How to Train Your Dog to Detect Allergens

Hello, Without meeting her I cannot say for sure if she would make a good service dog candidate but success with previous scent training is a great indicator of having the scenting ability needed to succeed. In addition to scenting ability, the second criteria for service dog success is her ability to handle public access challenges, and adapt to all the locations you will need her to be able to go to with you - that area often fails more dogs than the scent training. How is her temperament? How does she respond to new things? Any reactivity, fear, or aggression? Is she a dog you could take anywhere and trust? If not, why? Obedience can often be caught up and improved, but behavior issues like reactivity, fear, or aggression can be too complex and make the dog unreliable as a service dog even with extensive training. There are exceptions, but before you put in two years worth of work, take an honest look at her temperament as well. Often task training takes 6 months to start to really make sense for a dog and another 6 months before it's reliable around distractions for real life scenarios, with frequent practice that is. Public access training also generally takes a year. With daily practice it takes the average service dog with an adaptable, well balanced temperament 1-2 years to be ready for service work. About a year into that the dog might be ready to do smaller jobs out in public with you and should be practicing their public access portion of training and allergy alerts you you have intentionally set up and know the allergy status on ahead of time, but with a life threatening allergy, you would want to be very careful with trusting real alerts still until they have proven their reliability around distractions in public in that area overtime. Best of luck training, Caitlin Crittenden

Nov. 30, 2023

Hello Matthew, Yes, the right dog with a good nose and interest in working with a person can be taught to detect food based scents. This is commonly done with gluten detection for celiac or peanut allergy alerts. You would teach each scent one at a time, working on the first scent until pup was really good at that scent, with a specific alert for that scent, then start training the next scent until that scent detection was reliable with it's own alert, then move onto subsequent scents. Because there are a variety of scents this will take longer, like a couple of years, but once pup has learned the initiate scent, subsequent scents will probably be quicker to teach than when you started at the beginning. For service dogs, the most time sensitive part of the training will be socialization and manners, for the public access requirements of training. Socialization between now and 16 weeks of age is extremely important. Task training can wait and still be successful when taught later if you don't have time to focus on both socialization and manners and the task scent training yet. Check out the free pdf e-book After You Get Your Puppy which can be downloaded at the link I have included below for more information on socialization and manners at the age pup is at now. I would start there, then move onto Canine Good Citizen and intermediate obedience once pup is a few months old, then start task training (the allergy alerts) between six months and a year old. You can work up to more obedience and task training earlier, but most people don't have time for the amount of socialization and manners a puppy needs to learn and more advanced obedience and task training all at the same time. www.lifedogtraining.com/freedownloads There is a good group of owner trainers on social media you may also find it helpful to connect with, like facebook, instagram, and youtube. You may even find others who are teaching scent based detection to get together with and train together in your area. There are trainers you can send your dog to for service dog training - board and train programs, but there are also private trainers you can hire session by session if you train on your own and find yourself stuck at any point and need a bit of in person help, if you train the majority of the service dog work yourself. Allergy scent detection is generally based on teaching pup an alert on cue, like bark when you say speak, nudge when you say touch, paw your leg when you say paw, ect...Having pup sniff a pure sample of the allergen, give pup the command you have taught, like speak, then reward pup when they bark after they sniff and bark when told to. As you practice, you look for pup to bark before you give the verbal command when they sniff, then let them sniff, wait seven seconds, then command speak if they don't bark on their own, practicing until they can bark on their own every time they sniff without needing to be told. Next, you have to proof that by hiding the sample in your pocket and rewarding when pup barks when they sniff you, practicing with other foods and only rewarding when pup barks correctly when they sniff (being careful not to cross contaminate the samples during practice so the none allergy sample doesn't smell like the allergy one), and eventually transitioning to foods with large amounts of the allergen in them but not pure, to help pup learn how to pick the allergen smell out - as pup improves, you gradually decrease the the amount of allergen present in the food pup is sniffing, to help pup work up to eventually being able to detect minute amounts of the allergen in something. Best of luck training, Caitlin Crittenden

July 13, 2022