Shama likes people, and she likes the treats she gets when she's well mannered with people. I'm not going to pursue therapy dog certification until I actually have time to go on regular therapy dog visits. For now, we occasionally visit people at a nearby nursing home that doesn't seem to have a relationship with the local therapy dog organization. One woman has an array of photos of her dogs displayed on her wall. I know she loves it when Shama visits!
How can you tell that Kodi LOVES therapy dog work? The reason I think Shama likes people is that she gets excited, jumping up and down, wagging her tail, and trying to get to them. When she's in her ex pen, she has to calm down and have all four paws on the floor before we let anyone pet her. Same thing if she's on a leash.
I agree that CGC certification is within the grasp of most pet dogs.
Well, I should qualify that to say with elderly and sick people. I think it takes a different type of dog to do reading with kids and other kinds of work with kids.
But Kodi is so INCREDIBLY gentle and insightful with the elderly and ill and upset people. He will be just "be there". We will be talking, not really "about" him at all. He just lies down next to them. He seems to know whether it is better to lie by the person's feet or beside them on a couch. Then he doesn't move. Without them even realizing it, they start stroking him. That is his cue to move his head onto their foot (or lap) and then he just stays there. Gazing up into their eyes. They keep stroking, again, often without realizing that they are doing it. At some point, they seem to realize and acknowledge him, and he starts wagging his tail. They have made his day!
I don't ask him to do this... he is not a "trained" therapy dog, nor do we make "official" therapy visits. It is just that he ends up being put in that position quite frequently because of our extended collection of geriatric friends and relatives!
Sometimes, we've had people who have started out saying they didn't really care for dogs become total converts to "KODI is an exception".
And he is so totally reliable. There was one incident, when my dad was in a rehab. he needed to use the toilet, and a nurse had not come to help him. He was not supposed to get up by himself, but he REALLY needed to go. It was getting to be an emergency. So I threw Kodi into a corner beside a chair and told him to stay, and took my Dad into the bathroom with his walker. While I was in there, my Dad's roommate, a very loud, smelly, and not very nice man in a wheelchair came back into the room, smacking into the chair Kodi was sitting beside, yelling for a nurse to come help him and generally making a ruckus. I got done with my Dad, got him back into bed, and Kodi had not moved a muscle the entire time. I REALLY wouldn't have expected that of him... I just didn't know what else to do!
The interesting thing is, when he was younger, I actually thought he WOULDN'T be a good therapy dog. He really didn't enjoy being handled by people he didn't know, and I didn't push it. I was a little disappointed because I thought it MIGHT be something I'd like to do with him as he got older. OTOH, we were so busy with so many sports-related things, we didn't have time for it anyway! Then he grew into it, all by himself, with no help from me!