Havanese Training to Complement the Breed’s “Assistance Dog” Temperament
The havanese breed’s traits have allowed it versatile action in a wide range of occupations, even if at its core it is still very much a companion dog. The dog’s cheerful, exuberant personality and quickness at training helps it do well in jobs that have to do with public service and coming to other people’s assistance. The dog breed thus has the traits of an ideal pet therapy and assistance dog, coming to soothe and relax people with physical and emotional disabilities. In fact, a lot of havanese have become signal or hearing dogs, through the help of havanese training.
Hearing dogs are an example of dogs that fulfill some very high level type of work: imagine being trained to be the “ears” of the hearing impaired. Many organizations carefully pick and teach their dogs to be effective companions for hearing impaired people. These dogs maximize their Havanese training to the fullest, capable of giving notice to their charges that they just heard an important sound or noise, such as a doorbell, or a smoke alarm, or the clock alarm. Many dogs are also taught how to respond appropriately to sounds coming from outside the home. For example, if the dog hears someone calling the owner’s name, or any important noise, the dog may put its paws on the handler, or nudge it. For some noises, like the telephone ringing, the dog may take the handler to the noise source; in the case of others, such as a fire alarm, the dog leads the handler away from the source of the alarm.
If you think that all assistance dogs come from tried and tested breeders, you are wrong! Most organizations actually have used dogs found in shelters, because these entities are also interested on rescuing dogs, aside from the motive to help the disabled. Some organizations also welcome donations of dogs. Havanese have a reputation at signal work since they are first and foremost loving and dedicated, not skittish when it comes to sounds, love to please their humans, and actually have a work ethic. Nevertheless, all dogs regardless of breed must take a temperament test before starting on Havanese training. Dogs are first taught obedience, and then are socialized with a wide variety of people and situations; last of all, they start what is called sound alerting training. Some dogs finish training in three months, but most dogs take around a year to complete training. Dogs are taught to differentiate and sort out a large number of sounds and to respond correctly to various sounds when physically signaling their handler. This means that the dog needs to know the difference between a phone ringing and a fire alarm sounding off, and aside from that, learn that handlers need to be taken to the ringing phone, but taken away from the fire alarm.
Hearing dogs, just like other assistance dogs, got access to a wide range of public structures. To prevent their being mistaken for pet dogs, hearing dogs are accstomed to wearing a bright orange collar or leash. Many groups get their hearing dogs markers such as capes or jackets of a specific color to sort among them. Nowadays, a new trend is that of hearing impaired persons who are training their own dogs, as organizations in the service of the disabled continue to train their own signal dogs.
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