The Unbreakable Bond: Service Dogs and Their Life-Saving Impact with Jennifer Arnold

Kate Tucker: I'm Kate Tucker, and this is Hope Is My Middle Name. Today, I am so excited to share my conversation with Jennifer Arnold. She's the founder and executive director of Canine Assistants, a service dog school on a big old farm in Milton, Georgia, where Jennifer and her team teach golden retrievers, labrador retrievers, golden lab mixes, and goldendoodles, how to help folks who are struggling live better, safer lives.

The dogs at Canine Assistants learn how to help people who use wheelchairs or have other difficulties with mobility. They can alert people who have epilepsy about the onset of a seizure. And they can warn those with type 1 diabetes when their blood sugar is about to go out of range. As hospital dogs, they support families, patients, healthcare workers, and first responders in the hard work of survival. These dogs can literally save lives. As you'll hear, working with these dogs is intensely personal for Jennifer, and that's how and why she's developed her own approach to teaching dogs, which she explains is very different from training them. She also shares some amazing stories about what these wildly smart and intuitive animals are capable of, and why we humans are so gosh darn lucky that these dogs love us the way that they do. 

Kate Tucker: Hello, Jennifer. It's so good to get to talk with you today.

Jennifer Arnold: Hi, Kate. Thank you so much for having me. 

Kate Tucker: When you were a kid growing up, did you have pets? And what was kind of your first experience really bonding with a dog?

Jennifer Arnold: GiGi was my first dog, and I loved her so much that I'd have to call home from school to be sure the gate was closed. I was so afraid somebody would let her out and the gate to the backyard would be open and something would happen to her. We loved each other desperately. 

Kate Tucker: So when you were 16, you were diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. What was it like to discover that you had that? What were the symptoms and how did that unfold? 

Jennifer Arnold: It was terrifying. I got up one morning to go to the bathroom like normal and I tried to stand up and I kept falling on the floor and I was hospitalized and they diagnosed me as having multiple sclerosis. I could hear the doctors talking to my mom and dad in the hallway and they were talking about their goal and they said their goal was to try to keep me from getting worse. but they weren't certain that I would get a whole lot better, which meant that I'd need to use a wheelchair. And that devastated me. I didn't know anybody except maybe a couple of older adults who used wheelchairs. I didn't know how you lived like that. You know, it was before places were accessible. So, for example, like I couldn't go back to the school I'd gone to since I was in pre-K because it wasn't accessible. And I'm ashamed of myself, and I know I shouldn't be. I know I was a teenager and that that's a hard time, but I've met so many extraordinary people who had a different reaction that I'm kind of ashamed that I basically gave up. 

Kate Tucker: Oh, it was so out of the blue. I can't imagine. I can't imagine that happening right now, let alone as an adolescent when your whole life is stretched out in front of you and you have all these hopes and dreams and then suddenly you can't see your friends.

Jennifer Arnold: And they were kind of scared of me a little bit, you know, just because they didn't know what to say or do. And I was the fourth and final child and I was my dad's girl. He was an ophthalmologist and eye surgeon in Atlanta and his practice was very stable by the time I was born and so he had more time to spend with me and he had just read an article in a medical journal about a woman in California whose name is Bonnie Bergin, who was training dogs to help people who use wheelchairs. He reached out to Bonnie Bergin, but unfortunately she just had a couple of dogs in her home. No way she could send a dog all the way to Georgia. But my dad got kind of excited and thought if I needed a dog in Atlanta, there were going to be other people in our area that did too. Maybe this was something I could do with my life. I remember him sitting on the edge of my bed saying, you are where you are, and this is something I think you could do that nobody else really can because who better to teach dogs to help other people who use wheelchairs? And I got excited about it, because that made sense to me. You know, that was something I could focus on.

