Someday, Beatrice will be able to turn on a light switch. She’ll be able to pick up a dime off the floor. Someday, she’ll even be able to open a door.
But first, the 3-month-old golden retriever puppy learned how to sit.
“She has a list of commands to learn before she’s four months old, and she’s already learned all of them,” Allen High School junior Samantha Johnson said.
In December, Samantha started an 18-month project she said she has been dreaming about since second grade—raising a service dog.
“I've just always loved animals, and I want to be a vet when I'm older, so I thought it would look really good on a college application,” Samantha said. “I'm [also] in Girl Scouts, so I thought it would be a really great Gold Award [project]. And I don’t know, I just really like the idea of her helping somebody."
Samantha is raising the puppy through an organization she found out about last July through the Allen Public Library called Canine Companions International (CCI), which is the largest non-profit provider of assistance dogs. Julie Johnson, Samantha’s mother, said she received an email about the CCI presentation at the library and thought it would be a good idea to check it out.
“I thought she might see how much was involved, and it would discourage her, but it didn’t,” Johnson said. “There were about four puppies there with their trainers. After we saw the presentation and the videos that really get you because they showed how it helped other people who use these dogs, she just gave me that look, like, ‘I really want to train a dog.’”
Johnson said she talked with Samantha’s father, and they decided together that it would be a worthy investment for Samantha.
“After talking with her dad, it was like, well, this is really a passion of hers, and even though we know we don’t really have time for it, we’ll make time for it because we know it's her passion,” Johnson said.
About two weeks after the presentation, Samantha applied online to train a dog. Since she is under 18 years of age, her mother is her “sponsor,” although Samantha does all the training herself. About two months after submitting the online application, she interviewed with the CCI Southwest regional manager over the phone and then had a home interview a few weeks later.
“They sent one of the puppy raisers in our area out to check [the house] out,” Samantha said. “Another month later, they called and said they would have a male, full yellow lab puppy available in November.”
Samantha said she was advised to get a female puppy first because they are easier to train.
“They said to feel free to go ahead and take the puppy, but it might be [harder],” Johnson said. “I thought maybe we might heed some advice.”
On Dec. 11, Samantha received Beatrice. Along with Beatrice, she also received all the training materials she would need—a binder with a care and training schedule and a DVD with demonstrations on the way to teach commands to the dog. Samantha said the training schedule starts at 5 a.m. and ends after dinner.
“I get up anyway at five in the morning for cross country,” Samantha said. “So that really worked out because I wouldn’t get up at 5 a.m. if it weren’t for cross country. So I wake up and I usually get myself ready so I'm not late if I run out of time, and then I take her outside directly, and then I’ll come inside and train her if I have time, and I’ll feed her and take her outside again and then put her back in her kennel.”
Samantha said since Beatrice’s attention span is small, the training sessions only last five minutes. She said the morning training session is repeated before lunch and dinner.
“She always trains before she eats,” Samantha said. “She works for her food. And usually after lunch or after dinner, I’ll let her go out into the backyard and play with [our other dog] Buddy so that she’ll sleep ‘cause she doesn’t like her kennel.”
The training Beatrice will undergo the next 18 months will include simple commands, like “stay” and “shake.” But according to CCI Regional Coordinator Beth Jerner, who has trained six CCI dogs, these commands are the building blocks for more advanced commands the puppies learn in what Samantha called “puppy college,” a six-to-nine month intensive training program that follows the 18 months of training the puppy gets from Samantha.
“[The puppy raiser] teaches them to shake, like, [to] shake paws with you, but later in training, that becomes "light," [and] on the wall you "shake" the light switch,” Jerner said. “So [the puppy raisers] teach them the building blocks, kind of like ABCs, like how to write and read small words, and when they go out for advanced training, they build off [those].”
If they graduate from puppy college, CCI dogs are matched with a recipient for free, which the organization is able to do because the puppy raisers pay the dog’s expenses while training them.
“These guys go to somebody that has a hearing disability or a veteran that comes back from war and has an injury and walks with a cane or a prosthetic limb, or like a child with autism or any other personal disorder like that,” Jerner said. “So when the training is all said and done, they will eventually be able to pick up things as small as a dime on the ground, turn on and off light switches, hit elevator buttons [and] open and close doors.”
But Beatrice won’t be graduating for a while—and in the meantime, Samantha said it has been hard not to get attached to her.
“[At first] I was like, we’ll just look at it like she’s another visitor coming to our house,” Samantha said. “It’s not working like that, though. She’s my baby.”
Samantha said she wants to train a male dog next to see the differences in training and that she’s excited simply that her goal of raising a service puppy has already come to fruition.
“I would always used to see people in the grocery story or mall with service dogs and I’d be like, ‘Can I pet it?,’ and like, 'I want to do this, and it's just cool,'” Samantha said.
“I knew I would want to do it later in life ... I just didn’t know how soon it would be.”