Service Dog with Veteran
Photo Credit: DND/CAF
Esprit de Corps Magazine September 2021 // Volume 28 Issue 8
Let's Talk About Women in the Military – Column 30
By Military Woman
Question:
What do you think about service dogs for veterans with mental health challenges?
Answer:
Veteran or civilian, healthy, or sick, there are many benefits for humans to spend more time with animals, especially dogs.
One of the many benefits of animals is their potential to be a calming influence on stressed out humans. This trait has made it commonplace for purpose-trained and certified therapy animals, usually dogs, to be made available in stressful public settings such as airports, hospitals, courts, and mental health counselling sessions.
People who feel chronically stressed or anxious for any reason may find benefit, with their physician’s support, from an emotional support animal. Since no specialized training or testing is required, these animals are generally not allowed in public spaces except in some special circumstances such as airplanes.
While an emotional support animal does not require specialized training, nothing stops people from getting it. Training can include things like teaching your dog to recognize when you are having nightmares and to wake you up. Training your dog to complete mental health related support tasks does not require you to have a formal mental health diagnosis or recognized disability status.
So what is a service or assistance dog? Many are familiar with purpose-trained dogs who assist people that are sight-impaired, autistic, mobility-challenged or epileptic. Such dogs are traditionally breed specific, professionally trained, and tested to ensure their behaviours are safe to be allowed into the public domain. These dogs will usually also have been taught three or more specialized tasks unique to their specific human’s formally declared disability needs. The North American standard for these types of service dogs is generally recognized as those set by Assistance Dog International (ADI) .
The VAC website defines mental health service dogs as “extensively trained to respond precisely to specific disabilities of their owners including individuals with mental health diagnoses such as PTSD. Service dogs are trained to detect and intervene when their handler is anxious; contribute to a feeling of safety for their handler; and promote a sense of relaxation and socialization.”
So, what are the differences between a mental health service dog and an emotional support dog? One difference is that a mental health service dog is examined and certified to be safe in all public settings, and emotional support dogs are not.
Another difference is that Veterans seeking a service dog must have a federally recognized disability requiring the presence of the animal in all settings.
A third difference is who pays. Generally, a Veteran pays all costs related to an emotional support dog but often can have the costs of a service dog (up to $50,000) paid for by interested fundraising charities. There is also a federal tax credit available to help defray additional and ongoing service dog costs.
As it stands, there are lots of good folk, charities, and dog trainers alike, all doing the best they can. Unfortunately, there are others working hard to charge veteran charities top dollar for under-trained, and in some cases inhumanely trained, service dogs. This chaotic non-standardized state of affairs in Canada impedes researcher’s ability to produce quality, intersectional, peer-reviewed service dog research. Without a standardized and enforced national training and certification standard for mental health service dogs, everyone stands to lose.
One way around the growing minefield of vendor related conflicts of interests is for the Government of Canada to follow the example set by the US Department of Veterans Affairs –which supports the training of breed-specific dogs to ADI standards for veterans, by federal penitentiary inmates.
In other words, one way to support mental health service dogs for veterans could be to build a Canadian not-for-profit dog training and certification capacity. This would also allow for standardized dog training, certification, and reproducible GBA+ (gender-based analysis plus) research to provide, once and for all, the evidence based impact of mental health service dogs on Veterans – women and men.
Update:
2024. Research continues to mount showing positive impact for Veterans with mental health conditions to own a service dog compared to owning no dog. However little research has been done to date to show what benefit, if any, owning a service dog is over owning an emotional support dog or regular dog. Canadian standards for mental health (psychiatric) service dogs for Veterans continues to be an unresolved discussion area.