Kate Tucker: Yeah, 

Jennifer Arnold: And unfortunately, all these years later I have to really fight to keep from crying, but my dad was walking home from my grandmother's house, she lived a block over, and a drunk driver on a motorcycle jumped up on the sidewalk and hit him and he died the next morning in the hospital where he worked. And I was the only one that stayed there overnight. I don't know exactly how that happened except it was just total chaos and I wasn't leaving my dad. So I was in my little wheelchair in the ICU waiting area. In my head, I knew he wasn't going to survive. I mean, first I thought, well, I quit this life thing. It's too hard. Why would you do this? And I thought, if there is a God, I hate you. And finally, you know, I thought, screw you. If there's something I can do that makes life better for people here, I'll stay. 

He died early that next morning and I knew, I knew he was gonna go and I just, you know, guess you always hold out hope.

So it took me a little while to regain my equilibrium when it actually happened, but when people say that I've done a good thing here, I almost feel guilty because it's what saved my life. So I feel like the motivation, at least to a large extent, was very selfish, but I am grateful that I have had this opportunity. And I hope at this point, not only to make it better for people who are struggling, but I'd also like to make it better for dogs. I owe them a lot. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. I always think it's funny and it's totally understandable, but when, you know, you go through a loss like that, it's not the same exact thing as what you were describing with your friend suddenly not knowing how to treat you when you were in a wheelchair, but it's a similar sort of thing where your friends kind of don't know if they haven't experienced that, what to say, then you feel so alone in that grief. 

Jennifer Arnold: You are alone in it. Even people who are experiencing the same loss, I think, don't experience it exactly the same way. Yeah. So yeah, that's a lonely, it's a lonely thing. And we went broke. My dad was not a great business person and the circumstances were just surreal, almost. The life insurance that he had had an exclusionary clause against death by two wheeled vehicle, obviously intended for people who were driving or riding on motorcycles. So we were encouraged to fight it in court. It ended up being upheld, and we lost the insurance company's court costs. And my mom and I learned a lot. We learned a lot about bagged cereal. It's much less expensive. It took us over 10 years to finally start the program. But it was what I held on to every day. I knew I was going to do it. I just had to get there. 

Kate Tucker: So when you say it took you 10 years, you knew from the moment you lost your dad, you were on that path, that that was what was going to get you through. But, was there a conversation with your mom? Was there a moment where you made the commitment and started to take steps? I mean, make the plan? 

Jennifer Arnold: Oh, yeah. We talked about it. We had long talks about it. At first, we had to focus on survival. But once I got better, and I did, after a little over two and a half years, my diagnosis has since been changed from MS to a condition called relapsing polychondritis. Rather than it being the covering of the nerves that are affected, it's the cartilaginous tissue in your body. Once my health got better, we started focusing on putting money away. And I did amazing things. I delivered pizzas, I learned to shoe horses, and we found this 10 acre place with a house on it and we started a kennel. We took all the dogs that nobody else would take, dogs that veterinary clinics even didn't want to take because they were dogs who were biters and wore diapers, you know, they were just the nightmare kind of dogs.

Kate Tucker: What was it like when you finally opened in the Canine Assistants purview? How many dogs did you start out with? 

Jennifer Arnold: We had 17 or 19, I can't remember right now, inquiries for service dogs before we got our brochures back from the printers. We were slammed from the second we said we would do this, and it has never let up since then. The need is stunning. 

Kate Tucker: Tell me about maybe one of the first dogs you paired with someone. Who was it, and how did it make you feel? 

Jennifer Arnold: Well, we adopted for the first six years, all of our dogs from shelters and rescue programs. 

Kate Tucker: Oh, wow. Okay. 

Jennifer Arnold: And Lucy, the Border Collie, was what we would now kindly say, a lot of dog. She was a busy girl, but brilliant. And this young man, Trey, had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and they were our first pair. It's hard in a way to let go of the dog that you've loved and nurtured and agonized over and agonized with. But you fall so in love with the people, too. I always say I would give the people on our waiting list a kidney and most of my liver, maybe both kidneys. You would do anything to make it better. And so I think I was elated and sad. And that continues today. The day after graduation, there are a lot of tears around here. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. 

Jennifer Arnold: Happy and sad. 

Kate Tucker: And I'd imagine back then when you're working with shelter dogs, so you're also training them to even just be around people, maybe some of them, or to get over some of the trauma they've experienced, it would have been such a different scenario than today. 

