit, Down, Let's Go and Don't. Don't is the correction word used when the dog doesn't do as commanded. It's accompanied by a swift pull of the leash that snaps the collar. While Carpet Dog responded correctly most of the time, there were times he ignored commands and we had to correct him.

Then it was time to practice with real dogs, the dogs to be assigned to us. That was quite a different experience. Most of us weren't as assertive snapping the leash with the word Don't because we didn't want to hurt the dogs. And, we were stupefied on the occasions when the dogs continued to ignore commands and corrections. We just looked at the trainer wondering "now what do we do?" Keep practicing, of course, and build up the confidence.

Day 2 was spent doing practical exercises including a tour inside the facility and outside around the building. We practiced Day 1 commands and learned more commands, practicing first with Carpet Dog. These were heel (sit at the left side), side (sit at the right side) and release (telling the dog he has some time off to just be a dog). Most of us still had to work on getting the dogs to respond timely and appropriately. We have a long way to go!

At the end of Day 2 after having handled about 6 different dogs over the two days, we wrote down the names of the three dogs we were most interested in. The trainers have their opinions based on our written applications and phone and in-person interviews as well as observing us. We'll get a pre-match tomorrow and begin working with "our" dogs. The trainers said sometimes adjustments need to made but generally, the pre-matches work out.

Everyone's nervous as we've all handled some dogs that felt "good" and some that didn't feel very "right". The trainers cautioned us not to pre-judge matches because we've had limited time with the dogs and circumstances are abnormal so nobody is at their best - dogs or humans.

Life outside of training

Dinner each day is on our own as well as breakfast, so most people went out to the nearest grocery store the first evening to stock up. The community kitchen is huge with lots of refrigerator and freezer space and plenty of kitchen appliances and tools.

The first two nights I enjoyed home cooked dinners with a nice group including (in the photo from the left) Melanie, her mom and Patrick. Melanie is an adorable, 11 year old dynamo in her wheelchair who is one of the nation's youngest sit skiers as well as rides horses! At the age of just 18 months, a virus attacked her spinal cord and left her paraplegic. Patrick, another baby-boomer like myself, has trouble walking due to surgery on a spinal cord tumor that took away the tumor but damaged nerves involved in walking.

Now it's time to do some laundry and complete today's take-home quiz! Wish me well on my Match tomorrow.