Most of the people I know who have service dogs feel the same way I do:<\/p>\n
\nAccessibility needs to improve<\/font><\/p>\n
Acceptance needs to improve<\/font><\/p>\n
And people shouldn\u2019t fake.<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I\u2019m lucky. I\u2019m 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\u2019t unique.<\/p>\n
I was going to have to return Dulce to her breeder if I couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
How did I know this? Well, I trained scent dogs for local police departments for almost 10 years, and it wasn\u2019t hard to put together. Once I saw the pattern, I started logging it and there you go.<\/p>\n
BTW, if you start noticing a pet in your household is reacting to your blood sugar, email me and we\u2019ll figure out a way to make it useful. Besides it will make them much easier to live with.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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\u2019t care what my blood sugar is). They have to tell me about the beagle they had as a child (nice, but I\u2019m on my 8th). <\/p>\n
They have to ask if she really is a beagle, and is she really 4 years old, she looks like a puppy.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s worse now that I allow Dulce to visit \u2013 when I taught school we couldn\u2019t at work \u2013 but people are thrilled to death to pet her, especially at my doctor\u2019s office.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019t fake. I\u2019m lucky. I\u2019m a skilled dog trainer who recognized that one of her dogs is affected by my blood sugar and with the help of an official […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/diabetes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}