Jennifer Arnold: I will say adopted dogs can easily become assistance dogs provided they haven't experienced too much trauma. I mean, they've all experienced trauma just by virtue of the fact that they've ended up in rescue. But this is what finally really convinced me that it was okay to have a breeding program, when I realized the amount of pressure we were putting on these dogs who had been hurt in the past. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. 

Jennifer Arnold: It's a lot to ask of them. You know, I feel like most of the dogs who end up in shelters or in rescue deserve a family who will do nothing but love them and make life better. And asking them to take somebody through the Atlanta airport when that person might lose consciousness, that's a lot. It's a lot of pressure. 

Kate Tucker: Let's talk about what the dogs are capable of doing once you've taught them. So for someone, say, with a mobility issue, let's start there. What does it actually look like? Is there an example of a dog or a story you can tell where you've taught a dog and then they're going to do what?

Jennifer Arnold: Well, we had a dog, his young man was on a ventilator, 16 year old kid. And he really wanted to be able to spend some time alone. He was a high quad on a ventilator as the result of a car accident. And his mom was the driver. I mean, I don't think we can really imagine how much that scarred her, but she didn't want to leave the room and the primary reason she didn't want to leave his room was because ventilators, especially then, this has been a while, secretions like mucus would make it jam up and it would shut off. And in order to restart it you would have to hit a button that suctioned it and it would restart. But when it stopped functioning, he wasn't getting any air. One day, the mom had gone to get the mail and a neighbor had stopped her to talk at the end of the driveway. And when she came back into her house, in the foyer as she entered, there was blood everywhere. And she ran into her son's room and the ventilator was fine and functioning normally, but his dog was covered in blood. She went back out and looked in the foyer. There were huge claw marks in the front doors. When the ventilator shut off, a little alarm rings and it was her job, the dog's job, to run and get mom. And the alarm sounded, and she tried to get to mom, but couldn't. So she tried to dig her way through the front doors, and she ripped off multiple toenails. And before the young man lost consciousness, he remembered seeing her run back in his room. There is no explanation for what happened other than she hit the reset button. She had seen it done, you know, repeatedly. And I mean, I find that extraordinary. So they learn to do things like pick up what you drop, tug open doors, push buttons, go for help in emergencies. But they often put those things together in new ways. They're amazing. They care. That's the biggest thing. It's not that they physically do these things. It's – why do they love us so much? How did we get that lucky? 

Kate Tucker: I mean, there's so much science even still trying to understand that, but I think it's beautiful and maybe beyond our understanding because love is not something that you can always quantify or measure.

Jennifer Arnold: No, but we know now from science, we know from fMRIs done on dogs that show the pleasure center of their brain explodes with blood flow when they see, hear, feel the touch of, even smell, their favorite human, more than it does for their favorite animal companion, more than it does for steak or whatever their favorite treat is. They adore us. 

Kate Tucker: Let's talk more about some examples like you mentioned before how powerful the support can be for someone with epilepsy. What do dogs do with someone with epilepsy? 

Jennifer Arnold: A young man came into our office one day, he kind of slammed into the office and he looked at me and he said, Are you in charge? And I said, Well, I guess so. I don't know, what do you want? And he said, I have epilepsy and you're going to train a dog for me. 

Kate Tucker: Oh wow

Jennifer Arnold: And I said, Well, I have no idea how to do that. But his story was he was appointed to West Point while he was in the military and it was his dream to go to West Point and two weeks after he got there he had his first epileptic seizure and he couldn't stay. You can't serve if you have epilepsy. And when he came into our office, he was trying very hard to decide between living and choosing not to live. This dog thing for him was a lifeline that really resonated with me. So we figured it out. And we still didn't know to what stimuli the dogs were responding when they could tell in advance, and they can tell in advance, that a seizure is oncoming. So, some years after we started placing dogs with people who have epilepsy and taking it on faith, we entered a research project with Florida International University in Miami, and they identified three volatile organic compounds, three VOCs, released by the body prior to seizure onset. And once we knew that it got a whole lot easier because you can recreate that odor in the lab. 

