We take our home cameras with us everywhere for our doctors, for advocacy, but also so I can rewatch animal behaviors and figure out what Echo’s thought process is. I’ve said it a lot but I’ll say it again. Sometimes I don’t listen the first time on purpose.

I notice, I start heading in a safer direction, but sometimes I take my time. Especially when there’s help sitting right next to me. If you look closely, I give Echo an inference right after I notice he caught a scent of “something”. I nudge my head to the corner of the pool that’s closest to me to encourage his problem solving skills.

I say he scents “something” vaguely because he has more than one type of alert but seizure alerts are always vocal. Sometimes he will become vocal if I’m having a lot of medical episodes releasing scent of epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, & histamine dumps (all chemicals released in neuro type - Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome- POTS and at time Mast Cell Activation Syndrome-MCAS) These are probably all syndromes you’ve heard of but I’m using the correct names for a reason.

Echo alerts to pre-syncope leading to syncopal events, sleep attacks, and severe allergic reactions. He also watches body language for all of these things and asthma attacks. That took A LOT of training from the day he came home with me.

Theres a lot of people who ask how I trained Echo and it’s really not something I can write a short paragraph about. Echo is a herding breed and that makes him fantastic at watching for differences in behavior. Theres pros and cons to having a dog that watches everything so intensely.

I have worked with service dogs for a really long time and I try to be as transparent as possible. Sometimes It’s hard not to turn a moment where I’m actively releasing chemicals that indicate a medical episode approaching into a training session.

But, hopefully this helps someone understand the sequence of events we practice and the “science” behind how we approach our personal training a little better.

Side note: there were some really bad seizures captured during this trip but I will not be posting. Sometimes I do have boundaries and these were just a little too hard to watch.

#ServiceDog #MedicalAlertDog #ServiceDogTraining #DisabilityAdvocacy