Quote: barbara schuler

One of the horses at Dream Catchers "alerted" a few years ago with a student who was prone to seizuers. During a lesson, with no outward indications from the rider, Jazz, simply planted all four hooves and would not budge. They tried for a few moments to get her to "walk on", but she literally planted herself. Since Jazz was one of our older "go to gals" and had been in the program for years, the instructor realized she might have a reason for doing so - either herself being injured/in pain or the student. She called for an emergency dismount and a few minutes after getting the rider safely off the horse, she had a very intense seizure.

Interesting...I almost wonder if it has to do more with ones body language, tense, rigid muscles, weak muscles, that the person is not aware of, but the animals are.

I don't know for sure, but I think it's pretty well documented that some dogs can and do alert prior to seizures.
It's speculated that the dogs are working on a change in chemistry through the nose, but in reality no one really does understand what is setting the dog off. Only that some dogs are in tune with and respond to whatever is out of sync.

I am sure there are a lot of people trying to figure out some way to pick those dogs from all the others. A common denominator among them.

I do believe it happens, but I don't think it can be any dog. It would be very difficult finding the right dog for the alert, and why so much emphasis is put on the bond between the person and the dog. Diabetic patients omit a fruity smell on their breath when their insulin is depleted, many family dogs have been noted as detecting this.

That is really interesting about the horse.

I know several people with seizures, I sure wish that there was more known about this.

 Quote: Tammy Moore

Interesting...I almost wonder if it has to do more with ones body language, tense, rigid muscles, weak muscles, that the person is not aware of, but the animals are.

Tammy, it could very well be the muscles giving an indication to the horse which people around her were not aware of - I honestly don't know. That makes perfect sense, considering how attuned horses are to the rider's movements, shifts in posture, etc...

 Quote: Willie Tilton

So.....they told you that you were better off with a handler focused dog?
Can you give more details as to why?

I think it's just that hard to find a dog that alerts......
You said it could be learned?
Do you know anyplace that places alert dogs?

My adventure into seizure alert dogs began about a half year after my younger brother was literally dropped 7 feet onto his head when he was in the US Army. As a result of this he spent a couple months at Walter Reed and during his time there started developing seizures at random from brain trauma. So I had heard about these seizure alert dogs and decided to check into it because if a dog could improve the chances of him not hurting himself (he had a seizure on a staircase once and wasn't found until 15 minutes later according to the security vid) then it would be worth the huge costs I was finding.

So I started contacting groups. I found out that A) people would claim to produce dogs but B) they had few if any dogs actually working in the field, or they could not or would not supply references to dogs working in the field. Then I contacted a epilepsy support group whose director had grand amounts of information from me and matching it up with some information from a seeing eye group things began to make more sense.

Basically it went a little like this. All dogs can be classically trained to perform a task. Some take to this better than others of course and some have temperaments that make them universally better at being service animals. Of the percentage of dogs out there though some are better at taking in subtle changes in their owner and environment and responding to it. Usually however dogs from service dog programs have this sensitivity trained out of them or are not selected to have anything but the most neutral of temperaments to disruptions in the environment. You'll notice a fair number of super calm golden retrievers, sometimes a standard poodle, or a lab graduating from these programs.

So according to the support group director I spoke with the best dogs for alert were not dogs you'd normally think of as assistance dogs. They tended to be the family dog, the dog from the shelter, not the dog raised by a stranger in a super structured environment. Standard poodles, mutts, setter,border collie and in one case a particularly neurotic JRT. Except for the case of the poodle these were not dogs you'd classically think of temperament wise as a service animal. The few I met tended to be slightly reactive dogs (except for the poodle) and they tended to be VERY handler oriented. Basically they saw a pattern of alerting then tried to turn the dog into a service animal using training. Some dogs come out of programs able to do this over time as they bond with their owner, others just do not have the gift, and will never have it.

The idea is that to these dogs they tend to be super sensitive to movements and smells which are unique to their owner. This is near impossible to train because one seizure patient isn't the same as another. It's a unique storm for just about each and every person so how on earth can a trainer condition something which cannot be seen and is unique to a single person. So much as the way some dogs react to weather patterns and others don't it's up to the dog to decide to signal if they are aware of something to signal on, and the person being aware enough to recognize it.

I think there are a few places that say they can produce alert dogs like 4paws. I'm a little dubious on their record though beyond assistance dogs.


Edited by Melissa Thom (07/25/2010 10:43 PM)
Edit reason: Grammar is Awesome!

I wanted to add this. We ended up not getting one after discussing it and weighing the odds of actually getting a dog who would alert. My brother is allergic to dogs so the odds of the benefits outweighing the risk of spending thousands to get a dog who would do nothing for the alert side of things just wasn't worth it for us. Happily medication and time fixed the seizure portion of his issues. His back damage is another story.

First, I'm sorry for what your brother has had to go through.

Second, Thank you for such a great post.
It and the articles answer lots of questions I had.


Willie