In the beginning, poor dogs, the method of the day was to expose the dog to the odor over and over and over and over again and pair that with a treat. The way we do it now, we expose the dog once, maybe twice. Once they smell the odor, they've got it. They don't need to smell it again. They need to know how to communicate that they smell it. So, we teach our dogs to answer binary yes, no, either, or questions. So, you can say, do you smell your smell, if their smell is seizure, do you smell your smell? Yes or no? And we put our hands out as we say, yes, the left hand goes out because I'm left handed and no, the right hand goes out and the dog will look at or touch the appropriate hand. And I think because we don't give them a treat, we give treats to our dogs because they breathe, they don't have to do anything else to earn it. We don't want them to feel like they need to tell us something that maybe isn't true so they get a treat and some affection. You know, it's taken years for the medical community to believe that this phenomenon actually exists. They're finally there and a wonderful neurologist, epileptologist in Denver named Ed Maa has been instrumental in getting them there.

But the first time I ever took a dog who can recognize the smell of oncoming seizures to Denver I was going to do a demo and Dr. Maa asked a nurse, they had just had a patient have a seizure, he asked a nurse to go and collect a sweat sample from the palm of that person's hand and bring it in and we were going to see how the dog responded to that sample. Well, she came back in holding the little swab. And she gave it to me, and I let my dog smell it, and I said, Okay, do you smell your smell? Yes or no? And she hit no. And I was thinking, Oh, crud. Don't mess up. You've never messed up before. Don't mess up now. So I asked her again, and the third time I asked her, she took her little nose and hit my right hand over and over and over again. Like, It isn't there. And I looked up and said, I'm sorry. She says the smell isn't there. And the nurse was standing there with her mouth open and she said, it isn't there. I brought you a blank swab. So, you know, it's nice to know they're going to tell you the truth. 

And with type 1 diabetes, they do the same thing, except that they have to add an extra layer in. So you say to the dog, is my blood sugar out of range? Yes or no? And if the dog says yes, you then ask, is it high or low? And they tell you, and they are accurate. 

Kate Tucker: That's amazing. What about when someone isn't able to ask? 

Jennifer Arnold: Yeah, yeah, they get to the point where they do it without being asked. We had a dog, an amazing goldendoodle named Mossy. One day, her mama went to Kroger, and as they were leaving the grocery store, Mossy had gotten in the back of the car, this very well mannered dog jumped up to the front and as her hand was trying to turn the key in the ignition, Mossy took her paw and knocked her hand away. And at first, her mom fussed at her and said, Mossy, cut that out, what are you doing? Get in the back of the car! And she just wouldn't give it up. And finally, she realized something was going on. And she checked her blood sugar and she was down well below 50 and probably would have lost consciousness on her way home had Mossy not told her. What's so dangerous about type 1 diabetes is the people who can't tell when their sugar's low. It’s awful. That's a real issue and the dogs are about 20 minutes ahead of most glucose monitors and they used to get in trouble for that. Originally, everybody thought, well dogs just aren't very accurate. The dog alerts and the monitor says everything's fine, and then finally somebody was smart enough to notice that the dog alerts and 20 minutes later the monitor says everything's not fine. So there is likely some odor that precedes the smell of high and low and the smell of it dropping and the smell of it rising. 

My favorite description of how brilliant dog noses are is if you put it in visual terms, what we can see clearly from a third of a mile away, a dog would be able to see with equal clarity from 3,000 miles away. That's how much better their noses are. I mean, they're extraordinary. They smell parts per trillion. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. You're also placing dogs. in hospitals across the country. Tell me about that. 

Jennifer Arnold: Well, we started here in Atlanta, Children's HealthCare of Atlanta, and we noticed these dogs are also lifesavers. They provide enough support so that people who are really struggling can keep going. And parents will tell you that having the dog in the room with their child gave them a glimpse of hope that one day they would laugh again. This wasn't where they were going to be stuck forever. I've been the most surprised with the hospital dogs about the impact they make on the staff. You don't necessarily think about that, but I mean there's a surgeon who has reserved a dog for 10 minutes prior to surgery and 10 minutes plus after every surgery. He does oncology, so he deals with bad things, and he swears that the dog has kept him from retiring early which is awesome. And honestly, I kind of believe him.

