Ophelia And Her Assistant Puppy Raisers

Posted on | February 18, 2010 | No Comments

I said I wasn’t gonna turn this into a puppy raising blog – honestly, I’m not, but can’t resist sharing a picture of Ophelia with her ‘Assistant Puppy Raisers’ Zephan and Bannon.

Canine Companions for Independence Puppy-in-Program Ophelia IV

I really can’t imagine raising a puppy without having help from dogs like this. ‘Help’ meaning the kinda influence these dogs have on a puppy – playing with it, correcting it when necessary, and so on.

Zephan and Bannon are both Canine Companions for Independence ‘release dogs’, i.e., they didn’t make it all the way through the six-month Advanced Training (now properly called Professional Training) where the dogs live at one of the five CCI regional centers and are trained every day by a fantastic staff of professional trainers (takes 3 1/2 years to be a fully qualified trainer at CCI, BTW).

You might think that would make them bad influences for the one you’re currently raising, but that hasn’t been my experience – exactly the opposite, in fact.

I’ll leave the explanations to the all the trainers, behaviorists, or whoever, but what I’ve seen through experience is that dogs routinely change their behavior as they mature and take on that big brother/sister or even surrogate mom/dad role with young puppies. Dogs, for example, who played very roughly when they were puppies (if you’ve been around Labs, you know exactly what I mean; if not, you would likely be shocked by just how roughly they play) but are very patient now that they are older and on the other end of the teeth.

The other part of that is because the standard is so high and the cuts along the way are so fine (only about 1/3 of the dogs make it all the way through the program), the dogs who are released from the program are still wonderful dogs. (Which is one of the reasons they are so much in demand. That’s a discussion for another time, but I will say I always cringe a little when I will see a suggestion out there that you get a dog that’s released from one of the top service dog programs, as if that were easy to do – it’s not.)

That certainly applies to Zephan and Bannon – they are both wonderful dogs, and I can’t begin to tell you how lucky I am to have them in my life.