From our trainer extraordinaire, Brenda, who was meeting with our current client, Rowena. Rowena, also a dear, dear friend, has Multiple Sclerosis that is getting worse, and her current Service Dog that trainer Laurie trained through the PAT, “Blessed”, was just too big for her to be able to handle anymore. She loved Blessed so very much, and Blessed loved her, but Rowena knew that Blessed would be better suited for someone else who had the mobility capacity to use a larger dog.
Brenda was working with a new client, Noelle who, with her parents, fell in love with Blessed’s description on our website. Brenda writes:
“I met up with Noelle, her parents, Rowena, and Anthony (Rowena’s husband and also our client) for a meet and greet with Blessed. Rowena told them all about Blessed’s temperament, personality, and what she could do. Noelle and Blessed hit it off right away – and once Blessed sat down next to Noelle, Blessed never really left her side! It was like Blessed just knew what was going on and was telling us that she was ok with it! I had Noelle give Blessed some commands to see how she would respond to her, and Blessed did all that was asked of her without any hesitation. Blessed’s former trainer, Laurie, had just done a “refresher” course on all the PAT commands with Blessed, and knew she still was perfect. Noelle’s family had brought their little dog Lucy to make sure that the two dogs would get along, and they did, so that just sealed the deal. Rowena didn’t want a long, painful parting, so she passed the leash to Noelle, and with that, Blessed became Noelle’s Hazel.
Since now “Hazel” has already passed the PAT as mentioned above, she just needs to get used to Noelle being her new handler, and Noelle needs to learn how to apply the commands. She had already been working on “sit” with her. Noelle wants to be able to bring Hazel to school ASAP, and Hazel will of course need to mind her manners there – so we were working on “down” and “stay”. Then, we added some distractions in for Hazel to ignore, “leave it”, and getting her attention back on Noelle if she went to investigate the distraction.”