There's just something about them. They just love you and show you that incredible affection. And they tell you that you're wonderful. And they make you feel like everything's going to be okay. Because dogs are, probably above all else, hopeful creatures. They experience every minute as if it was going to be wonderful, unless they've really been traumatized. They know such great joy, and they share that with us, sometimes when we can't find joy ourselves, and I think that's a big deal. These guys attach easily and quickly to new people, and that's important, especially for the hospital dogs. That's the toughest gig there is, I think, working in a hospital for one of our dogs. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah, I read one of your clients said that her dog makes her feel like her wheelchair disappeared. What do you think she means by that?

Jennifer Arnold: I know exactly what she means. When anything about you is different, I think people mostly intend to be kind, but in that effort, they ignore you, because they don't want to stare, and so they just don't look at you at all. When you've got this gorgeous dog next to you, everybody smiles. Our dogs all used to wear these patches that say, Please don't pet me, I'm working. And people would pet the dogs anyway. So we went to Please pet me, I'm friendly. So I think they make a difference when they're out in public. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. So in 2012, you develop the Bond-Based Approach to teaching dogs. Could you give us a brief definition of what  Bond-Based teaching is? What is the Bond-Based Approach?

Jennifer Arnold: So the Bond-Based Approach is asking rather than telling. All my life in dog training, I was taught that you never ask a dog, you always tell. And we've let go of that idea completely. We know that provided the dog feels safe and secure and capable, you can ask and they will respond. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. Take me to the moment when you realized that what you were doing or what you had learned prior just wasn't working. You know, what were you struggling with? Why did you do that? 

Jennifer Arnold: Well, it started when I was giving the dogs going into training camp where they would meet their future humans, every dog we had had to start on Imodium because they were going to have diarrhea in camp. And I thought that's because we increased the number of treats that we used, but I started getting suspicious and thinking that it was at least partially because of stress. I also did train the trainer classes for people who wanted to learn how to work with service dogs. And I'll never forget, we had this woman come from, I think, Ohio. She was working on a dog for her son, and she asked if she could come to this class and if she could bring the dog, and I said yes. And it was this lovely golden retriever, male, about eight months old, and he just was so nice. He was playful when it was time to be playful, but otherwise he would just relax and lie down right next to her. And we all said, what kind of training have you done with him? And I'll never forget what this woman said. She said, uh, I loved him. That's about it. And, you know, I started thinking, wow, we may not be looking at this in the right way, which led me to look at why we train animals the way we train them, and it's because we've gotten stuck in the psychological educational school of behaviorism of classical and operant conditioning. And while they both exist and can be effective, reward and punishment is not a great way to develop a relationship. 

People will say, well, we train, but it's all positive. That's not possible because even the absence of reward is in itself punishing. And so we started by saying we're not going to make food or affection contingent upon the dogs pleasing us in some way. It's not necessary. And honestly, it's a little bullying when you think about it. I mean, they can't get food for themselves, so you're gonna make them do tricks to get a little piece of treat? And I never thought it was about that tiny piece of Milkbone. I never believed that. I thought that little piece of Milkbone has to symbolize something. And I think what it symbolizes is everything's okay. I care about you enough to look after you. I'm happy enough with you to provide for you. And I think it must be terrifying for a dog to believe that they have to somehow appease you in order to survive.

Kate Tucker: It sounds to me like you're taking them from what was a transactional sort of experience into more of a relational experience. 

Jennifer Arnold: Totally. That is exactly what we're doing. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. What, how does it actually work? How do you start?

