Veterans Administration refuses to provide Service Dogs for Veterans suffering from PTSD

IF no other post I write ever gets your attention here at US NAVY JEEP, I pray it is this one.

The Veterans Administration has issued a ruling that states they will not provide a service dog to Veterans who suffer from PTSD.

We are talking about providing Man's Best Friends to deserving Veterans as Dogs have proven to help our Veterans, especially those dealing with PTSD.  There are dozens of non-profit organizations that are training service dogs as they have seen that the presence of a trained service dogs helps those who suffer from PTSD.

And the reason why they refuse to offer the invaluable help of man's best friends?  They say there is no "clinical evidence" that Dogs help Veterans with PTSD.  In reality, it comes down to a simple answer - MONEY.  The Government doesn't want to pay for the dogs.

These gov paperpushers will hand themselves lifetime goldplated benefits but won't provide a suffering Veteran with a trained service dog.

I find it hard to believe but these self-serving hacks have put in place a federal rule that documents their refusal to provide an assistance service dogs for Veterans unless the Veteran has mobility, hearing or sight issues. They are hiding behind the usual " Sorry, we don't agree with it, regardless of how many others have proven it " BS.

Service Dogs have been shown to provide great help to those who deal with PTSD.  The number of non-profit agencies working to train dogs for the mission of helping our Veterans are proof enough that Dogs are of great benefit to our Veterans.  These agencies have hundreds of cases where they have placed a trained service dog and it was highly beneificial to the Veteran with PTSD.

My theory is that the pencil-pushers in the beltway don't want to shoulder the cost, just like they have been denying Veterans benefits over the last 7-10 years even though the Veteran meets all the criteria for VA assistance.  No, we got ours and screw you Veterans.

The words I would use on these gutless wonders can't be printed here as it wouldn't be best but I tell you if I got to meet them face to face, I would be using some of my best Sailor/Marine words on them.

There will be a special place in Hell reserved for these dishonorable bureaucrats. I hope one day they understand how wrong they are about how Man's Best Friend's are of great benefit to our Veterans suffering from PTSD.  Of course, by then it will be too late for those who needed the service dogs.


Veteran Affairs won't cover costs of PTSD service dogs by Laura Moss - www.mnn.com
 

More veterans are being diagnosed with PTSD, but there's little research about how service dogs help with this 'invisible disability.'           

 

The Department of Veterans Affairs will pay for service dogs assigned to veterans with impaired vision, hearing or mobility, but it will not cover the cost of dogs assigned for mental disabilities like post-traumatic stress disorder, according to new federal regulations.

Many dogs provide support to veterans suffering from PTSD, but although more veterans are being diagnosed with the anxiety disorder, the VA says there's not enough evidence that these dogs help with the symptoms of combat-related disabilities. A new Army policy has already made it more difficult for soldiers to obtain service dogs and keep them on Army bases.

There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that service dogs help veterans cope with PTSD, but research lags and the VA is skeptical.

"VA has not yet been able to determine that these dogs provide a medical benefit to veterans with mental illness. Until such a determination can be made, VA cannot justify providing benefits for mental health service dogs," the department said.

There have been no double-blind, randomized controlled trials on the benefits of service dog and PTSD patients, and there are no widely accepted standards for training dogs to alleviate PTSD symptoms.

Researchers at the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa, Fla., are conducting the first study to look at benefits of pairing veterans with PTSD with specially trained dogs. Congress recommended the three-year study, permitting the Department of Veterans Affairs to match as many as 200 veterans with dogs, but only 17 participants are currently enrolled.

Three service dog organizations partnered with the hospital to conduct the study, but Guardian Angels Medical Service Dogs (GAMSD) is the only association still involved in the research. The organization trains PTSD service dogs to perform such tasks as awakening clients from nightmares and reminding them to take medication.

Carol Borden, GAMSD’s executive director, says she’s seen dramatic improvements in veterans’ lives after they’ve been matched with dogs.

"The results are very immediate. They’re very quick. It’s not a cure, but they are able to manage their challenges much better than they have in years,” Borden told NBC News.

