A diabetic woman got carried away with her work and forgot to check her blood sugar levels - as a result, it dropped to a dangerous level. Fortunately, there is a companion nearby, trained with the help of an excellent natural sense of smell to identify just such dangers. This is her dog. Lightly touching the mistress's leg, she gives her an alarm signal.
They say a dog is man's best friend, but service dogs often help their owners with things that even the best friend can't do without proper training.
There are about 500,000 service dogs in the United States helping people. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), service dogs must be allowed access virtually anywhere their owners go. This allows people with disabilities to live independently and solve the problems that arise in everyday life.
Service dogs can help people with visual impairments navigate unfamiliar places, they can rescue an owner who has an illness attack, calm a person with post-traumatic stress disorder, and even wake him up if he had a nightmare.
Disability civil rights laws similar to the ADA have been enacted in 170 countries, and many of them include service animal regulations. One of these countries is Mongolia.
Linda Ball, who heads Minnesota-based nonprofit PawPADS, will visit Mongolia this fall and take one of her service dogs with her. It is necessary to spread information about service animals: despite the adopted laws on the disabled, very few people here have them. Linda is aware of only one such dog that provides visual assistance to a US embassy official.
The activist hopes to change the situation and organize a cynological program in Mongolia that can be a model for other countries. As she says, during the trip she will explain that "the value of service dogs for people with disabilities is exceptionally high."
This is not Linda's first trip to Mongolia. In the 1990s, she was in this country as a Peace Corps volunteer. Then she compiled and published the first and only dictionary of the Mongolian sign language.
On a new trip, she takes her dog Victoria, who, as it should be for service dogs, has undergone special training. It can take two and a half years to properly train a service dog, she said. “It must be a really special dog. In carrying out her tasks, she must show purposefulness and independence,” says Linda.
September is National Service Dog Month in the United States. For Linda Ball, raising people's awareness of the role of service dogs is a year-long challenge, and Victoria goes out of her way to help her.
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