If you scroll the service dog sides of TikTok and Instagram, you’ll see lots of incredible dogs showing the many ways they help their disabled owners. Maybe you’ve seen guide dogs guiding their blind handlers through crowded environments, or dogs facing discrimination from business owners or other entities, or others still in training. If you’ve seen the dogs still in training, there’s a good chance that at least some of them were being trained by the person they’ll eventually work with as a service dog. On social media, young disabled creators are training their own service dogs and sharing their journeys online. It’s a niche community that I’ve been a part of since I began training my service dog, Rosalie, back in 2021 to help me manage the symptoms of my obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Like most disabled people who trained their own service dogs, I am not a professional dog trainer, I’m just a disabled girl who loves dogs. There’s a provision in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that says disabled people have the right to train their own service dogs. But just because the ADA says that we can train our own service dogs, doesn’t mean that the training process is always accessible for us as disabled people. In fact, it’s really hard. Service dogs are highly trained to behave appropriately in public and perform specific tasks that assist their disabled handler, like retrieving dropped objects, alerting to high or low blood sugar, or providing mobility assistance like guidework or counterbalance. Training a service dog takes years. Most service dogs will begin their training as puppies, perfecting obedience skills and undergoing socialization before moving on to advanced training to learn specific tasks they need to know to support their disabled handler.
While many disabled people receive service dogs from professional training programs, getting a “program dog” often requires time and resources that many disabled people just cannot afford. Many reputable programs offer funding and fundraising assistance to their clients, but the cost of a service dog can often be in the tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the program. Even if you can afford a dog or get some type of funding help, there may not be one available for you because of high demand. So, for many disabled people, training their own service dog becomes the only option.
I sat down with three of my favorite creators — Carmen and her dog Pochita, Kaelynn and her dog Finnegan, and Ally and her dog Honey — to get their takes on the joys and challenges of training your own service dog as a young disabled person online. Here’s what they had to say.
Carmen selected Pochita to train as her service dog in late 2023 from a responsible breeder because of his exceptionally friendly and stable temperament and a willingness to work. Carmen says the online service dog community is full of young disabled people like her, many of them young women, who are learning just how much a dog can do – from psychiatric tasks, mobility tasks, and medical alert tasks, to finding help for their handlers when needed.
“And sometimes,” Carmen says, “it’s not just how much a dog can do, it’s also about what doctors can’t do.” Many disabled people consider a service dog as an option when the other options available to them just haven’t worked, or haven’t worked enough. A service dog can be a constant source of support for daily tasks. They can be trained to assist their handler during medical episodes with tactile stimulation or deep pressure therapy, or retrieve medication, water, or a person to help. Some dogs can even alert to oncoming medical episodes before they happen, and guide their handler to a safe place before they faint or have a seizure.
In that way, training your own service dog can be revolutionary, but many also overestimate how much a service dog will change their lives. “It’s easy to think the dog is supposed to change everything,” Carmen says. “The dog is supposed to bring your health back. It’s supposed to give you independence.” In reality, it’s not that simple.
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It takes years of regular daily training sessions to learn obedience skills and advanced tasks, but it also takes that time for the dog to mature, experience the world, while building a relationship together. The specific training you need to do will also differ depending on which kinds of tasks you need your dog to perform for you. It might take months or years of consistent practice to train your dog to reliably alert to medical episodes by detecting your high heart rates or low blood sugars, and more time still for the dog to be able to perform that task in busy environments with lots of distractions. Some tasks take longer than others to train and dogs have preferences, personalities, and breed-specific behaviors that can help or hinder the training process, too. You might get lucky and get a dog who is a natural retriever, so training the dog to bring items to help you might be relatively straightforward. Or, you might get a dog who is absolutely not a natural retriever, like Rosalie, who I have been training to do object retrievals for over two years. We’re making progress — she can now consistently bring me a water bottle from six-feet away — but only if there’s chicken involved. It’ll be a while yet until she is able to bring me what I need when I need it. Like many service dog handlers, I say that we’re always training.
Kaelynn (who you may know from Netflix’s Love on the Spectrum) trained her dog, Finnegan, to perform a variety of tasks to help her manage her autism. For all the help and joy that Finn, a black labrador, brings her, Kaelynn also highlights a side to service dogs that not everyone may think about.
“I wish people understood that a service dog is not a ‘quick fix’ for disability related issues. In fact, using a service dog oftentimes creates or exacerbates existing issues [for disabled people],” she says. “It can increase my anxiety in public because I never know when to expect someone else’s dog flying around the corner trying to eat mine, or a child running up behind me trying to grab my dog, or curious members of the public interrogating me about how I got my service dog and how to make their dog a service dog.”
Ally has faced similar issues with her five-month-old show-line long haired German Shepherd named Honey. On one hand, Honey loves ice cubes and belly scritches and is a delightful big baby, but on the other, training her represents what Ally calls a “constant mental load.”
“So many people think having a service dog is just them walking pretty on a leash, but it’s not. It’s a constant mental load on the person. Everything that I am experiencing, I experience through the lens of dog training now,” she says. “At times, going outside of the house can be extremely overstimulating because where somebody sees, say, a farmer's market, I see a really tough environment for Honey to be in. I think, how am I going to navigate that? How am I going to walk her through?”
Ally and Honey have just started their training journey, and it’s a long road ahead. Ally knows that most dogs aren’t suited to service dog work, so she was incredibly intentional in selecting Honey to train to be her service dog to give them both the best chance of success. If everything goes right, Honey will learn how to help Ally with psychiatric tasks and medical alerts.
