Curbing those dog-gone rates

By Amy Geiszler-Jones

The demand for service dogs is on the rise, but the dropout rate of dogs selected for service training has remained at 50 percent. Emily Weiss, a psychology doctoral candidate and animal behavior researcher, hopes to lower that dropout rate by 25-30 percent through a new selection test she has developed.

Using 75 dogs from the Kansas Humane Society, Weiss is putting her 17 selection factors to the test. Project Select, which is Weiss’ dissertation in human factors psychology, got under way in November with nine dogs. The remaining dogs will be rotated through the project every five weeks until August.

Already two of the dogs Weiss worked with have gone to become service dogs. Weiss is trying to place a third dog as a therapy dog for a nursing home.

Once the project is finished, Weiss expects to have a set of standards that correlate highly with trainability and suitability for work as a service dog. The problem with the current tests, Weiss believes, is that they don’t reliably predict future behavior. The second phase of the project will be to test the test.

Some of the selection items she’s come up with are quite unique, including one that uses a wood sculpture by Wichita artist Gino Salerno to test responses to a novel object. In another test, an umbrella is popped opened in front of the dog and then dropped. A dog that initially startles but then approaches the umbrella indicates a good candidate for training, she says.

Other selection items will look at how a dog behaves while on a controlled walk for five minutes, how it reacts to the noise of a spoon beating a pan, and to touch.

To remain unbiased, Weiss isn’t involved in the testing. “That’s because these items are kind of near and dear to me and I have my ideas about which ones I think are going to work and which ones aren’t,” Weiss says. She doesn’t want anything to influence how she conducts the five weeks of obedience and retrieval training that she’s doing at Chisholm Creek Kennels, owned by her husband, Mark Wasserman.

Wasserman, one of his employees and WSU psychology professors Gary Greenberg and Ellie Shore administer the test. Greenberg is also Weiss’ mentor and dissertation adviser. They videotape the process so that Weiss can review the dogs’ reactions once they have gone through the training.

Weiss is also relying on others, including area business owners and community members, to make the project a success and to provide homes for the dogs.

WSU has provided a $47,339 grant and Purina has donated dog food, but Weiss still needs items such as dog bones and blankets. She’s also counting on business owners to allow the dogs into stores and restaurants. Legally, only trained service dogs accompanying a person with a disability may be permitted in businesses, but she’s hoping business owners will allow her to take the dogs into the shops so they can get used to such an environment. Currently the dogs, outfitted in black vests with the words “Project Select,” take road trips to PETsMART, a store that allows customers to bring their pets, and to the university.

Once the dogs have gone through Weiss’ training, many will be in need of homes. Weiss says anyone adopting the dogs, who all weigh more than 50 pounds, will get discount coupons from Purina and the benefit of obedience training. Those dogs who perform best will be trained as service dogs. Anyone interested in adopting the dogs should call 744-7580.

Weiss expects that her findings will not only help trainers who select dogs for service training, but those who work at humane societies and animal shelters. Being able to administer a test that can predict certain traits and trainability will help workers determine which dogs will make the best pets, Weiss says.

Project Select is a culmination of many interests for Weiss, who began by training dogs for New York dog owners, including actress Kathleen Turner, and for work in movies and advertisements; conducting research for The American Museum of Natural History; and now working with animals at the Sedgwick County Zoo as curator of behavior and research. Her master’s thesis also dealt with service dog selection. She will eventually work to secure funding to conduct the next phase of the research.

Emily Weiss does obedience training with
Frankie, one of several dogs in her project
aimed at decreasing the dropout rate of dogs
in service training.