The Accidental Curriculum: How Real Life Became Haunted House School
If you’re new to this series on HHN service dog training, be sure to start at the beginning with Part 1!
Around this same time, I discovered a service dog blog by a trainer who lives in this area. She says that in addition to the theme parks, Ikea is an amazing place to train service dogs for public access. Crowds, a maze of epic proportions, overwhelming amounts of merchandise…and plenty of sets to mock up nearly any situation, from squeezing under a plethora of different sizes and shapes of tables to settling in an unfamiliar bedroom (similar to what she would have to do when we travel). So off to Ikea we went.
It turned out to be just the right amount of challenge — enough difficulty to hold her focus, but not enough to send her into overload. And lots of quiet corners to hang out and reset as needed. We live on the third floor of a large apartment building, so she was already an elevator pro. We watched the escalator go up and down to desensitize her to it, though we have no intention of taking her on one, and then we spent quite a while just roaming around the store and inventing training scenarios. She (and we) learned more in an hour at Ikea than we had collectively up to that point.
Chamber of Horrors? Why Not!
The Ikea visit turned out to be fortuitously timed. Shortly thereafter, Dad got the call that he had been anticipating for months: Medicare had finally approved a badly needed radiofrequency ablation on his back.
(We chronicled the full story in the multi-part blog series Traveling with a Service Dog.)
One part of the trip in particular turned out to be unanticipated gold for HHN service dog training: Potter’s Wax Museum.
A small, cramped space packed with incredibly expensive wax figures, it might not be the first place you’d think of to take a dog that had only been public access training for service work for two months. But she was ready, and she rose to the occasion. It was a short walk across some grass from the parking garage to the museum, so we gave her plenty of sniff time. Once inside, she happily let a little boy pet her (with my permission) and then used her relaxation protocol to settle comfortably in the cramped intro room while the docent went over the rules and the boy’s tiny sister asked endless questions from her spot right next to Lady Priscilla’s nose.
This was when we first started wondering if therapy dog might also be in her future, but that’s for a later post.
Inside the museum, we watched with pride as she carefully tiptoed around each wax figure, leaning in just far enough to see and appreciate the figure but staying far enough back that she wouldn’t accidentally brush against it. Dad and I looked at each other: Chamber of Horrors then? Why not?
The thing that people sometimes don’t realize about service dogs is that they don’t have the same frame of reference as we do. Not having grown up on a diet of horror movies and true crime, they have no reason to inherently fear what humans perceive as scary, like knives or monsters or even torture chambers. Lady Priscilla observed the horror scenarios with the same calm focus as all the others, completely unfazed by the disturbing imagery, dim lights, or creepy soundtrack.
Her only actual challenge there had nothing to do with the Chamber of Horrors at all. It was two rows of military figures standing face to face, with only a small space to walk through. She went in a couple of steps and then gently but determinedly backed out.
No thank you. I don’t care to squeeze between these unfamiliar maybe-humans.
Clearly her Tunnel game still needed a bit of work.
But all in all, it was a huge success, and great training toward our HHN goal.
Continue to Part 5: Mapping the Fog
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