Demand for PTSD service dogs is high, according to Borden, who says that most recipients spend four years on her organization’s waiting list.

Determining the need for service dogs

 

It’s estimated that 13 to 20 percent of the more than 2.6 million Americans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001 have or could develop PTSD.

But unlike service dogs for people with more obvious physical disabilities, there can sometimes be confusion over who can have a dog accompany them into certain places. The American Disabilities Act requires businesses to allow people with disabilities to enter with service animals, but dogs whose sole function is to provide comfort or emotional support do not qualify as service animals under the ADA. However, according to the ADA, dogs that calm a person with PTSD during an anxiety attack are considered a reasonable modification to ADA policies.

Service dogs assist disabled people with specific tasks like opening doors and pulling wheelchairs. Therapy dogs, on the other hand, provide comfort, motivation and emotional support. With proper documentation they can often be taken onto planes and other spaces where animals aren’t usually allowed.

Although PTSD service dogs are trained to respond to certain cues, such as nudging an owner into a petting session if he exhibits panic attack symptoms, and to perform tasks like reminding him to take medications, some people are skeptical of the idea that a dog can assist with a so-called "invisible" disability.

However, there’s evidence that interacting with animals produces biochemical changes in some people’s brains.

Research shows that when people focus on petting a dog, it can increase oxytocin, a chemical that quiets the brain’s fear response. Caring for a pet also helps people become more secure and self-sufficient, according to Hal Herzog, a psychology professor at Western Carolina University.

Training service dogs can also be a form of therapy, according to Rick Yount, founder of Warrior Canine Connection, an organization that has PTSD patients train service dogs. After completing a 2008 training program at a veteran’s hospital, many participants reported lower stress levels, decreased depression, better impulse control and improved sleep.

Yount says that it might be most effective for veterans with PTSD to train a service dog before receiving one themselves.

"They have to convince the dog the world is a safe place, rather than letting the dog prove to them that the world is a safe place,” he told MSNBC.

For more information on service dogs, visit the International Assistance Dog Week website.

 

Man & Dog have been together a lot longer than we ever imagined....

By all accounts, man & dog have been living together for about 15000 years, since the end of the last ice age. Man has altered dogs to serve our needs and due to man, the dog is the most genetically altered species in the world. We have bred dogs to serve the needs of hunting, farm duties and for vanity.

Now, researchers have found that the partnership between man & dog may go back as far as 33,000 years ago based on new evidence found in cave dwellings in France.

All I know is our lives would not be the same without our 4 legged friends. I am glad to say that the three that reside with my family are valued for their companionship, attentiveness and that they make sure no one comes near our home without us knowing about it.


From the Cave to the Kennel

What the evolutionary history of the dog tells us about another animal: ourselves. From a cave in France, a new picture has emerged of canines as our prehistoric soulmates.
By Mark Derr - Wall Street Journal

Chauvet Cave in southern France houses the oldest representational paintings ever discovered. Created some 32,000 years ago, the 400-plus images of large grazing animals and the predators who hunted them form a multi-chambered Paleolithic bestiary. Many scholars believe that these paintings mark the emergence of a recognizably modern human consciousness. We feel that we know their creators, even though they are from a time and place as alien as another planet.

What most intrigues many people about the cave, however, is not the artwork but a set of markings at once more human and more mysterious: the bare footprints of an 8- to 10-year-old torch-bearing boy left in the mud of a back chamber some 26,000 years ago—and, alongside one of them, the paw print of his traveling companion, variously identified as a wolf or a large dog.

Attributing that paw print to a dog or even to a socialized wolf has been controversial since it was first proposed a decade ago. It would push back by some 12,000 years the oldest dog on record. More than that: Along with a cascade of other new scientific findings, it could totally rewrite the story of man and dog and what they mean to each other.

