The Dog House’s most recent litter of puppies has reached the eight-week mark at which they are distributed to Susquehanna Service Dogs (SSD) volunteers to begin their training to become service dogs.

The Dog House, a campus club dedicated to “rais[ing] service dogs to assist individuals with disabilities or serious medical conditions, thereby bringing awareness to the challenges faced by these individuals and their families affected by disabilities,” according to the Dog House Facebook, is partnered with SSD and run almost entirely on volunteer efforts.

Director of Dog House Jessica Bell ’18 spoke on the role of the Dog House in the process of raising the puppies, known as whelping.  “It starts three to four days after [the puppies] are born and during that time we do what is called early neurological stimulation, so we play with their paws and turn them upside down and rough them up or get them used to wearing vests or we introduce them to new surfaces, new sounds and just get them exposed to the world.”

Although the first contact with the puppies begins after they are born, the Dog House is involved with the mother dog even before she gives birth.

“We get the mom when she’s pregnant with the litter,” said Bell,  “and she gets used to the Dog House where she’ll be raising her puppies for the next couple of weeks, then she goes to Susquehanna, has her puppies and then comes back and we take care of her and her puppies until they’re about eight weeks old, and then at eight weeks they start their training so they are paired with different volunteers that Susquehanna Service Dogs has and they train from eight weeks to about a year and a half.”

This most recent litter of puppies has just reached this stage and will be beginning the first of three stages of training “where they learn all their basic commands: sit, down, stay, all that good stuff.”

The puppies will then move on to “what’s called advanced training,” said Bell.  This is where “they learn how to do more advanced tasks to suit their temperament and what they’d be good for and what their client that they’re going to be paired with will need.”

She continued, “for example, if someone is in a wheelchair, in advanced training a dog would learn how to open door using the handicap button or turn on and off lights or even opening and closing door[s] that don’t have a handicap button.  They learn more specialized tasks in advanced training and then they go to team training where they learn how to work with that partner that they’ve been cultivated for.”

Bell says that SSD volunteers have a lot of experience and are able to look at a dog’s “build, their temperament, their work ethic” and make a decision about “what kind of person these dogs would be good with and then they train them.”