08/13/2026
Phenomenal Advice
I get asked all the time what are you looking for in a service dog. Well, below is only the first ten minutes of my evaluation.
Here’s what I look at in the first 10 minutes when someone puts a dog in front of me and asks, “Could this be a service dog?”
I don't start with obedience.
I don't need to see a pretty heel, a perfect sit, or a dog that can run through 20 commands.
I've seen plenty of dogs that look fantastic in a training room and fall apart when you put them in a grocery store.
The first few minutes tell me more.
I watch the dog walk through the door.
I watch what the dog does with the new smells, new people, new surfaces and all the movement around it.
I'm looking at the dog's nervous system before I'm looking at its obedience.
Does the dog come in and take information?
Or does it immediately start pulling, scanning, whining, barking, avoiding, freezing or trying to control everything around it?
Then I wait.
That's important.
I want to see what happens after the initial excitement wears off.
Some dogs walk into a new environment looking busy as hell for 30 seconds and then settle themselves.
That's a very different dog from one that stays at a high level of arousal the entire time.
Recovery is one of the biggest things I watch.
A noise happens.
A person walks past.
A door opens.
Someone drops something.
A dog appears.
The dog notices it.
Fine.
Every dog notices things.
What happens next is what I'm interested in.
Does the dog startle, look, process it and come back to me?
Or does that one event completely change the dog's behavior for the next five minutes?
I've learned not to judge the initial reaction nearly as much as I judge the recovery.
I've also learned that a dog doesn't need to ignore the world to be good at this work.
I actually want the dog to notice what's happening.
I need a dog that can notice something without becoming consumed by it.
That's a very different skill.
Then I start looking at engagement.
Does the dog check in with the handler on its own?
Does it care where the handler is?
Can I change direction and have the dog notice?
Can I interrupt the dog's interest in something without turning the interaction into a wrestling match?
I'm watching for a dog that can work with a person.
Not just a dog that will perform for food.
That's an important distinction.
I've worked with dogs that will do absolutely anything for a piece of chicken in a quiet room.
Take that same dog into a busy public environment and the food suddenly isn't important enough.
That's why I want to see what motivates the individual dog before I decide how I'm going to train it.
I also pay close attention to social behavior.
People love saying, “He's super friendly!”
That isn't necessarily a compliment when we're talking about service work.
A dog that desperately needs to greet every person it sees can be much harder to live with in public than a dog that is perfectly comfortable letting people exist without getting involved.
I don't need the dog to hate people.
I need the dog to understand that strangers are background noise.
Same thing with other dogs.
A dog can be dog friendly and still be a terrible candidate for service work if every dog in the parking lot becomes the most important thing in its life.
Then I put a little pressure on the dog.
Nothing dramatic.
I'm not trying to scare the dog.
I'm looking at normal frustration and environmental pressure.
What happens when the dog doesn't immediately get what it wants?
What happens when I change something?
What happens when the environment becomes inconvenient?
Does the dog stay engaged and start looking for a solution?
Does it escalate?
Does it shut down?
Does it recover?
That tells me a lot.
And here's one of the biggest lessons I've learned doing this work:
Obedience can hide problems.
A dog can look incredibly trained while still having poor environmental stability.
I've seen dogs perform beautiful obedience right up until something changes.
Then the obedience disappears because the dog wasn't actually coping with the environment. It was simply following a rehearsed routine.
That's why I don't make a service dog evaluation about how many commands a dog knows.
I'm trying to figure out who that dog is when the script changes.
Because public access is full of changes.
Elevators.
Crowded aisles.
Automatic doors.
Shopping carts.
Children.
Wheelchairs.
Food on the floor.
People reaching toward the dog.
Other animals.
Unexpected noises.
Tight spaces.
Long periods of doing absolutely nothing.
A service dog has to be able to exist through all of that without becoming everybody else's problem.
That's the standard I'm thinking about.
And I don't make a decision in 10 minutes.
The first 10 minutes simply tell me where I need to look harder.
Sometimes I see a dog with obvious training problems that I think has tremendous potential.
Sometimes I see a beautifully obedient dog where I know the real problem isn't obedience at all.
That's why I evaluate the dog first and the training second.
You can teach a dog a behavior.
What I'm trying to determine is whether the dog has the underlying qualities that make that behavior sustainable when real life gets messy.
That's where the real evaluation starts.
