Most of the people I know who have service dogs feel the same way I do:
Accessibility needs to improve
Acceptance needs to improve
And people shouldn’t fake.
I’m lucky. I’m a skilled dog trainer who recognized that one of her dogs is affected by my blood sugar and with the help of an official trainer, I was able use that in a constructive way. I have had other beagles who were affected by my immediate health condition, BTW, so she isn’t unique.
I was going to have to return Dulce to her breeder if I couldn’t have gotten a handle on it. Because of a child in my classroom, I had got out of the habit of testing my blood sugar and was keeping it too high. This started in January, I got her in May and I have NEVER had a dog that was so difficult to live with. I noticed that the higher my blood sugar, the more hyperactive she was. When I got done with the school year and started normalizing my blood sugar she started calming down.
When I have normal blood sugar, she is your average, easy going beagle. If it goes down or up, it affects her. Down makes her anxious, up makes her hyperactive.
How did I know this? Well, I trained scent dogs for local police departments for almost 10 years, and it wasn’t hard to put together. Once I saw the pattern, I started logging it and there you go.
BTW, if you start noticing a pet in your household is reacting to your blood sugar, email me and we’ll figure out a way to make it useful. Besides it will make them much easier to live with.
For me, since I am an experienced dog trainer, the scent thing is a piece of cake. But as always, training people is the hard part.
I will tell you that it will slow you down, especially if it is a small, cute dog, breed to be a people pleaser (that would be Dulce and any other show dog). People have to stop and tell you how cute she is (yes, and I have a cuter one that doesn’t care what my blood sugar is). They have to tell me about the beagle they had as a child (nice, but I’m on my 8th).
They have to ask if she really is a beagle, and is she really 4 years old, she looks like a puppy.
The ones I do like are the ones who ask, with baited breath, is she a diabetes alert dog. Those are the people who heard about them, had seen one and needs to know where to get one because of a relative, friend, or worse yet, an immediate family member.
It’s worse now that I allow Dulce to visit – when I taught school we couldn’t at work – but people are thrilled to death to pet her, especially at my doctor’s office.
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