Dog AID (Assistance In Disability) receives a great deal of
interest from abroad from those wishing to emulate our work
in helping people with physical disabilities to train their
own pet dogs to become Assistance Dogs. Luisa Scarpa, the
general manager of Regione Lombardi and prominent dog trainer,
Luca Rossi flew to England from Italy in March this year to
discuss a course designed to help "train the trainers".
As a result of their initial visit, Dog AID trainers Dolores
Palmer and Joy Harrison recently hosted a six-day training
course "Training the Assistance Dog" in Rugeley,
Staffordshire. The course was attended by Luca, together with
12 hand-picked Italian dog trainers. Regione Lombardi are
themselves interested in the possibility of setting up an
organisation similar to Dog AID. In Italy, many people with
disabilities often do not venture out of their homes, and
Luisa and Luca are hoping to change public attitude towards
disability. They aim to do this by showing how dogs can be
used to provide genuine assistance to disabled people to help
them achieve greater personal independence.
The course gave the students not only the opportunity to learn
training methods for teaching Assistance Dogs to perform specialised
tasks, but to also gain a better understanding of the difficulties
faced by people with physical disabilities, both in daily
life and in training their pets. The students were provided
with the experience of "being disabled", and given
tasks to perform both with and without dogs so that they could
better appreciate for themselves the problems faced by people
with physical disabilities.
The course proved to be a huge success, and feedback received
from the students was extremely positive. Dog AID hopes to
host future course for trainers in other countries who have
a desire to learn about training Assistance Dogs. Says Dog
AID head trainer,
Dolores Palmer, "We hope to run more International courses
in the future, utilising the funding gained to help Dog AID
to provide a full training programme for our own trainers
within the United Kingdom."
For those wishing to find out more about Dog AID,
please visit our website at http://www.dogaid.org.uk
or contact Joy Harrison on 024 7626 0584 / e-mail joy@dogaid.org.uk
