She has slept through my history class and peed at the Gap.

And the one time she went to church, she talked through the entire service.

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Puppy Training

Volunteers raise puppies for the KSDS, a non-profit group that provides dogs for people in need of assistance.

So when I decided to take my puppy to a movie, I was—understandably—a little nervous.

I walked into the movie theater with the speech I give at least 20 times a day running through my head: “This dog is a service dog in training. I’m her puppy raiser. Part of what I do is make sure she is exposed to as many different things as possible …”

But the manager of the movie theater just waved us toward the ticket counter, where I bought a ticket to Last Chance Harvey. (I couldn’t risk the commotion Marley & Me or Bolt might cause.)

I am a puppy raiser for KSDS, Inc., a non-profit organization that breeds and trains golden retrievers and Labrador retrievers as service dogs for individuals with disabilities. Someday my puppy, Trego, will join the more than 400 working dogs placed by KSDS since 1991. She will work as a guide dog, a service dog or as a social dog. In about 18 months—when Trego is 2 years old—I’ll drive two-and-a-half hours to the KSDS training facility in Washington, Kansas, and hand over her leash. But until then, she’ll live with me. My job is to keep her safe and happy and to teach her how to behave in public.

That’s why Trego goes everywhere with me—to the movies, to the mall and even out to eat. She needs to be exposed to as many different situations as possible, so that when she works with someone who is blind or in a wheelchair, she’ll be comfortable doing her job in public.

So when I get ready to leave the house each day, I strap Trego into her puppy in training vest and clip a leash onto her collar. Then I grab my doggie diaper bag and check my pockets: Dog food. Puppy ID. Poop bag.

Becoming a volunteer

I applied to be a puppy raiser for KSDS about two years ago. After a surprisingly easy application—two pages and two letters of reference—and a long wait, I was handed a 10-pound puppy on September 5, 2008. She was 2 months old. I was 22.

KSDS looks for people who love dogs and are willing to take the time, energy and money to raise these puppies. They also need to be emotionally able to give the puppy up when it is called back for formal training, Debbie Tegethoff, KSDS puppy coordinator says.

As a puppy raiser, I am responsible for the first phase of Trego’s training, the growing up part. When I take Trego back to KSDS, she will be health and temperament tested before beginning advanced training. Then she will be paired with the person she will help and the two of them will go through team training to learn how to work together. The entire process takes about three years.

Right now, about 100 volunteers are raising KSDS puppies, Tegethoff says, and 50 of us are in Kansas. The rest are scattered around the country, mostly in the Midwest.

We all get ‘the look’

Lisa Beck and her puppy, Willow, are Lawrence residents just beginning the puppy raising process. For the past three months, Beck has been thinking about the places she’d take Willow after the dog was vaccinated for rabies and received a vest. Beck, associate director of operations for the Office of Admissions and Scholarships, plans to begin taking Willow to work every once in a while soon. She hopes the hubbub of the Office of Admissions and Scholarships will help Willow learn how to behave in public.

Now that I’ve been taking Trego out in public for a few months, I’m less anxious about finding places for her to learn new things. In the beginning, though, I kept lists. Animals she needs to meet. Types of people she needs to be around. Sounds. Smells. Modes of transportation. Now, I’m much more relaxed, focusing on providing extra exposure to the types of things that make Trego uncomfortable. In the past few weeks, for example, I’ve vacuumed my house nearly every day and we’ve spent a lot of time around power tools, because Trego doesn’t like loud noises.

Like me, Larry Braddy plans his day around his puppy. He takes Cinnamon places that will help the puppy learn, such as restaurants, shopping centers and the bank.

“We all get ‘the look,’” says Braddy, vice chairman of the KSDS puppy raiser board. “Like, ‘What’s that dog doing here?’” These dogs are not just pets, Braddy says. They are working dogs that need to be allowed to do their job, whether they’re at a restaurant or a bus stop.

“They’re not here because we’re Paris Hilton showing off our fuzzy dog,” he says.