For decades, the story told by science has been that today's dogs are the offspring of scavenger wolves who wandered into the villages established by early humans at the end of the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago. This view emphasizes simple biological drive—to feed on human garbage, the scavenging wolf had to behave in a docile fashion toward humans. And—being human—we responded in kind, seeking out dogs for their obsequiousness and unconditional devotion.

As the story goes, these tame wolves bred with other tame wolves and became juvenilized. Think of them as wolves-lite, diminished in strength, stamina and brains. They resembled young wolves, with piebald coats, floppy ears and shorter, weaker jaws. Pleading whiners, they drowned their human marks in slavish devotion and unconditional love. Along the way, they lost their ability to kill and consume their prey.

But it was never clear, in this old account, just how we got from the scavenging wolf to the remarkable spectrum of dogs who have existed over time, from fell beasts trained to terrorize and kill people to creatures so timid that they flee their own shadows. The standard explanation was that once the dump-diver became a dog, humans took charge of its evolution through selective breeding, choosing those with desired traits and culling those who came up short.

This account is now falling apart in the face of new genetic analyses and recently discovered fossils. The emerging story sees humans and proto-dogs evolving together: We chose them, to be sure, but they chose us too, and our shared characteristics may well account for our seemingly unshakable mutual intimacy.

Dogs and humans are social beings who depend on cooperation for their survival and have an uncanny ability to understand each other in order to work together. Both wolves and humans brought unique, complementary talents to a relationship that was based not on subservience and intimidation but on mutual respect.

It seems that wolves and humans met on the trail of the large grazing animals that they both hunted, and the most social members of both species gravitated toward each other. Several scholars have even suggested that humans learned to hunt from wolves. At the least, camps with wolf sentinels had a competitive advantage over those without. And people whose socialized wolves would carry packs had an even greater advantage, since they could transport more supplies. Wolves benefited as well by gaining some relief from pup rearing, protection for themselves and their offspring, and a steadier food supply.

The relationship between dogs and humans has been so mutually beneficial and enduring that some scholars have suggested that we—dog and human—influenced each other's evolution.

The Chauvet Cave "dogwolf"—the term I use for a doglike, or highly socialized, wolf who kept company with humans—is controversial, but it cannot easily be dismissed. Over the past three years, it has been grouped convincingly with a number of similar animals that have been identified in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and the Altai Mountains in Southern Siberia, dating from 33,000 to 16,000 years ago.

Identification of these early dogs, combined with recent genetic evidence and a growing understanding of animals not as stimulus-response machines but as sentient beings, has broken the consensus model of dog domestication—leaving intact little more than the recognition of the grey wolf, Canis lupus, as progenitor of the dog. Everything else, it seems, is up for grabs.

According to the old view, the dog arose around 15,000 years ago in the Middle East. (Or in China, south of the Yangtze River, an alternate possible origin point added in the last decade in an attempt to reconcile archaeological evidence with emerging DNA evidence.)

The first major challenge to the consensus came in 1997, when an international team of biologists published a paper in the journal Science placing the origin of the dog as early as 135,000 years ago. Their date was based on analysis of mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on to offspring through females and is believed to change little from generation to generation; it allows scientists to calculate the time when populations or species separated genetically. This analysis suggested that wolves could have become dogs wherever in Eurasia they associated closely with early humans, and that even after the split was made, dogs and wolves continued to interbreed.

In short, because of their natural affinities, wherever and whenever wolves and humans met on the trail, some of them began to keep company. Often, when socialized wolves died, there were no others immediately available to replace them. But sometimes several socialized wolves would mate or a socialized female would mate with a "wild" wolf and then have her litter near the human camp. The pups would stay or go, according to their natures. This kind of arrangement could have continued for a considerable period. Any number of them could ultimately have produced dogwolves or dogs. Most of those lines would have vanished over time.

The DNA evidence remained controversial for years, even as most major studies placed the genetic separation of wolf and dog at earlier dates than those favored by archaeologists. Hard proof was slow to appear. The Chauvet Cave paw print once provided the only physical evidence for the existence of dogs before 15,000 years ago—and it was, at best, an indirect piece of support.

