Exceptional Dogs for Exceptional People

Canine Companions for Independence is the oldest and largest national nonprofit organization that breeds, raises, and trains assistance dogs for people with physical disabilities other than blindness. CCI provides dogs with three types of training:

• Service dogs, assisting people with motor disabilities. These dogs can pull a wheelchair, pick up things that their partner drops, even answer a telephone or pay for a purchase at a store.
• Hearing dogs, that alert their deaf or hearing impaired partner to sounds such as a smoke alarm, a baby crying, or someone calling the partner's name
• Assisted Service dogs, that have the same training as service dogs but have a third partner, an adult facilitator. Assisted service dogs are provided to disabled children and to adults who need full-time assistance.

ADA Accessibility Guidelines

Canine Companions Presentation Materials

Our volunteers, graduates, and puppyraisers often give presentations to spread the word about Canine Companions. To help in this effort, we conducted a "Presentation Workshop" in Atlanta in January 1997. The result of this workshop was a set of materials to get someone started doing valuable public relations work for Canine Companions.

The presentation guidelines are available in Microsoft Word Rich Text Format (rtf), which should work on any fairly recent version of Word. Click on either the Volunteers and Puppyraisers version or the Graduate version to download the file. Save the file on your own machine and then open it and print it with MS-Word.

Melody Moore's Pups

The College of Computing at Georgia Tech provided a rich environment in raising three service dog puppies for CCI. My third puppy, Haas, will finish his initial training in an equally rich environment at Georgia State University as I began my appointment there this January 1998.

Roman (now Brennan)

Gilly

In the meantime Gilly has grown up to a huge 85 pounds. Unfortunately he was released in March 1997 for elbow problems (and an annoying inclination to chase squirrels). He has passed his test to be a therapy dog with Canine Outreach, so he will still have a wonderful career bringing joy, hopefully to the patients at a nearby children's hospital.

Gilly and I had many adventures during the summer, including carrying the Paralympic torch and braving the security at Georgia Tech during the Olympics. Here is a picture of Gilly surveying the Olympic village:

In addition to lots of hard work, CCI puppies get to have lots of fun too. Here is Gilly at a pool party sponsored by one of our graduates. Gilly won the belly-flop contest paws down:

Haas