People have a lot of reservations about any dog being anywhere, and Trego and I rarely go anywhere without being stopped every few feet. Some people just want to tell me how cute she is—and she is cute—but others want an explanation. “Is that a service dog?” people ask, sometimes not very nicely. I’m quick to explain what we’re doing and to reassure people that, yes, it’s legal to allow us to be in public places. Still, puppies in training aren’t always welcome, and Kansas law does not give puppies in training the same access rights as service dogs.

When Braddy was raising his first KSDS puppy, Goblin, he says, he had to leave the dog behind when he visited his mother in the hospital. The funny thing about that, Braddy says, is that Goblin’s partner has multiple sclerosis and takes Goblin to the hospital all the time. The visit to Braddy’s mom would have been an opportunity to teach Goblin about being in a hospital.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Brooke Langdon, Abeline junior and former puppy raiser, says. “Nothing changes about the fact that they shed and that they’re a dog just because they graduate.”

After raising three KSDS dogs, Langdon understands something I sometimes forget: As impressive as their future jobs are, these dogs are still dogs. And Trego is still a puppy.

When we’re out in public, I have to be aware of Trego’s tail—the Labrador’s No. 1 weapon. And, even though she is potty trained and usually asks to go out, I always have a poop bag in my pocket. Just in case.

During our trips out, I am constantly correcting her, asking her to walk nicely on a leash, to ignore bits of food and pieces of trash on the ground and, most importantly, to pay attention to me. We work on basic obedience—sit, stay, heel, etc.—but with the added distractions of new people, smells and sounds. It would be impossible to teach Trego these things at home, because our environment is too controlled; she needs to know how to pay attention to me whatever our surroundings.

With Trego in tow, even a simple trip to Target becomes a training opportunity. We spend extra time in the toy aisles, for example. I push the buttons on every electronic toy I can find, working to make sure nothing she’ll encounter as an adult will scare her and distract her from doing her job. Soon, Trego will attend her first concert and go to her first bar. I hope we’ll get a chance to attend a keg party and a basketball game this semester, too.

It’s like having a child

College students considering committing to puppy raising need to understand that it isn’t just something you can do on the weekends, says Dave Downing, professor of aerospace engineering and former puppy raiser. He says raising a puppy for service requires a lifestyle change similar to that of having children, but just for a short time.

I’ve had this puppy for five months and I can’t think of a better analogy.

When Trego and I walked into church on the Sunday before Christmas, I was armed with the Missouri law—puppies in training have access to all public places—and pamphlets about KSDS. I thought I was prepared for anything. But when the band started playing and Trego joined in, I began to panic. Just wait it out. She’ll stop singing when they stop. I told myself it was going to be OK, that she would calm down when the service began. Then, the pastor released the children to go to their children’s church activities. Oh no.

Trego’s favorite people are ones who are less than 3 feet tall. She especially loves children who smell like food or scream and run around a lot. The mass exodus of children made Trego bark even more loudly. Mom! Do you see the kids? Look! Kids! They’re leaving! LET’S GO! Her yelps and whines were very clear: She wanted to go to children’s church, too.

I tried everything I could think of to get Trego to stop barking, but my embarrassment quickly won out. I walked Trego away from the congregation and into a stairwell in the back of the church and fought tears as I tried to calm her down.

A young mother, carrying her child, approached us. “We all go through this,” she told me. I wiped tears out of my eyes and replied. “But no one thinks you should have left yours at home.”

Sometimes, especially in the beginning, puppy raising feels like that: parenting a child no one else wants around. But more recently I’ve collected a lot of success stories, not the least of which was Trego’s first trip to the movies.

Trego sat through all of Last Chance Harvey with only a few whimpers. She thought (and I have to agree) that the middle of the movie was kind of boring. As we walked out of the theater that day, several people stopped us to say they didn’t even know there was a dog in the theater until they saw us leave. Score.

