All in a day’s work - Saving lives and picking up pens (Etta part 3)

Men surely using an expensive pen

Some pens enable me to write like the adult that I am. With other pens, I turn into a 7-year-old still learning to scribble coherently. 


Pen companies exploit our unique needs and preferences and price pens accordingly. Some of us are even willing to shell out $98 for the Surefire Writing Pen with Clicking Mechanism.

Unlike humans, dogs tend to be generalists when it comes to pens. For most dogs, a pen or pencil on the floor is quickly welcomed into a dog’s domain of “chewable items”. 

Chewable item made its way into dog's stomach

But not for Etta. You’ll remember Etta as the protagonist from the last two blog posts. In addition to excelling in bite work and narcotics detection, Etta is trained in assistance work, and she performs various tasks, such as picking up pens!

ETTA!!!

As you read through some of Etta’s assistance dog competencies, please remember, Etta does not have opposable thumbs.

Certified mobility assistance level 1 

Object discrimination - Pretty nifty; Etta can discriminate objects by name. To teach this task, you decide on the objects that are important to the person the dog would serve, and the dog learns to discriminate those objects from other objects. A dog might learn glasses or pants or phone. If it were my list of objects, the dog would learn to discriminate the nuances of my different cans of chickpeas (I REALLY LIKE CHICKPEAS!!).  

I love you

Site discrimination - Also nifty. “Go get my meds” means go to the “meds” place and bring me whatever is there. You can see this type of learning differs from object discrimination.

Familiar with adaptive technologies like wheelchairs and walkers.

Returns a dropped leash on command.

Solicits help from the nearest person. “What in the world?!” you ask. How do you teach a dog to “solicit help”? To begin, you’ll need two people and a dog. Person A says to the dog, “Go get help!” Person B calls the dog over. The dog goes to Person B who then brings the dog back to Person A where the dog receives a treat. The dog learns that they get good stuff when they go to another person and bring the other person back to the original person. Again, nifty!

Assistance dog level 2  (there is no level 3) 

These are considered the assistance dog 

“Rin Tin Tin” abilities.

Perform in-home fire drill. This does not refer to the often-performed-by-teenagers fire drill. In this task, the dog alerts the handler to a fire and/or fire alarm. The dog brings the person a blanket, fire extinguisher and phone. The dog opens the door and gets the person out of the house. Most humans wouldn’t know what to do if a fire broke out and here is Etta, potentially saving your life! No promises that she’ll do mouth to mouth...

“Call for help”. Let’s say a person and their service dog have gone on an errand and the person falls down. The dog is taught to return to the vehicle, go into the vehicle, retrieve an emergency phone and bring the phone back to the person. Etta learned to perform this task when the person has fallen at a number of distances from the car.

Go shopping. The dog practices taking items off a shelf 100 times in an eight-hour shopping day. During training, the dog also completes eight full-day shopping sprees. This training task assures that if a dog has to go shopping with its owner for a long time, it will perform its duties and not get bored. (I hate shopping and would fail this task).

Shopping dog!

Aid in transactions at a store. Indeed this means Etta can place cash, credit card OR check on the counter for the clerk. She can then take the item or package from the clerk or counter and hand it over to her handler, placing it in their hand or lap as needed. For those of you out there with kids, can you even train your kid to do this? 

Pick things up. This might consist of picking up a dropped pen, checkbook or credit card off a flat surface (and remember, no thumbs and she doesn’t chew the items as many many many dogs would!!)

Etta is not the only dog who benefitted from Tom Brownlee’s tutelage. Most recently, Tom trained Chesty, a yellow Lab, for the Wounded Warrior Project. The article, Dog gone good, details Chesty’s training and placement with a Marine who returned from Iraq both physically and emotionally changed.

Chesty opens a door!

Hope you've enjoyed learning about Super Dog, Etta -- a dog who could catch a criminal, find their stash of dope and then save them from a burning building!

Tom and Etta!