Jennifer Arnold: So, for example, with the Bond-Based Approach, we teach concepts. So, one of the concepts that we teach them early on is the concept of being gentle. You know, when faced with what we use initially is a stuffed animal, a toy that we treat as a human infant. We hold it like that and teach the dog that they have to be very gentle and then they learn that and they're able to generalize that into other situations. So, what we do first is we'll play hard with one of the toys first that they can play with and shake and tug and be as rough as they want to be with this toy. Then we bring out Baby and we hold out Baby with our arms positioned so that we can protect Baby if needed. And if the dog starts to put his mouth on Baby, we say, Uh, Uh, Uh. You're gentle with Baby. And there is some tone of voice involved, I would say. And if they start to put their paws up on you, you say the same thing. They're incredibly quick. Like, we don't do sessions like we used to when we trained. We just have the dog with us as we go through life. And we'll have a toy and a baby on top of the refrigerator and we'll stop and go through this once. So, when a toddler at a hospital runs toward the dog, when we used to train, we would tell the dog to sit and stay or to down and stay, which honestly is tantamount to pinning them in a corner. So now what we do is when the toddler runs toward the dog, we say, remember now, be so gentle like you are with Baby. So gentle. So they know the concept. So in essence, we are not saying, if you do this, I'll give you a treat. Or, if you don't do this, you're not going to get a treat. We say, we need you to remember, please do this.

And once they're that connected to you, and they feel safe, they do want to make you happy. I've never seen them turn down an ask. Now, I've had dogs, we ask a lot of yes, no questions. For example, I will say, I'd like to put your vest on now so we can go. May I put your vest on, yes or no? I've had plenty of dogs say no. And, you know, you just have to be prepared for that. And you ask again in a couple of minutes. And honestly, when you get to like the third ask, they usually start thinking, well, this is so important to her, let's just get this over with. And they're so much more stable. 

Like, when we used positive reinforcement, the dogs were so anxious all the time because they were looking for our next cue or command and waiting to get that treat. They're like, what do I have to do to get it? What do I have to do? I mean, if you fussed a little bit, you crushed them because they didn't have a super strong sense of self. With a Bond-Based dog, you can fuss. I mean, they're like, sorry, dude, but I needed to chase that deer for a second. And honestly, for the recipients, I mean, just having to direct the dogs every move, practically, is irritating because they don't think for themselves. You turn that thought off when you start training, to a large extent. It's somewhat different with pet dogs. With pet dogs, it's not nearly as damaging as it is with working dogs, whose only interaction with people is in this context. So I like it that they're smart enough to figure out what to do. A lot of times you don't even have to ask. I mean, they just think, yeah, that's a little one. I need to be really gentle. 

Kate Tucker: So how long does it take to put them through the training program before you can actually start training the people who they'll be placed with? 

Jennifer Arnold: Most of our dogs graduate at about two years of age. That's really just so they have time to grow up and we want to be sure that they have the maturity to handle what is a tough job.

Kate Tucker: So in that process, you've loved on them like crazy. You've established a bond where they trust you. How do you transfer that over to somebody new? 

Jennifer Arnold: Well, when the dogs are here with us, we first work on building a secure attachment with each puppy. And it's just like a secure attachment that a primary parent forms with a pre-verbal child. And we know from extensive research now that dogs form those attachments that are virtually indistinguishable from those formed by a pre-verbal child to a primary parent. Dogs will form that same kind of attachment to their primary human, and you want that to be very secure. So that secure attachment, once formed, allows them, just like with a young child, to then form secure attachments with others as they grow up.

And while the people are here in our recipient camp for two weeks, we also do a very sort of overt ceremony of hugging the person and saying, We trust them. You can trust them. They usually match on Monday, and Thursday night, for the first time, they get to go to the hotel with their new person. And Friday morning, they usually come in pretty thoroughly attached. I think it's who you sleep with. It makes a big difference. They're really connected. And we miss them and they love us, I think, always. But I also think they're glad to be in the spotlight, if that makes sense. I mean here they're one of a hundred. And each loved individually like crazy, but they're not our one and only.

Kate Tucker: Yeah. 

Jennifer Arnold: And I think they're happy to find somebody who sees them as their one and only. 

Kate Tucker: So how do placements work and how do you know which dogs are going to go where? 

Jennifer Arnold: I don't. They tell me.

Kate Tucker: So you bring the people in, they get through the process of being able to be there, which we'll talk about, but also once they're there, you actually let the dogs self select?

