Assistance dogs today do not receive as much credit as they deserve. One may be asking what is an assistance dog? According to the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), an assistance dog is, “Any guide dog, signal dog, or other animals individually trained to provide assistance to an individual with a disability” (“Commonly Asked Questions About Service Animals in Places of Business”). Only .9 % of disabled people have a service dog, and in the U.S. 43 million people were recorded to have disabilities back in 1990 (Service Dog Central). There needs to be a bigger emphasis on the training programs available for assistance dogs, and how they can benefit our community. Currently, the media tends to focus on raising funds for troubled animals. While this is an important need, there is a greater need for increased funding for service animals and awareness of the many ways they contribute to society. Guide, Hearing, Service, and Emotional Therapy are four different types of assistance dogs. Each type of dog is trained to perform tasks for its assigned disability. Guide dogs are trained specifically to help …show more content…
These specially trained dogs can help by retrieving objects that are out of their person’s reach, opening and closing doors, turning light switches off and on, barking to indicate that help is needed, finding another person and leading the person to the handler, assisting ambulatory persons to walk by providing balance and counterbalance, providing deep pressure, and many other individual tasks as needed by a person with a disability.” This quote obtained from Assistance Dogs International provides the perfect description of service dogs and their many capabilities. Service dogs are trained to perform different types of tasks. However, they are not all competent to execute every single task as listed above. They specialize in certain areas and are assigned to a