Service Dogs Helping with Anxiety

I got an email from someone asking about how service dogs might help with anxiety and how they would know when their handlers were getting ready to have an anxiety attack.  I thought those were great questions and wanted to share my answers here.

Dogs tend to be really in tune with their owners and with a service dog, the owner cultivates that.  For instance, the owner needs to be the one that feeds the dog, most of the time.  The dog learns that the owner is the person from whom all good things come, pretty much.  

Dogs are pack animals and it's natural for them to form really close bonds with others.  Basically, the owner is the head of the pack.  For most animals, a lot of communication is nonverbal.  Dogs communicate with each other by the position of their head, the position of their ears, how wide or narrow they open their eyes, stuff like that.  So it's natural for a dog to pay close attention to the owner's body language.  You don't really have to even teach them to do that.

The dog would need to be taught what I wanted it to do when he noticed certain body language.  Like, when I start getting anxious, my body gets tense.  My muscles get stiff.  My hands make tight fists.  It took me a while to even notice these things because they are small things and I don't think much about them.  If I'm close to crying, my lips start quivering.  Those are all things a dog would notice easily.  My breathing probably changes, too, when I’m getting anxious.  That’s something I need to pay more attention to.  

Dogs also have very, very sensitive noses.  People often sweat a little when they are anxious, and their sweat may even have a different odor, which would be easily detected by a dog.

And dogs are pack animals so they want to be around the members of their pack.  The dog would be happiest hanging out around his owner.  He’d notice all those signs of an impending anxiety attack, maybe even before I would notice them.  And it wouldn’t be hard for him to notice them, either.

Certain breeds, especially, like to have jobs to do.  They like to play, too, like all dogs so you wouldn't have a service dog "on duty" all the time.  But they like having jobs.  So you'd teach the dog that when it starts seeing those signs of increasing anxiety, you want it to go pick up this bottle of medication and bring it to you.  And the dog would get lots of treats and praise for doing that, so the dog would be happy to do it.  Plus, certain breeds, like retrievers, really like to retrieve things (hence the name).  

It's such a cool thing.  I'm still learning about how dogs are trained to do certain things, but they can be trained to do an incredible number of tasks.