Family furious after being given a service dog who does not do its job

http://www.lifewithdogs.tv/2014/05/family-unhappy-with-service-dogs-training/

I can understand their anger. The man obviously has a very severe nut allergy, and yet the dog has not been trained to even detect a pile of peanuts in the same room. Not the dog's fault, but it isn't right.

I have to say, if I'd spent $12500 on a service dog I'd expect it to do the job it's supposed to be trained for!

I'd hazard a guess & say the training company are charlatans.

Angel Service Dogs are usually good, but I don't think this dog was tested properly before being sent to a home.

But what about the other court case, and the fact that they are refusing to retrain, now, without further payments of $2500 - that's a very expensive pet dog if it can't do its job.

That is terrible. Trading standards will be on it though.

A problem with a lot of service dog companies out there. It isn't just this one. The organisation itself is good, but at the end of the day the dogs are trained by people, who makes errors.

What a sad and worrying story.

I'm sure that this family would have (even may have) come to love the dog as a pet, but that was not what this particular dog was bought at vast expense for. No disrespect to the dog, she can't help failing in what she is not capable of.

Hayley wrote:That is terrible. Trading standards will be on it though.

Do they have the same sort of trading standards in the US as we have here?

Eleanor wrote:A problem with a lot of service dog companies out there. It isn't just this one. The organisation itself is good, but at the end of the day the dogs are trained by people, who makes errors.

I tend to disagree. The organisation can't be good if it employs people who are not doing their jobs properly & are getting away with it.

It honestly sounds like either they don't know how to train the dog to pinpoint peanuts, or they have placed the wrong dog with the clients & they just aren't compatible.

They really should at least retrain the dog free. When you think of all the things a service dog can be trained to do, alerting the owner to peanuts should be relatively easy    I saw a programme about service dogs in the UK a while ago and it can take time for a dog to be placed with someone because they have to make sure they are a good match and work well together.

They'll have to retrain the dog.

Maybe they got the dogs confused and trained the wrong dog for the wrong job..

Obviously, they've royally screwed up with this one. However, I wouldn't blame the entire (very large) organisation for the mistakes of a handful of employees. As for hiring the employees in the first place, nobody's a mind reader. I'm sure if they knew that this was going to happen, they wouldn't have hired them.

I think it's far more likely that the dog has been placed with the wrong family. I hope something's sorted out in terms of a new service dog or re-training for free. Considering the amount of time it takes to train a service dog, a new service dog would probably be more appropriate.

Eleanor wrote: However, I wouldn't blame the entire (very large) organisation for the mistakes of a handful of employees. As for hiring the employees in the first place, nobody's a mind reader.

The buck must stop somewhere. When something within a large organisation goes wrong, somebody has to take responsibility.

But whoever is to blame, they must either retrain or replace the dog free of charge. As the dog has been with them for some time & is almost certainly a part of the family, I'd say that retraining (as long as it's within the dog's capability) is the way forward - for free!

Eleanor wrote: I think it's far more likely that the dog has been placed with the wrong family.

I don't see that. They knew what the dog needed to be trained for, and so that should never have happened. Again, the buck stops somewhere, and whoever's in charge must shoulder the blame, whilst making sure it doesn't happen again.

Of course, somebody has to take the blame for what happened officially. But it does happen with a lot of large organisations. Should it happen? No. What bothers me isn't so much that they sent the wrong dog or an incorrectly trained dog, but that it doesn't seem like they've taken appropriate steps to rectify the mistake.

Eleanor wrote:it doesn't seem like they've taken appropriate steps to rectify the mistake.

That's the problem - they seem to think it isn't their responsibility. They want their clients to pay extra for something that they should have done in the first place. They need to accept responsibility and retrain free of charge.

Unfortunately, there's only so much you can gain from a newspaper article. From the family's point of view, anything short of an immediate refund (or similar) is going to seem like a lack of cooperation. Authors of articles are also likely to embellish to gain a higher number of readers.

However, I do hope that the organisation will agree to supply them with a new dog. I don't think retraining will be appropriate in this case, as the family probably doesn't have much faith in the dog anymore.

Eleanor wrote:However, I do hope that the organisation will agree to supply them with a new dog. I don't think retraining will be appropriate in this case, as the family probably doesn't have much faith in the dog anymore.

True, unfortunately. Poor dog.