Training Programs
Service Dog Training Programs in Colorado Springs
Animal Smart Training Programs
Our service dog candidate and puppy training programs in Colorado Springs are designed to give you and your future working partner the best possible foundation for a lifetime of service. We focus on shaping your dog’s behavior and public access skills for the long haul. We teach you how to communicate effectively with your dog so you can build the reliable, task-trained partner you truly need.
There is no ‘quick-fix’ when it comes to service dog training, just as there is no way you can eat a salad once and expect to stay slim and healthy forever without effort! Public access reliability and task execution need time, consistency, and daily practice to become rock-solid habits. Our comprehensive training approach teaches you and your candidate everything required for long-term success and a seamless working relationship. We provide long-term support, and handlers who are deeply committed to the process excel in our programs. Is your dog the next Animal Smart service dog graduate?
Service Dog Training
We provide training for several types of service dogs including mobility assistance, psychiatric (including PTSD), medical alert such as diabetic or allergen alert, seizure response, emergency response and hearing dogs. We can also train your dog to be a Home Helper dog who can perform tasks at home but is not public access trained.
We offer both in-home training as well as virtual training for owners and work with puppies as well as adult dogs.
If you already have a dog, we start with an in-home consultation to evaluate your dog for service work.
If you do not have a dog yet, we can help you find the right service dog candidate for training.
Here’s how it works
Comprehensive Evaluation
Intensive Skill Building
Ongoing Community Support
Kickstart Training
Our one-on-one sessions will show you how to build rock-solid reliability in your service dog candidate and transform your daily independence. These lessons are customized to fit your specific disability-mitigation goals and lifestyle. Often, our human habits need shifting too for a working team to succeed! We will coach both you and your candidate so you can communicate seamlessly under pressure and work together as a focused unit, rather than battling competing motivations (for example: you needing them to focus on a medical alert while they want to watch the crowd).
This program is designed for foundational public access obedience as well as specialized task-training and behavioral proofing.
A note on service dogs, therapy dogs and emotional support dogs:
- Service dogs help one individual with a disability as defined by the ADA with trained tasks and must have impeccable manners in public.
- Emotional support dogs help an individual or family by providing emotional support but are not task-trained and do not have public access or air travel rights.
- Therapy dogs help many individuals by providing comfort in settings such as schools, hospitals and nursing homes. They do not have public access rights beyond the facility they ‘work’ at.