Jennifer Arnold: I mean, they're gonna do it anyway, so we may as well go with it. I mean, you're gonna be the most attracted to a dog who's the most attracted to you. So that's going to be the dog that you pick anyway. And I've never had a dog who didn't find their person, and I've never had a person who didn't find a dog.

Kate Tucker: Wow. How many dogs have you placed since you started? 

Jennifer Arnold: Almost 3,000. 

Kate Tucker: Wow. And what does that look like annually? 

Jennifer Arnold: Well, pre-COVID, we were at almost 100. We're now down around 60 or so, and I'm hoping that's where we'll stay. But we are trying a new way of finding and helping people. We have a program that we're beta testing right now called Handle with Care. It's an in-home education for future service dogs. It's a homeschooling offering. And so rather than having to wait on a waiting list, I mean, it can be 10 years that you have to wait on it, and we have people die on our waiting list. That shouldn't happen. We can teach people how to do this for themselves. I mean, we've cracked this code. So, we're willing to share everything we know and we ask families or individuals to find somebody who can act as a coach for them through this process and we will give everything we have to the coach and provide 24-7 support to the coaches. The way it works now with the schools, it's not scalable. We find out every year something else that dogs can do to help us. We're never going to catch up with the need unless we look at it differently, and this is how we've chosen to try and correct that. 

Kate Tucker: So anyone in any state can apply to this program and have support from you on how to become a coach.

Jennifer Arnold: Well, first, the person who needs a dog would apply. They do something, um, we call a pre-app that's available on our website, which is just canineassistants.org. And this is going to be Bond-Based. So if we feel like the person is not going to be able to understand Bond-Based or just won't do that, then we have to say you're not a good fit for us. But if you are a good fit for us, then we ask you to find a coach. And with our beta tests, we've been lucky because we've been able to find people pretty easily, but as it gets larger, we're going to have to go into communities and ask people to donate their time to try to make this work for families. And then we go through everything from acquiring an appropriate candidate, all the way through. 

Kate Tucker: So it's starting with the need, the person who needs the dog. And then that person finds the coach in their area? 

Jennifer Arnold: Correct. If possible. If you need us to help you, that's when we jump in. 

Kate Tucker: And what about if there's someone like my sister who's going to listen to this podcast and already has three dogs and a huge farm who wants to just learn how to be a coach and then…

Jennifer Arnold: And be ready if somebody needs her? 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. 

Jennifer Arnold: Yeah, that's great. But hang on, let us finish the beta test and then we will… Although actually, I think that application is up on our website already. It's under Community Facilitator. 

Kate Tucker: Did you hear that, Jo? All right, well, good. I think that's amazing. So I'd like to know a little more about how you select the people. So maybe not during the beta program, but just in your standard way of bringing people to camp. The waiting list is beyond what you can serve. How do you select who actually is placed with the dog? 

Jennifer Arnold: That's pretty agonal. After the pre-app has been approved, and they've been approved basically to submit a complete application, we evaluate each applicant based on how much a dog can do to help that person physically, socially, emotionally, and medically. And how appropriate that placement is for a dog. How appropriate it is for the dog and how much the dog can do to help. So it's not first come, first serve, which is frustrating. But it's the way it has to be because occasionally people who apply can't afford to wait. 

Kate Tucker: That's so much responsibility to have to make that decision.

Jennifer Arnold: We have a wonderful woman from California named Nicole Hearn who is responsible for that. She's a social worker by background, and it's not an easy thing to do. 

Kate Tucker: No. 

Jennifer Arnold: We average four pre-apps a day. 

Kate Tucker: Wow. 

Jennifer Arnold: It's a lot. 

Kate Tucker: So once somebody is approved and they come to the two week camp and they bring the dog to the hotel and they go through that whole process, what happens next? I mean, what does support look like? Do you stay in touch with them? How does that all work? 

Jennifer Arnold: There's a little graduation that's really cool. And I used to hand the dog their diplomas all rolled up with a beautiful ribbon and one dog helped me understand that that looks a lot like a dog bone, so I don't do that anymore.