Still, there are no guarantees. “There's been a few dogs in my journey. When we say not every dog can be a service dog and you're training your own dog, that's the reality,” Carmen says. “And I wasn't even set up to fail, necessarily. In fact, I had a lot more resources than I think a lot of people do when they start training.”
To train your own service dog, you need not only time and patience, but also knowledge about how to train service dogs specifically. You need to know how to read dog body language and understand behavior and communication, and you need to learn how to identify and address any problem behaviors when they come up, like fear, reactivity, and excitement. It also helps if you have people around you who can cheer you on. But as Carmen notes, even someone who has the right resources might not be successful if the dog just isn’t up for the task. Like people, some dogs are better suited to be helpers than others.
“It's still just a matter of a little bit of luck and faith and pixie dust in the process, because you want all the good genetics, you want the good breeding, but then you need all the positive experiences, and you need the time, and you need the energy,” Carmen says. “You need your life to not be falling apart at that moment.”
A lot has to go right when you train your own service dog. But part of the journey is also learning how to work with what you have. Ally says getting a dog with the perfect temperament is not accessible to everyone, and “a dog that is 100% neutral, or professionally trained, or from a program – that dog comes with a price tag that not everyone can afford.”
Kaelynn says, “Unfortunately, having a service dog is a luxury. The process is unavoidably expensive. There is no cost-effective way to do it.” While some people forego any professional training classes, many seek out support from professionals who train you how to train your dog. Those classes add up. And then there’s the added costs of caring for the dog — everything from toys, to treats, to food, and leashes, harnesses, and kennels. Vet visits add up, too.
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Ally is committed to doing her best with Honey, even if Honey doesn’t turn out to be that all-star service dog she hopes she’ll be.“We're both just figuring it out. For better or for worse, she’s the dog that I have, and you have to learn how to train the dog you have in front of you.”
After all, even the most promising dogs are still just dogs. They have bad days, just like us. Ally says, “there's going to be a point where you look at this little five-month-old teething terror and you're like, I don't think she's going to make it as a service dog. And that's a very scary thought.”
It’s a thought that so many of us who train our own service dogs have when we struggle with training. But Ally says that she’s found a space to share those thoughts online. “Sometimes you just need one person to say it out loud so that you can say it out loud, too. It breaks the stigma around service dogs in training.”
Training a service dog isn’t always just about training, either. Every dog will need to have their needs met in order to train or work effectively. But Carmen says that meeting all of your dog’s needs all the time can be challenging, especially for disabled people. “You are often dealing with a group of disabled individuals who might not have the ability to do that, all the time. A lot of days, I don't either. It’s a give and take process, because you are both living beings.”
Kaelynn agrees. “While my dog is there to support me, I am still responsible for him and his behavior,” she says, “which in some circumstances can be a lot of added stress.”
This is the catch-22 of training your own service dog as a disabled person. On some days, the symptoms and experience of your disability – the very thing you need to train your service dog for – make training your own service dog difficult, if not impossible. Still, even on our bad days, our dogs need training, enrichment, play, and care.
Ally documented this challenge in a series called #SadGirlDogTraining. In the 21-part series, Ally shares the training and enrichment activities that she did during her depressive episodes for her late (and beloved) service dog, Hilo, a high energy and high demand Belgian Malinois (if you know, you know). Ally offers us “hacks” for navigating the messy reality of training your own service dog while living with disability and chronic illness.
Ally lost Hilo suddenly last year, but he shared an incredibly special life with Ally that continues to impact so many of us on our training journeys. For me, there’s an honesty in Ally and Hilo’s #SadGirlDogTraining series that gives us a glimpse of just how much we will do for our dogs – and just how much they will do for us, too. Ally and Hilo show us that training your own service dog is a process that builds an unbreakable partnership made out of love and care and mutual understanding.
My conversations with Carmen, Kaelynn, and Ally remind me that training your own service dog is life changing – for better, certainly, but sometimes for worse. And while we often focus on the end goal – having a fully trained service dog who can reliably perform tasks in difficult environments to help us manage our disabilities – I think there’s a bit of magic that happens when you train your own service dog. So I asked Kaelynn, Carmen and Ally if training their own service dogs has taught them about living life as a disabled person.
For Ally, training her own service dog has changed the way she thinks about her disabilities. “Training Honey provides an opportunity for my disabilities to be something that I can explore, rather than this sentence that I have. If I am having a tough disability day, there are still opportunities for my version of happiness – even in really tough moments – but only because I have this dog.”
Kaelynn says that working with Finnegan has taught her how to be flexible in meeting her needs as an autistic person. “I’ve learned that, for me, there are a variety of ways to meet the same need. I think it’s important that all people learn and have access to a variety of ways to get their needs met. Using a service dog has taught me to be flexible and use a variety of strategies.”
And Carmen says that training a service dog has allowed her to learn how to advocate for herself. “When your dog is your medical equipment, you have to have the concept of, I deserve to have this medical equipment with me so I can access things as much as possible.” It’s a hard concept for many service dog handlers to embrace, especially when you’d be hard pressed to find a service dog handler who has not been denied access to a public space with their service dog, as a matter of routine. It’s a demoralizing experience.
But Carmen says, “In the training process, you just learn how to advocate for your dog – you learn how to ask for things, and how to say, I just need to take a moment, my dog needs a break. And I’ve learned how to do that for myself now, too. I have learned that this dog is going to give me access to the world, and I deserve that access. Now, I tell myself, you deserve this. But I started by learning how to advocate for my dog.”
