I know the basics for trianing therapy dogs, but i was wondering how you migh train a dog specifically to help people with adhd.
what could a dog to to calm a person down or remind them to stay on task or even remind them to take a medication? how could you train a dog to do tasks needed for an ADHD therapy dog and what would some of the needed tasks be ?
A therapy dog is nothing like a service dog. The difference in training alone is the difference between 8 weeks and 18-24 MONTHS. So being prepared to train a therapy dog in no way qualifies you to train a service dog,
Calming a person down is not a function of a service dog. "Animals whose sole function is to provide emotional support, comfort, therapy, companionship, therapeutic benefits, or to promote emotional well-being are not service animals." US Department of Justice.
If you need to remember to take medication, you use a timer such as a MedPort
http://www.amazon.com/pill-MEDglider-Ala ... There are significant drawbacks to expecting a dog to remind you to take necessary medication, in part their inability to keep exact time, and their general unreliability. When it comes to retrieving a dropped item, remembering what to do 9 times out of 10 is perfectly acceptable. That's not the case with medication. A dog will never be as reliable as a timer for this job. Also remember that in the case of retrieving, the owner is sitting there coaching the dog to do it, not expecting the dog to remember it on their own, which means reliability is even lower.
pets question and answers,www.5d2d.com I think you've gone about this backwards. It looks rather like you've thought you'd like a service dog and hunted around and found some list of tasks and figured some that might be useful. What you need to have done instead is to make yourself a list of the things you cannot do for yourself because of your disability, and then brain storm with your medical care providers about how best to get those things done. Usually a service dog isn't the best answer. But if you look at it backwards, trying to find a way to justify making a pet a service dog, it's easy to get trapped into picking nifty tricks and thinking they are tasks.
As Nekked pointed out, a medication reminder wouldn't qualify as a task unless it was something you were unable to do for yourself using ordinary means. Most people simply use a timer.
Eh what?
You mean you want to try to pass of a dog as a "service dog" for someone with ADHD? ADHD is only a learning disability .. its not a disablility defined by the ADA .. it does not affect daily life activities. No need for a "therapy dog"
pets question and answers,www.5d2d.com
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so you get a stopwatch set to go off and remind you to take medication. You wouldnt qualify for a service dog just because you forget to take medication that helps you to focus.