Then in 2008, Mietje Germonpré, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science and the leader of an international team of scientists, re-examined fossil material excavated from Goyet Cave in Belgium in the late 19th century and announced the identification of a 31,700-year-old dog, a large and powerful animal who ate reindeer, musk oxen and horses. The dogwolf from Goyet Cave was a creature of the Aurignacian culture that had produced the art in Chauvet Cave.

Last July, another international team identified the remains of a 33,000-year-old "incipient dog" from the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia. This month, Ms. Germonpré confirmed another find, this one in the Czech Republic, of the remains of a 26,000- to 27,000-year-old dog that had been buried with a bone in its mouth—perhaps to fuel it as it accompanied its human companion to the afterlife.

While the old consensus model held that the first dogs were small, these and other recently identified early dogs are large animals, often with shorter noses and broader faces than today's wolves. These early dogs appear in the camps of hunters of horses, reindeer, mammoths and other big game. From all appearances, they were pack animals, guards, hunters and companions. They are perhaps best viewed as the offspring of highly socialized wolves who had begun breeding in or near human camps.

Our view of domestication as a process has also begun to change, with recent research showing that, in dogs, alterations in only a small number of genes can have large effects in terms of size, shape and behavior. Far from being a product of the process of domestication, the mutations that separated early dogs from wolves may have arisen naturally in one or more small populations; the mutations were then perpetuated by humans through directed breeding. Geneticists have identified, for instance, a mutation in a single gene that appears to be responsible for smallness in dogs, and they have shown that the gene itself probably came from Middle Eastern wolves.

All of this suggests that it was common for highly socialized wolves and people to form alliances. It also leads logically to the conclusion that the first dogs were born on the move with bands of hunter-gatherers—not around semi-permanent pre-agricultural settlements. This may explain why it has proven so difficult to identify a time and place of domestication.

Taken together, these recent discoveries have led some scientists to conclude that the dog became an evolutionary inevitability as soon as humans met wolves. Highly social wolves and highly social humans started walking, playing and hunting together and never stopped. The dog is literally the wolf who stayed, who traded wolf society for human society.

Humans did wield a significant influence over dogs, of course, by using breeding to perpetuate mutations affecting their shape, size and physical abilities. Recent studies suggest that the dog has unique abilities among animals to follow human directions and that its capacity for understanding words can approach that of a two-year-old child. To various degrees, humans appear to have concentrated those and other characteristics and traits through selective breeding.

Since the advent of scientific breeding in the late 18th century, humans have altered the look and temperament of the dog more than they had over thousands of preceding years. A team of gene-sequencers at the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that the dog lost 4% of its genetic diversity during its initial separation from the wolf. Much greater losses have occurred as a result of modern breed formation, one result of which is the more than 400 inheritable diseases to which purebreds are uniquely vulnerable.

Recent genetic evidence has confirmed that certain basic types—pariah dogs, sight hounds, mastiffs, spitz-type dogs and small dogs—arose very early in the transformation of wolf to dog. These dogs adapted to their homelands and often had special talents as hunters, guards and eventually herders. These characteristics were often perpetuated over time.

Scientific breeders believed they could improve on nature by consolidating several similar types into one breed or isolating a few prize specimens from a larger population. In both cases, they relied on inbreeding to create and perpetuate the look and talents they wanted. With the advent of kennel clubs in the mid-19th century, the pace of breed creation picked up.

Breeders began to create dogs to fit the needs of the wealthy—from sporting dogs that could point and retrieve fowl, to little puppy-like lap dogs. The dog proved to be a wonderful animal for testing the skill of breeders, since it could be stretched in size from two to 200 pounds.

Purebred dogs were expensive commodities until after World War II, when they became symbols of arrival in the middle class. Increased demand led to increased breeding, often in puppy mills. The resulting dogs had health and behavior problems from bad breeding and the poor care of pregnant females and newborn puppies.

In some cases, the traits that breeders desire are inherited along with unwanted, debilitating conditions—such as when blindness and epilepsy accompany particular coat styles and eye colors. In many regards, the original, naturally occurring breeds were healthier and better at their appointed tasks than their purebred heirs.