It’s obvious to me that the time I put in to taking Trego out is paying off. Giving any dog constant and consistent correction helps the dog behave better, and makes each day a bit easier. And after spending so much time with these puppies, the mental and emotional bond is incredible, says Jan Broxterman, a puppy raiser from Overland Park.

Giving them back

But puppy raisers have to be careful about how they think about that bond, because when the puppies are between 18- and 24-months-old, KSDS sends each puppy raiser “the letter.” The letter tells the puppy raiser that it’s time to bring the puppy back.

“The day they go back is the worst, but it’s the best at the same time. You’re so attached, and you don’t even know how attached you are,” Langdon says.

Braddy doesn’t know when he’ll get the letter about Cinnamon, but he’s guessing it will be sometime next month. Then Braddy will load Cinnamon into his car for the drive back to Washington, Kansas, making sure to take along one of Cinnamon’s favorite toys.

After an exit interview, during which the puppy raiser answers questions about the puppy’s progress and shares information that will help the dog’s transition to living at the training facility go smoothly, the puppy is taken away. It’s sad, Braddy says, but you want your dog to go off to doggie college to learn how to do its job.

After the dogs are called back, they are sent to Kansas State University, where their eyes and hips are tested to make sure they don’t have any problems that will keep them from having a long career. The dogs are also temperament tested every day, Tegethoff of KSDS says. The trainers at KSDS watch the puppies closely. They decide which track the dog will take—service dog, guide dog or social dog—based on what tasks the dog is good at performing and what it seems to enjoy doing.

Some dogs, Tegethoff says, aren’t ready to begin advanced training as soon as they get back to the training facility. “Some of the dogs are kind of like teenagers. They don’t know what they want to do,” Tegethoff says.

These dogs are sent to the Topeka Correctional Facility where they spend about 30 days with teams of female inmates who are able to spend more time with the dogs than puppy raisers or the trainers at KSDS are, Tegethoff says. The teams are usually made up of three women and the leaders of the teams have passed both written and practical tests to ensure that they are equipped to help train the dogs. After time at the Topeka Correctional Facility, the dogs return to KSDS for formal training, which lasts between six and nine months.

Pairing up

After advanced training, each dog is paired with a person whose needs, personality and lifestyle are appropriate to the dog’s skills and personality. Then, the dogs and their partners go through team training, which lasts between one and three weeks, depending on what type of service the dog will be doing. The dogs and their partners are taught to work together before the dogs graduate. At graduation, the puppy raisers present the dogs to their partners and the KSDS community celebrates the teams’ success.

“You get to see that joy that they are experiencing and they’re scared because they’re going home with this dog—sometimes it’s the first dog they’ve ever had. You get to see all of those emotions,” Braddy says. “You get to see that feeling of hope. They now have hope that their lives will be more independent.”

Trego is my first KSDS puppy, so I don’t have a graduation story of my own yet. Instead, when people ask how I will give Trego up, or why I am a puppy raiser, I tell them about Challenge Air, an event during which pilots donate their time and their private planes to take children with physical disabilities for short flights. Trego and I volunteered at the KSDS booth at the event. We were there to introduce children and their parents to the idea that a service dog could change their lives, but the children I met there changed mine.

One of the first people Trego and I met that day was a 6-year-old named Alex. When he saw us, he dropped the braces that were attached to his arms and fell to his knees to play with Trego, who, at 3 months old, was still swimming in her vest. Alex told Trego that he was about to fly in an airplane while I talked to Alex’s mom. She told me she had been planning on applying for a dog for him already, and seeing him with Trego solidified the thought.

Alex and his mom soon moved on, allowing other children to talk to Trego. I was figuring out how to hold a leash and unscrew the cap from my water bottle at the same time when Alex came running back to Trego and me. He had left his braces behind in his excitement and was struggling to stay upright, but he was in a hurry to tell us about his flight.

“I got to FLY the plane!” he told Trego. I told him that neither Trego nor I had ever flown a plane, and he showed us the flight wings the pilot had given him. The pilots at Challenge Air had their way of letting these children experience the freedom of motion I feel every day. Raising Trego is mine.