Development of Service Dog Concept
The Bergins then spent two years teaching in Australia followed by travel through Asia where she saw donkeys and burros carrying kitchen-wares for people who also used them as crutches while making their way to a street corner to sell their wares. Her experiences of this and seeing other disabled people in Asia struggling to fend for themselves led her to consider the possibility of using dogs to do tasks that would allow individuals with mobility limitations to live independently as a part of mainstream society.
With no formal knowledge of dog training, she tried to convince others of the validity of this vision. Many dog organizations and dog trainers with whom she shared her idea all said it would not work NS would be bad both for the dogs and for people with disabilities. She left teaching to work in a dog kennel for $2 an hour to learn about dogs and dog breeds after which she began the experiment that has resulted in the internationally acclaimed “service dog” concept.
Read more about this topic: Bonnie Bergin
Famous quotes containing the words development of, development, service, dog and/or concept:
“As long as fathers rule but do not nurture, as long as mothers nurture but do not rule, the conditions favoring the development of father-daughter incest will prevail.”
—Judith Lewis Herman (b. 1942)
“Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the “philosophic temper,” in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascertained knowledge.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Finally, your lengthy service ended,
Lay your weariness beneath my laurel tree.”
—Horace [Quintus Horatius Flaccus] (65–8)
“Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)