But this is just the most recent chapter of a long tale. The tableau in the mud of Chauvet Cave is a stark reminder that dogs and humans have traveled together for tens of thousands of years, from ancient hunting camps to farms, ranches cities and suburbs—from the tropics to the poles. The relationship has endured not because dogs are juvenilized wolves but because they are dogs—our faithful companions.

—Mr. Derr's most recent book is "How the Dog Became the Dog: From Wolves to Our Best Friends."

Banning service dogs is NOT a solution....

Liberty Mutual posted this story on their website and asked the reader to be the judge.

The City of Indianapolis made two poor decisions. Like schools banning peanut butter, the employees should be told to limit the food with paprika and handle it carefully, not have to have it banned as if they are unable to handle the responsibility of handling food correctly.

Allowing Emily Kysel to have a service dog to help her was a good decision. To ban her service dog but no one else's is a 2nd mistake. Her service dog is as needed as others.

I feel there are better solutions than banning things from the workforce. Banning things never produced a solution. It is better to place the responsibility in the hands of those who are on your staff, and support those who need additional assistance.

In this case, the employer, The City of Indianapolis made poor decisions and employees suffered for those decisions.

Be the Judge: Banning Service Dogs
by Kathy McManus / Liberty Mutual

Emily Kysel has a potentially fatal allergy to paprika. The 24-year-old Indianapolis city worker nearly died five years ago from eating chili, and since then, The New York Times reports, “her allergy has sent her to the emergency room five times and caused her to jab herself with an anti-allergy injection 11 times, sometimes from just inhaling paprika nearby.”

Kysel’s boss banned co-workers from eating any foods containing paprika—like buffalo wings-- at their desks. Her family helped her buy a $10,000 allergy-detection service dog that alerts her to the presence of paprika by jumping on her. But the first day she took the golden retriever to work, a co-worker with an allergy to dogs suffered an asthma attack. Kysel’s boss then banned the dog.

Kysel contends that the city of Indianapolis has treated her unfairly by barring her service dog while allowing blind employees to use theirs. She has filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in a case The Times says “raises tough questions about how to balance the sometimes clashing interests of co-workers with disabilities.”

You be the judge: what’s the most ethical way to settle this case? Should one person’s allergy outweigh another’s??

Going to the Dogs.....How Service Dogs are helping more people

My MILBLOG seems to be going to the Dogs !!!!

As the casual reader might guess, I am keenly devoted to our four-legged friends and all that they can do for us.....

They are "devotion on 4 legs" and only worried about us....they live in the moment and show no concern for their own welfare, only that of their human companions.

I would like to work with organizations that increase the ability to utilize dogs for areas where people need assistance and where the K-9's physical abilities of smell, hearing, sight and presence can aid those who need a 24 hour a day companion. The Dog is a noble creature and one we can count on, just as he has counted on us for many centuries.

latimes.com
Service dogs are beyond fetching

Their use is growing. They help guide the blind, perform tasks for the physically disabled and may even help people with epilepsy and autism.
By Karen Ravn, Special to the Los Angeles Times
July 18, 2011

One moment 15-year-old Glen Gregos was a happy-go-lucky kid riding a motorcycle. The next he was the lucky-to-be-alive victim of a terrible accident, paralyzed from the chest down.

Now 54 and a resident of Woodland Hills, Gregos has built a rewarding life — college, marriage, a successful banking career, a daughter who just graduated from college.

Still, for decades after the accident, Gregos faced challenges every day from simple things most of us take for granted — going to the grocery store, going out the front door. And then six years ago, his life took another dramatic turn. He met Beulah — a.k.a. Miss Bo — a black Labrador retriever who has been at his side, 24/7, ever since — to open doors, carry bags, pull his wheelchair, pick up anything he drops on the floor and cheer up any black mood he falls into.

"It's hard to put into words everything these dogs do for you," he says. "It's physical. It's emotional. It's all-encompassing. You probably have to live it to understand it."

