have friend living in apartment want to get train his own service dog for hearing lease says no pets. comments

Question

he depends on hearing aids and his hearing will deteriorate to complete within the next decade. is it possible to get your own dog and train it to be a service dog? has anyone had problems with no pet lease with service dog?

Answer 1

Depends on where you live. Laws requiring landlords to allow service animals will be different from place to place.

Also, the definition of what is a service animal will be different from place to place. But generally, you can't just get any dog, call it a service dog and force your landlord to accept it.

Answer 2

I trained my own hearing dog. If your friend is interested in doing this, I suggest he join a Yahoo group for hearing dogs or for owner-trained service dogs or both.

If he lives in Canada or the USA, and if his hearing loss qualifies him for a hearing dog, the law is on his side once the dog is fully trained. In the USA, both the federal (you can get a summary of the ADA here )http://www.deltasociety.org/ServiceAccessLaw.htm and state laws (http://www.servicedogssavelives.org/statelaws.html.) prohibit discrimination against someone who relies on a service dog.

Depending on where he lives, he may not have any legal rights while the dog is in training. The link to state laws will let him see if service dogs in training have any rights in his state. If he lives in Canada, service dogs in training have no rights.

It takes about two years to train a puppy to become a service dog, and most dogs do not make it. According to the few organizations I have seen that quote success statistics, only 30% to 35% of the dogs that start actually graduate, and these are dogs that are screened by professionals before being put into the training program. There are no statistics for owner-trained dogs, but I have seen a lot of complaints about owner-trained dogs not being adequately trained for public access. My biggest worry while training my dog was that he would not succeed, and that I either would not be impartial enough to see that, or that I would not be able to give him away and start over if he didn't work out. (I would have kept the dog and done without a hearing dog, which would have make my life very difficult.) If your friend gets a dog that is already trained, he can avoid these worries. If he still wants to train his own hearing dog, he is welcome to e-mail me with questions. I needed a lot of help when I started, so I feel I should return the favor.

Answer 3

Yes, the government does recognize service dogs for the deaf. And as the person above me stated, the ADA exempts people with service animals from the no pet rules.

The threshold for a service animal is actually fairly low. The federal government and most states do not have licensing or training standards. Nor is a disabled person in most cases required to "prove" their disability or their animal as being a service animal.

But having some sort of documentation is always good.

Answer 4

My friend owns a service dog for herself since she is deaf too ... She has to show the landlord a proof of certifcation that the dog is a service dog ...

I would love to have my dog trained as a service dog but then again I can't bear to be without my dog for 6 - 8 weeks for training ... My dog is pretty good at letting me know that someone is knocking on the door ... She even tells me what door is knocking ... Front or back ...

Answer 5

Training a service dog is a serious endeavor. We have Paws for a Cause here and they allow people to help train animals. Service animals are considered a bit different than pets. Talk to a service animal org and the landlord.

Answer 6

I think it would be pretty much impossible to train ones own service dog as it would be difficult to have enough emotional distance from the pup-much like driving lessons from your father. Another issue is that well trained dog has to selected correctly and then trained with other dogs. You can't just take any dog and make it into a service dog-there is a high dropout rate and a dog raised isolated from other dogs is likely to be more interested in other dogs it comes across than its work. It's the dogs that have limited exposure to other dogs that want to make love or war with every dog they meet. Therefore I think it would be tough to have a DIY service dog as a no-pet loophole as the landlord could always ask what qualified dog trainer trained the animal.

Answer 7

The American with Disabilities Act (ADA) exempts service animals from "no pets" requirements.

Answer 8

I don't know, but if he needs the dog for a disability, then a law might protect him on this regardless of what the lease or landlord says...I don't know though.

Answer 9

if it is a certified service dog it is against the law in the US to disallow it.