5

Some Service Dogs Can Smell Medical Conditions

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4

Some Dogs Are Too Stupid To Be Service Animals

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As with any program that requires hundreds of hours of demanding training, there are some washouts who can't make the cut. Take Virgil the chocolate poodle, who spent much of 2012 training as an assistance dog for autistic kids. Virgil seemed to do fine in preliminary classes, but then the final exam rolled around, overseen by an administrator flown in from another city and held in a million-square-foot suburban mall on a Saturday afternoon. This is a less-than-ideal set of circumstances for all but the most obedient of dogs -- a fact that Virgil emphatically proved by thunderously failing his exam.

The first part of the test, recalls his trainer Francey, consisted of basic commands, and a bunch of kids running around the mall proved much too distracting for Virgil's concentration. Next came "behavioral obedience," which consisted of the examiner dropping a scoop of ice cream next to the dog's tail to see if he could resist eating it, which Virgil could not. Then came the part of the test wherein Virgil had to walk without Francey to see how he handled the separation, while Francey observed from a distance. Virgil responded by taking a shuddering dump on the shiny linoleum floor, which is an immediate disqualification (the vest that service animals wear is supposed to impart on them that it's not pooping time, and that's a big reason they're allowed places other animals aren't).

Francey Forster

And so the career of Virgil the service dog came to a sudden, irrevocable end. Nowadays, he attacks hair clips and barks at toothbrushes as a D-list YouTube celebrity, which honestly is a better career trajectory than any human being who has shit themselves in public could expect.

3

There Are Autism Service Dogs That Hold Their Children On Leashes

National Service Dogs

If you ever see a dog in a service vest walking with a kid, you might want to take a look at the leash connecting the two of them. The kid isn't holding the dog back, and the dog isn't leading the kid (the way a guide dog does). The leash connects to a belt around the child's waist, and it's there in case the kid suddenly decides to start fleeing. That's right -- service dogs are also used to anchor autistic children.

"Many children with autism have bolting behaviors, in which a child will dash away without warning," says Misha Winterfeld, who has raised service dogs for eight years. And when the child decides to make a dash for it, it's the dog's job to hold fast with all its weight. In a controlled setting, it looks something like this:

... and while it's not all that fun to see the kid cry and strain to pull the leash, it's probably less fun to watch an unrestrained kid running into oncoming traffic. Usually, though, it won't even get as far as the child pulling at the tether. "The child will often cease their bolting altogether," says Misha, "due to the close connection he or she shares with the dog." Why run off in a random direction when you have a cuddly best friend tied to you at all times?

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2

Service Dogs Know Way Less Than You Think They Do

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We're not going to bother wowing you with how awesome guide dogs are. You already know how awesome guide dogs are, and you rightly crumble with emotions when one leads her owner out of the North Tower on 9/11 or goes blind with age and gets a guide dog of his own. But, while these dogs have some amazing training, resist the temptation to look at any dog and say, "This boy is a GENIUS!" It's literally all in the training -- none of them have any concept of the disabilities they're meant to be treating.

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"Dogs don't have the idea of what blindness is," says Colin. For an animal to know that you have an individual mental state, and to further realize the two of you perceive the world differently, takes a huge level of intelligence, and there's no reason to think dogs have it. Casual experiments show that dogs still look to their blind owners for instructions about tasks the owners can't see. Colin's dog Wednesday guides him perfectly well, but she'll guide sighted people in just the same way because she was trained to do so (by trainers who, of course, could see just fine).

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1

Some Service Dogs Are Trained By Prison Inmates

Second Chance Dog Training Program via Rise Miami News

Service dogs can take years of all-day training before they're ready to work. Even dogs selling for thousands of dollars can't generate enough to pay a trainer for that long, and volunteer trainers don't have enough free time. So some dog training schools turn to America's premier source of cheap labor: prison.

You might have heard about this partnership from HBO's Oz (which featured such other real-world prison innovations as magic aging pills and an astrally-projected murderous Luke Perry). While the prisoners don't quite have the same training skills as most qualified professionals on the outside, they are able to successfully teach the animals to operate lights, fetch objects, and follow all sorts of basic commands. Sometimes, the dog's disabled future owner gets to visit the prison and participate in the training, and interactions between an eight-year-old autistic child and a convicted killer go surprisingly well.

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The dogs get so much individualized attention that they learn twice as fast as they do in normal training schools. It's a fine introduction for them to the world of law enforcement -- better, anyway, than running into all those cops who shoot service dogs.

The training is even good for the inmates. According to statistics from a Philadelphia dog training program, inmates who trained dogs ended up reoffending only one-third as often as their dogless counterparts. Prison violence also goes down because, as one Maryland officer put it, the program fosters empathy in prisoners, softening their hearts. The dogs literally taught them how to love.

Kim Hairston/Baltimore Sun

Ryan Menezes is an editor and interviewer here at Cracked. Follow him on Twitter for bits cut from articles and other stuff no one should see.

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