cost of service dog - Page 1

A local Tampa news channel recently broadcast a story about a local child whose parents along with donations finally managed to gather up enough money to buy her a service dog. The little girl has type 1 diabetes and the dog was needed to detect her glucose levels before theyt caused her to seizure. The dog was purchased from a "service dog training facility" somewhere in the south and cost these people $25,000.00. The dog is a black lab.

Does this sound right to you? They also said they must come back several times a year to "refresh" that dog's ability to do its job. Didn't say if there would be a charge for that or not.

Wow, not cheap. I wonder how would a trainer train a dog, any breed of dog, to detect critical change of glucose level in a human's blood. amazing indeed 

Good question, I was wondering that too.

The website for the business that sold the service dog to this child.

http://www.sdwr.org/contact-us/

Can Do Canines in MN only charges a $50 application fee for a Diabetes Assist Dog. It seems to me that this family was ripped off.

Ibrahim, I believe the dogs are trained to detect a change in scent that occurs as the person's blood sugar drops.

I think both the diabetic handler and the dog would need to be constantly refreshing with the providing organzations dog trainer.  I would assume that the dog would need to be trained to detect a blood sugar drop in one specific person, over a long period of time with 4,000 to 10,000 repetitions.  I think it would tough to train this skill synthetically or on another person, then have it work reliably for the actual end user of the dog.  I haven't been able to research the training methods of diabetes detection dogs yet, but based on what I know about other service dog training,such as allergen detection dogs, the end user would have to go to the training site for weeks or months prepping the dog with the site trainers and learning how to be a proper handler.

Here is an article where the recipients of one of these dogs and claims they can't do the job:
http://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/Diabetic-Alert-Dogs-Expensive-Pet-or-Service-Dog-265449251.html

I'm not so sure I believe all of the families claims, but I also think the provider of the dog needed to have a contract stating that the dog would need constant refreshing and long term one-on-one guidance on training the diabetic handler.  One of the owners even has the nerve to say "I can teach a dog basic obedience, sit, stand, stay, like you can, but when it comes to scent detection I have no experience with that".  So right off that bat, its safe to assume they don't know what they are talking about in regard to process of training service dogs.  Its looks like they thought the dog would be ready to go, out of the box.  I really don't see how that's possible and the organizations does make the following counter statement, "Sadly, all three clients did not complete the two-year training program, nor did they comply with contractual obligations," .  But, the owners do say the dog doesn't travel well and does poorly in environmental changes.  I can't believe that the trainer sold a dog like that.  It should have been exposed to the kinds of environments it would be serving in, by the training facility, long before it was placed in a home and should have been "washed out" of the program if it did not show immediate improvement over a short period of time.

Here is the 990 tax form for the non-profit Warren Retrievers, the organization had gross revenue of almost $550,000 in 2011, of which $255,000 was paid to the Independent contractor Warren Retrievers LLC:

http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990_pdf_archive/273/273778997/273778997_201112_990.pdf

Seems like a sweet deal to me, can I start one of these?

It looks like Warren is in trouble. http://fox43.com/2013/10/03/diabetes-service-dog-not-properly-trained-dissatisfied-in-virginia-based-company/

Low and high blood sugar have scents associated. 

My stud dog has reliably indicated on dangerous blood sugar levels since he was very young- around 4 months. No one taught him. However, no reason why any dog who showed detection aptitude in other ways couldn't learn it. Seizures are another story; there is not, to my knowledge, a reliable indicator that can be trained on. 

Another service venue that could be trained would be a hearing dog - am I right? One of my Cary daughter's female is a hearing assistance dog and I believe her owner trained her. 

Sadly, momos, you can easily get on board the Con Caravan if you could live with yourself doing so; there are plenty of people who are doing just that. Even better if you actually DO want to train assistance and alert dogs, but chances are you'll be living a pretty modest lifestyle, and you'll be putting more time and resources into the selection, acquisition, care for and training of those dogs than you'll ever see in the coffers, because it's not an inexpensive undertaking, and if you care enough to really do the job right, you probably won't feel right about charging the clients who need those dogs an amount that's really sufficient to compensate you for everything...and it's not a job you can do on your own, either, at least not to being able to put out any appreciable quantity of dogs on the streets and sidewalks.

A good number of people with assistance and alert dogs DO train their own animals, some entirely on their own, while others do so with the help of trainers who are either experienced, intuitively talented, or both. The service dogs for kids venue is shrinking, simply because of cases of large amounts being charged and the insufficiently-trained dogs and/or clients that have been made public in recent years; the new game is the service dog for military veterans, especially those for PTSD. In many instances, the dogs aren't really trained to do much more than be good companions, and that alone CAN be sufficient to assist some vets, depending on the degree of their illness and/or how it manifests in that particular person. Consequently, there are fewer public reports about vets getting taken advantage of by unscrupulous purveyors of so-called 'service dogs', especially when you factor in how likely a war vet is going to want to publicly announce that someone duped them though no fault of the veteran.

If there's money to be made with an animal, you can be sure that a disproportionate percentage of the people drawn to the trade will be schemers out to make a quick coin and then disappear before they reap any consequences.  Boy, I do love the human species in the abstract sense...