Met a great service dog

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that is a great idea. thank you.

That sounds awesome Skibum, dogs are amazing. I've wanted an autism service dog for a long time, and I'm really hoping that when I move into a more stable long-term home in October, I'll be able to apply for one. I would love to have a labradoodle. My mom has a chocolate one, she raised him from a puppy, and he's gorgeous and so gentle. I also like the fact that they don't shed, since dog hair everywhere drives me crazy.

When I was in the psych hospital earlier this month, there was a man there who had his emotional support dog with him. She was a beautiful golden retriever and was so happy to be around people, and to get to play outside when we had outdoor breaks. She helped with my anxiety and depression more than anything else there. Everyone on the unit with me was amazed at how the dog managed to get me to open up, relax, and laugh.

I played frisbee with her, and when it was really hot, she'd lie in the shade and roll over for me to scratch her tummy. It was like she could sense how miserable and anxious I was, and I became her favourite person. At first, she didn't like to be separated from her owner, and would get anxious if someone else held her leash, but after two days, she was perfectly happy for me to take her out and play with her when he wanted to stay in his room. It just reinforced for me the amazing ability animals have to take care of humans and to ease their minds. I was really missing my bird while in hospital, my second day there I cried because my heart ached so much without her, but that retriever managed to take a lot of that pain away, she helped me hold on and find hope until I was able to get out.

I have a Service Dog trained to mitigate my autism. I could not find a Service Dog program that offered anything other than Emotional Support Animals for children with autism, trained to do nothing other than the unethical practice of tethering and the legally unqualified work of providing emotional support (Service Dogs must be trained to perform tasks to mitigate the handler's disability in order to qualify for public access; emotional support does not qualify). So, I trained my own Service Dog and will probably have to train my next. My current Service Dog is currently trained in 28 tasks. My next Service Dog will be trained in 50 tasks, including guide work (to prevent and mitigate sensory overload), hearing alert (to mitigate auditory hyposensitivity), mobility assistance (to mitigate proprioceptive hyposensitivity), crowd control (to mitigate proprioceptive hyposensitivity and tactile hypersensitivity), self-harm interruption (to mitigate harmful stimming), alert to sensory overload, deep pressure therapy (to mitigate meltdowns), tactile stimulation (to mitigate shutdowns), and blocking (to prevent wandering off).

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31st of July, 2013
Diagnosed: Autism Spectrum Disorder, Auditory-Verbal Processing Speed Disorder, and Visual-Motor Processing Speed Disorder.

Weak Emerging Social Communicator (The Social Thinking-­Social Communication Profile by Michelle Garcia Winner, Pamela Crooke and Stephanie Madrigal)

"I am silently correcting your grammar."

StarTrekker, I am so happy that that dog was there for you. They really are amazing. I hope you can get your own and that your bird will love the dog too if you get one.

Knofskia, that is amazing. I did not know that the dogs could be trained for that amount of tasks and never even thought of the idea that one person could have more than one service dog. That is so cool that you are training your own. I believe there are a few members here who train their own service dogs. KingdomofRats trained therapy chickens which I thought was absolutely fascinating.