After many years of catching and training countless feral street dogs, and a one sassy rescued therapy dog, we decided to give training a diabetic alert dog a go. This is a passion project. We are not with an official service dog organization, nor are we training for a service dog organization. We are independently and privately training a dog for a relative who was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at the age of two.
We are using a curated knowledge of doggie body language, canine behavior, balanced training, and a library of “how to train your own diabetes alert dog” books. We are also occasionally consulting with our trainer friends for scent training, chaining of command, and we are bouncing things off of our friends that work in hospitals with therapy dogs. We are using nationally recognized standards for our final testing and behavior standards, but we are knowingly taking this on with an overinflated sense of confidence, a can do spirit, and faith in our mission. We expect to be humbled; regularly.
Diabetic alert dogs run in the range of $20,000 and up. We thought we’d share our journey to inspire anyone to give training their own dog a try. We’ll post here and we will be starting a blog to document our journey as well. Boo will be training with us for a year-ish before she is ready to go to her diabetic owner. Feel free follow Boo Boo, to ask questions, to encourage us, and to share our page.
Want to help us with Boo? If you want to drop us a couple of bucks to help us feed, gear up, and vet our training dog, Boo, you can click to paypal at doglady@gypsydogops.com (be sure to put “for Boo Boo” in the notes) or reach out for other options.
“Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.” – Thorton Wilder
That’s us, ridiculous! Here we go!
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*We understand not all trainers, dog owners, and working dog trainers agree on training techniques and tools. While we don’t mind polite and meaningful discourse, this is not the place to debate or attack tools and techniques. We will not tolerate bullying or inappropriate comments. Any questions or concerns about our training techniques or tools can be PM-ed to us. If we feel the group would benefit from the conversation, we’ll post about it. If any posts or PMs are combative and or contain personal attacks, the individual will be blocked.