Miss Bo is not considered a pet. She's a service dog, a concept first introduced with guide (or seeing-eye) dogs for the blind, perhaps as far back as the 16th century, though it wasn't until 1929 that the first guide dog training school in the U.S. opened up. By the 1970s, people had started training dogs to help with other disabilities, and that trend has continued.

Service dogs now include dogs that can open cupboards and drawers, alert someone to a ringing telephone, assist someone during a disorienting seizure, help someone keep their balance or get back up after a fall, not to mention dogs that can sniff allergens in the air or low blood sugar on someone's breath.

"Here in the U.S. we have a highly individualistic culture — creative, experimental," says Lynette Hart, director of the Center for Animals in Society at UC Davis. "It's like a caldron for coming up with new things that dogs can do for us. And dogs love to work. It's a very natural marriage for them to help people."

This has been a boon for many who, like Gregos, have had their lives changed by some extraordinary dogs. But potential pitfalls abound. "There's almost no regulation," Hart says. "And everyone wants to do what they want to do."

Sometimes people want to call their dogs service dogs even though they're really not. And sometimes people want to believe dogs can do things even though there's no real proof they can.

Many dogs have a natural knack for providing comfort, companionship and emotional support to their people, who often consider that a pretty big service. But it doesn't make those dogs service dogs. Neither does a capacity for warding off crime by looking or sounding formidable. According to the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act and new regulations put in place in March, a service dog must be trained to perform a service for a person with a disability that is directly related to the person's disability — turning lights on and off for someone who's paralyzed, for example, or alerting someone who's deaf that a smoke alarm is blaring.

Many organizations train one or more kinds of service dogs, and in general their programs follow a pattern set by the early guide dog training organizations: careful breeding followed by puppy-raising by volunteers who begin the basics of obedience and socialization, and finally intensive training by professionals. (Potential human recipients also are carefully screened, trained and matched to dogs.)

Guide Dogs for the Blind, the first guide dog training school on the West Coast, relies solely on Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers and crosses of the two. Training organizations for other types of service dogs often do too. "They have wonderful temperaments," says Katie Malatino, public relations coordinator for one such organization, Canine Companions for Independence, headquartered in Santa Rosa. "They're a good size for the tasks they have to do, and they have an instinct to retrieve, which comes in handy for picking things up off the floor."

Canine Companions for Independence provided Miss Bo to Gregos in November 2005. These days she is always on call if Gregos needs her, which is not to say that she never has any fun. "She has toys," he says. "We play ball. But once she gets vested up" — wearing the vest that identifies her as a service dog — "she knows, 'OK, I'm ready to work.' " (And people who see the vest should should know and respect that too.)

Like any good service dog, when she's working, Miss Bo is unperturbed by loud or unexpected noises ("bomb proof," Malatino calls it) and undistracted by other animals or people — unless Gregos gives her special dispensation. Which he often does.

"I put her in a 'sit' and let people pet her," he says. "I want to create more awareness about these special dogs. I wasn't aware of them myself for a long time. I'd think, 'What can a dog do for a guy in a wheelchair?' "

The Americans With Disabilities Act says service dogs get to go wherever their people go: grocery stores, restaurants, libraries, amusement parks, boats, buses, trains, planes and no-pets-allowed hotels. New regulations issued this spring establish two exceptions (which would surely never apply to Miss Bo): Service dogs can be banished if they get out of control or if they transact certain business indoors that should have been seen to outside.

Not everyone knows the rules. Gregos once spent several hours convincing officials at a hotel with a no-pets policy that they were obligated to let Miss Bo in. "One side of me thought, 'I don't want to stay here anyway,'" he says. "But the other part thought, 'They've got to be educated.' "

Even beyond the issue of ignorance, service dog use is not without controversy. One problem is cheaters.

