During the late 1980s, having read about assistance dogs for people with different disabilities, I began thinking that a service dog might be able to help me with some of my sensory processing problems. What I initially had in mind was a dog that would help improve my mobility in the community by doing a little bit of signal work and a little bit of guide work. While I do not have a diagnosed vision or hearing impairment, autistic sensory difficulties often interfere with comprehension of things I see and hear. At that time it was not uncommon for me to walk off curbs into the street, or walk past my house without realizing it and find several blocks later that I didn't know where I was, or fail to hear bicycles coming up behind me until they almost ran into me. I hoped a dog could help make it safer for me to get around.

I began calling training programs for service dogs, but could not find one willing to train a dog for an autistic person. Most of them told me they simply didn't have staff who were knowledgeable about autism. The director of one program told me that it wouldn't even be possible to train a service dog for an autistic person, because a dog could not be trained to meet my needs and because an autistic person would not be capable of handling a dog in public. At that point I decided to give up on programs and train my own dog. I had been training my own dogs in general obedience for about ten years, and I had a dog called  Horse  that I thought would be a good candidate for training as a service dog.

I spent about a year training Horse, but it didn't take that long for me to realize how much a service dog would improve my quality of life. During one of our first training walks, Horse (on her own initiative) guided me around a mud puddle on the sidewalk that, had I been out walking on my own, I would have walked right through--not because I couldn't see it, but because I couldn't do the motor planning quickly enough to identify an alternate path to avoid it. But the benefits went beyond small things like mud puddles. I found that with my dog by my side, my overall awareness and orientation to my surroundings was better. I actually understood more of what I saw and heard when I had the dog to direct my attention to the particular things in the environment that were important for me to attend to.

Horse's working career was tragically cut short by cancer, and I began training my second service dog. Ewok performed flawlessly in training, mastering tasks more quickly than any other dog I have ever trained. But when the time came to start working under real-life conditions, she didn't do so well. I had selected a dog that was friendly and outgoing, because autism makes it especially hard to understand and participate in social interactions. Horse had been a dog who responded well to people, distinguished between familiar people and strangers, distinguished between people who just happened to be standing near me and people whose body language indicated they were trying to get my attention--all things that are very difficult for me to do. I had hoped Ewok would share Horse's ability to be attentive to other people's social signals while maintaining her primary focus of attention on me, but I have since learned how very unusual Horse was in that regard. Ewok was so tuned in to other people that she wanted to socialize with everyone she met, and she was too easily distracted to be a reliable service dog. She made a successful career change to being a therapy dog at a nursing home, and was eventually adopted by a young woman who was recovering from a brain tumor.

I then trained Emmy as my third service dog. Emmy was absolutely devoted to me, as Horse had been. She performed routine guiding and signaling tasks that improved my orientation and safety in the community. When my balance began to deteriorate, Emmy got a special harness to help support me on stairs and help me up when I fell. But Emmy, unlike Horse and Ewok, is shy and reserved. She didn't get distracted by other people we encountered; she simply ignored them, as most service dogs are trained to do. She helped with my sensory and balance problems, but she didn't do much for my primary difficulties with social awareness and comprehension.

Then came Isosceles. At the time I adopted this young puppy with his enormous ears, Emmy was working as my service dog, and I had no complaints about her. I only intended for Isosceles to be a pet. His early efforts in obedience training certainly didn't suggest service dog potential. (A year and a half after I took him to a puppy obedience class, I learned from an acquaintance taking her dog to the same trainer that the trainer was still telling students horror stories about Isosceles, evidently to reassure them that their dogs weren't the worst she'd ever seen.) Isosceles was cheerful, outgoing, exuberant, and almost completely impossible to control. He was so excitable and so distractible that it took almost three years for him to settle down enough to master basic obedience.

But Isosceles wanted to be with me. He wanted to go everywhere with me. One day I was getting ready to go out somewhere. I picked up Emmy's harness, and without doing very much visual processing, mechanically strapped it onto the wagging furry body that presented itself. Then I put on my shoes, found my keys, took Emmy's leash and started to clip it to her collar--and found Isosceles prancing excitedly around me, wearing the harness. He had figured out that the dog who wore the harness got to go out with me, and when he saw me pick up the harness, he had pushed his way in to get me to put it onto him.

