Facility Dog Program Becomes Official

At the January board meeting, our Board of Directors voted unanimously to make our Facility Dog pilot program permanent.

A facility dog is trained to work at a designated location with a variety of people. Typically, this type of dog is placed in a hospital or a rehab center. Like our other dogs, Facility Dogs are task-trained, but the tasks they perform are done for someone other than their handler.

We have placed several certified dogs in facilities over the years, most notably four in each of the last two years, as we explored this approach. We will limit the number of Facility Dogs we place each year as we continue to keep our emphasis on placing dogs with individual clients, but this is an exciting new way for our dogs to help people and change lives.

Although it might take us a while to update our materials (and our conversations) to reflect that we train six different types of assistant dogs now, we are thrilled to officially add this program to our offerings.