"A lot of people try to skirt the system," Gregos says. "I see it all the time." Some will claim that their pet dogs are service dogs that help them with disabilities they don't really have — and they can get away with that, because the law doesn't require people to present proof of their own disability or their dog's capacity to deal with it. (It doesn't help that service dog vests are readily available online.) Proprietors may deny entrance to dogs that arouse their skepticism, and that's fine if they're right. If they're wrong, it can lead to a fine of a very different kind.

Another problem is that there are no industry-wide standards for trainers or dogs, leaving disabled people on their own to determine how much they should trust an organization's claims. "Guide Dogs for the Blind — they're very reputable," says Dr. Melissa Bain, chief of the Behavior Service at the UC Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital. "If they graduate a dog, OK, I trust it." But not every organization has the same long history of success.

Of course, some claims are easier to validate than others. It's easy to see if a dog can pull a wheelchair or open a refrigerator door. But seizure prediction? "The trouble," Bain adds, "is if people rely on the dog and nothing else, that could be dangerous."

Sometimes the question isn't whether a particular dog can perform a task but whether some tasks are even canine-ly possible. Take seizure detection again. "Is that legitimate?" Bain says. "Maybe."

In 1999, a British epilepsy specialist and a behavioral scientist/animal trainer reported that by giving dogs a reward every time their owners had seizures, they had been able to train some dogs to warn of oncoming seizures as much as 15 to 45 minutes before the seizures occurred. Their paper in the journal Seizure inspired a demand for such dogs.

Today, the Epilepsy Foundation says on its website, "while some people have been very pleased with their new canine friends, others have been disappointed." The foundation "recommends that people take great care in reviewing trainer claims and results, especially when thousands of dollars are involved."

More questions arose in 2007 when four of the seven seizure-alert dogs in a study in the journal Neurology were found to be warning people of psychological, not epileptic, seizures. Psychological seizures, caused by mental stress, can often be eliminated through counseling — without drugs — making warnings beside the point. And in one case in that study, a dog's "warning behaviors" were found to set the seizures off.

Service dogs for children with autism have inspired a debate all their own, with some districts reluctant to allow the dogs into their schools because, they argue, the dogs cause too much trouble — other children may be scared or allergic; child and dog may require extra supervision.

But, in fact, the value of service dogs to children with autism is less controversial than it is for seizures. "One of the main things our dogs do is provide safety," says Kati Rule-Witco, executive director and placement specialist for Autism Service Dogs of America, a training organization founded in 2002 that's based in Lake Oswego, Ore. "Often children with autism will run off. Parents have trouble just going to the grocery store. Our dogs provide a way for families to go out safely."

A 2008 study in the journal Qualitative Health Research looked at what happened when service dogs were brought into 10 families with children with autism and found that they did, indeed, enhance safety and facilitate public outings. When the child and dog go out into the community together, the dog is tethered to the child but also connected to the adult caregiver since that's who holds the dog's leash. Autism service dogs are also trained to keep their cool no matter what their young charges do (hug, squeeze, lie on top of the dog) and to take positive steps to cope with negative behavior (nudge or lean against the child, maybe even stop the child from hurting himself).

All of this costs money, a lot of it. That's true for training any service dog. Some organizations — like Guide Dogs for the Blind and Canine Companions — can operate on donations alone. But not all. Autism Service Dogs of America says the average cost for breeding, raising, training and placing one of their dogs is $20,000, $13,500 of which families are required to pay before they are placed on the waiting list for the next available dog.

The website for Autism Service Dogs of America has testimonials from 10 satisfied families who use words like "awesome" and "miracle" to describe their dogs and the jobs they do. They firmly believe that their money was well spent. But not everyone is convinced.

Bain notes that research so far has not compared service dogs to ordinary family dogs, and she suggests the latter might do just about as well. "Maybe a child feels better sitting next to the dog," she says. "There's no way to tell if special training does any good."

Gregos has no such questions about the good that Miss Bo's special training has done for him. But she'll be 8 in August, and the time is coming when she'll need to retire and he'll need to get a new service dog. Then Miss Bo will change from service dog to pet dog and spend the rest of her days with the man who says that having her has been "magical since Day One."