By this time Isosceles was starting to mature and settle down a little. I still didn't think he was service dog material, but I decided to try training him, just to have a backup dog prepared to fill in should Emmy ever be sick. He did well with his street training, so I got permission from the manager of the local Wal-Mart to take him into the store for more training. After he had been training for several months, Emmy injured her paw and needed to stay home and rest until it healed. I decided to try using Isosceles as my temporary full-time service dog while Emmy recovered.

Emmy's paw healed, but she never went back to work, except occasionally as a backup dog when Isosceles was sick. When given the chance to prove himself, Isosceles turned out to be the best service dog I've ever had. He does all the things Emmy did, but he also has Horse's social responsiveness. Isosceles has enabled me to recognize acquaintances when I encounter them, which has made it easier for acquaintances to turn into friends. He has helped to initiate some social contacts, by noticing when someone was interested in meeting us. With Isosceles as my partner, I am more oriented to my social environment as well as to my physical environment. Yet in overcoming his earlier problems with distractibility, Isosceles has developed the rare ability to pay attention to other people in the social environment, without losing his focus on me. It is important to me that Isosceles be aware of people and cues in the social environment, so that he can signal me in turn. I can allow people in my social world to pet Isosceles, and I can allow Isosceles to respond to them, because I know that if I make even the slightest movement, Isosceles will return his full attention to me to see if I need him. This is an extraordinary ability.

At first Isosceles provided mostly signaling and cuing (to auditory, visual, and social stimuli) for me, and performed minimal help with balance. But during the years he has been working, my physical abilities have deteriorated significantly. Shortly after Isosceles began working, I got a new service dog harness with a pulling handle, and Isosceles began helping to pull me up stairs and inclines. In 1997 I began using a wheelchair part-time. Isosceles learned to pull the wheelchair. As my needs changed, Isosceles learned new skills. He has never stopped learning. Several years ago I saw a report about service dogs being trained to help people with Parkinson's disease break out of motor "freezes," and I realized that Isosceles had been doing this for me for years. Some of the movement disorders associated with autism are similar to some Parkinsonian disorders, and Isosceles has learned on his own to help me with motor freezes.

Isosceles took on another challenge with me when I returned to graduate school to earn a master's degree in rehabilitation counseling. I wasn't sure how this former hyperactive puppy would adjust to three-hour class sessions, but he settled right into the new routine. His worst problem was occasional snoring during lectures.

In the fall of 1997 Isosceles and I successfully took on yet another challenge in our education together, when I became a counseling intern in the Syracuse City School District. I was the only intern in my graduate program to do a rehabilitation counseling internship in a school setting. Most RC interns are placed in adult service settings, but I wanted to gain experience working with school-age children with disabilities. As an intern and a counselor I have worked with young, active, impulsive, unpredictable children who are autistic or have other developmental disabilities. And Isosceles has been right there with me: guiding or pulling me through noisy crowded hallways, signaling the right classrooms so I don't miss them, picking my clients out of the crowds until I learn to recognize them by myself, and patiently and cheerfully enduring the attentions of dozens of children. In addition to my counseling work with children with disabilities, Isosceles and I have also presented demonstrations for different age groups from kindergarten through sixth grade, explaining what service dogs do for people with various disabilities.

Isosceles not only helps me function in my work, he also helps my clients. My work is with children who have disabilities similar to mine, and Isosceles has helped me help them to envision a future for themselves as successful adults. One of my first autistic clients declared an intention to have a service dog of his own when he grows up.

My service dogs have contributed to the education of service dog trainers. In the fall of 1997 Isosceles and I traveled to an autism conference where I gave a presentation, and one of the other presentations at the conference was about service dogs for autistic people. I talked to the trainers, who had been training signal dogs and mobility assistance dogs for many years, and were now beginning to work with autistic people. It turned out they became interested in training dogs for autistic people after being approached by someone who had seen me at another conference in 1994, and had been impressed with how Emmy was able to help me function in the noisy confusion of the conference! 

These are not the only trainers who are now accepting autistic people as service dog recipients. I have since encountered other autistic people with service dogs. I have been contacted by several service dog trainers who are interested in learning about the needs of autistic people. Every time I travel somewhere to give a presentation about autism, even though my presentations are not about service dogs, people see my dog and become aware of a new possibility for making autistic people more independent.

Now available: "The Story of Isosceles"

           Click here to see how you can help Isosceles and receive a booklet about him 

Click here to read about different tasks dogs can do for autistic people 

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