Working Like Dogs: The Service Dog Guidebook by Marcie Davis and Melissa Bunnell, with a foreword by Betty White, is a comprehensive disability resource book and guide to service dogs. It is a well-written, thorough, yet concise and easy-to-follow resource for anyone who wants or needs to learn more about this powerful human-animal partnership.
Topics covered include important questions readers should ask a potential service dog agency, training received by the owner at the agency, how a service dog can improve accessibility to the world, nutrition, grooming, proper exercise, and coping with the loss of a service dog—this last concern, especially, was handled with compassion. Included are personal stories, checklists, practical tips, full-color photographs, and extensive appendices of service dog resources and performance standards for service dogs.
This book is geared mainly to those who are obtaining a dog for the first time from an established training and placement agency (for example, it is light on technical training information, and owner-trained dogs are addressed and dismissed in one sentence) and as such will not be of as much use to those who are training their own service dogs. Despite this, Working Like Dogs remains a must-read for those who are considering a service dog, own a service dog, are raising or are responsible for the care of a service dog, or just plain love dogs.
Also recommended: Teamwork and Teamwork II by Stewart Nordensson and Lydia Kelley.
Publisher: Alpine Publications
Publish date: March 10, 2007
144 pages
ISBN-10: 1577790863
ISBN-13: 978-1577790860