Kate Tucker: And way less satisfying. 

Jennifer Arnold: That doesn't look good during graduation. Once they go home, especially initially, we stay in close touch. Our aftercare coordinator, Megan Hopkins, is incredible. And when we trained dogs, you could go home and the dog would sort of operate immediately. You could do all the retrieving and the lights and show off, tugging the doors open, and you could go out to Trader Joe's. And with Bond-Based dogs, it takes several weeks to several months before you get there. Because by virtue of the design, the dogs aren't finished for you when you come, if that makes sense, you have to form that relationship. But what we've seen is the training way, it was later on, several months in, that we started hearing about problems as the memory of training with us faded.

Kate Tucker: Oh, I see. 

Jennifer Arnold: The Bond-Based dogs, it just gets better and better. So, as long as we can convince people to slow down and give the dog a chance to really acclimate, it works a lot better in the long run. 

Kate Tucker: How much does it cost to kind of support a dog through its lifetime? 

Jennifer Arnold: Well, from birth all the way through, and we provide veterinary care and even food for the life of dogs when families can't afford to do that. And that's close to 30,000 a dog. It's a very labor intensive endeavor, but years ago, I saw an estimate that approximately 36,000 in other medical, like human attendants requirements is saved in the first three years of being matched with a service dog. So it's actually, they're cost effective.

Kate Tucker: In this work, I mean, how often are you thinking back to your father and his vision for it and maybe what he might think about where you're at now. 

Jennifer Arnold: I think about him every day and it pushes me to want to do better and give more and solve some problems that I see in the industry so that we can continue to ask dogs to help us. So, I mean, he's with me and my mom. I lost my mom in 1997. I mean, she's with me every day too. So, they're here.

Kate Tucker: So, it's interesting you set out to build something where dogs would serve humans, and it seems that now

your work involves helping humans understand how we can also participate in serving and loving our dogs.

Jennifer Arnold: Because it's the same thing. I mean, that's what I think it took me so many years to understand, was that. And we've actually had donors, we had one big donor here in Atlanta stop supporting us because they said we feel like you've become focused on the dogs. We have to be focused on the dogs. If we're not, they can't give the person everything they have, you know, so I feel like we were focused just on the people, really, in the beginning. And I mean, we tried to be kind to the dogs, but we had no awareness. or limited awareness that what we gave the dogs impacted what they could give others. 

Kate Tucker: Yeah. 

Jennifer Arnold: So now I feel like we at least embrace the fact that for the dogs to be able to really do their job and do it well, we have to give them what they need.

Kate Tucker: What's giving you reasons to hope these days?

Jennifer Arnold: The dogs. You can't look at them and not have hope. It's how they greet every second of every day with this extraordinary hope that everything's going to go well. And I think that keeps you moving along. 

Kate Tucker: It's so incredible. Oh, well, I am inspired and filled with hope. Thank you again, Jennifer. 

Jennifer Arnold: My great privilege. Thank you for having me. 

Kate Tucker: Thank you so much to Jennifer Arnold, the team at Canine Assistants, and to the thousands of amazing dogs out there helping us live richer, healthier lives. To find out more about their work, visit canineassistants.org

Hope Is My Middle Name is hosted and executive produced by me, Kate Tucker. You can find me on YouTube and on Instagram at KateTuckerMusic. And if there's someone you think belongs on the show, please send me a message!

Hope Is My Middle Name can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. It would mean a whole lot to us if you would follow the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review. We love hearing from you. And if you're still listening, please copy the link to this episode and text it to a friend. That alone makes a huge difference in helping us reach more people with more hope.

Hope Is My Middle Name is a podcast by Consensus Digital Media produced in association with Reasonable Volume. This episode was produced by Christine Fennessy with editing from Rachel Swaby. Our production coordinator is Percia Verlin. Our sound designer and engineer is Mark Bush. Music by the fantastic artists at Epidemic Sound, Soundstripe, and me. Big thanks to Conor Gaughan, our publisher and fearless leader at Consensus Digital Media. And thank you so, so much for listening. We'll see you next time!