What is the Ninja Kids dog called?
Ninja Pups
I am a Canine Coach who helps stressed to the max dog and puppy owners learn obedience techniques, beneficial walking on lead strategies, house training and fun family exercises through the Ninja Pups Programs
Why you should join Ninja Pups?
Between the ages of 2 and 16 weeks the pups brains are like a sponge, I don’t mean physically, I mean they soak up every bit of information they have around them, this is when most of the life long learning will occur .
This is called the critical period.
What this means is that what ever your pup experiences during this time both good and bad will stay with that pup for the rest of its life.
If your pup has a bad experience during this time it is very unlikely to fully recover .
The same if your pup has good experiences during this time they will stay with the pup for the rest of its life.
For example: at the age of 9 weeks your pup fell down some stairs, this would be a bad experience for the pup so that pup would probably never be confident with going up or down stairs. It might navigate the stairs with hesitation but will never be as good as it could have been if it had had a good experience as a puppy .
If the pup in this critical period has never had a bad experience with stairs and was encouraged and taught that stairs are a good thing, that pup will grow up being confident on stairs. Even if as an adult that dog fell down some stairs the long term mental damage done to that dog would more than likely be minimal and not long lasting , the dog would more than likely recover quickly and return to being confident on the stairs.
This of course would always vary for different dogs.
Another example would be during the critical period the pup never saw a male person, that pup could grow up being afraid of, or at least very wary of males.
Sometimes when people get a rescue dog and it’s afraid of males, they instantly assume the dog has been badly treated by a male. But this might not have been the case, it might have been that the dog had not been around males during the critical period.
This is why its very important to get your pup out and about in the world, so it can experience, noises, smells, cars, trucks, people, kids on bikes, kids in prams, other dogs. It’s a big wide world out there and the pup needs to experience as much of it as it can during this critical period.
But my pup isn’t fully vaccinated you say, that’s fine, tuck the pup under your arm and take it down to the local cafe and sit outside, it can observe, people, cars, food smells etc.
Take your pup for rides in the car, they don’t have to get out to experience the world. Don’t just take your pup to the vet and home again, make the car a good place.
Ninja Pups
Ninja Pups classes run at Koo Wee K9 Bootcamp in Koo Wee Rup is suitable for pups from 8-16 weeks.
Your pup will remain in the Ninja Pups class until it reaches the age of 16 weeks. So if you start your pup at 8 weeks you will have the advantage of 8 weeks of puppy training.
Ninja Pups Online is suitable for pups of any age.
Does your pup think its name is «No», «leave it», «drop it
Are you sick of having your shoes chewed up?
Do you get annoyed when your pup won’t come back when its called?
Are you frustrated at having your socks stolen and having to chase your pup to retrieve them?
Do you wish your pup would just stop jumping and putting its muddy feet all over you?
How nice would it be if you could walk down the street without your pup pulling you along?
Ninja Pups will give you the tools to help develop your puppy into the dog you want.
These classes will provide you with the tools needed to give your puppy the best start possible, introducing them to not only obedience training but helping them to explore the world with confidence. Helping you to create a puppy that will grow into a dog who can go anywhere and be a socially acceptable companion.
You will gain knowledge and confidence to:
have your dog come back to you when called
teach your dog the basics
be more aware of your pups general health
understand your pups body language
realise you can teach your pup to do anything
The number of fake emotional support dogs is exploding – why?
Much of Rosie’s goodness is inherent, by virtue of her being a dog. But Rosie is not just a lovable creature, she is a helpful one, too. Rosie can open Nick’s fridge for him. She can press handicap door activation buttons, heel off-leash on busy New York sidewalks, and she’s even dabbled in a little search and rescue. She exhibits extreme self-control, especially when wearing her assistance animal vest, which she knows means she’s on duty.
Nick doesn’t fly with Rosie anymore, but when he did, she’d take up to 20 flights a year.
“When I went through the airport, people would come up to me and put their hand on my shoulder and say, ‘It’s so nice for you to travel with your dog,’ or thank me for my service, thinking I was in the military,” says Nick. “They clearly looked at Rosie, a lab, and just assumed I was in the military. I never lied, but that was the assumption people always made.”
The assumption – that Nick is a veteran with an invisible disability like PTSD – is wrong. Nick has no disabilities, and Rosie is not his assistance animal. Instead, she’s one of a growing number of pets whose owners have conscripted them into a life of duplicity.
To promote your pet to the status of an “emotional support animal”, or ESA, all you need is a therapist’s letter asserting the animal contributes to your psychological wellbeing. If you don’t have a therapist, there are for-profit websites, known among some psychologists as “ESA mills”, that will facilitate a quick, dubious disability appraisal by a clinician over the phone or via a web survey, then sell you miscellaneous swag like vests and tags (none of which are legally required for assistance animal owners to have) to make you pet look more official.
While ESAs are technically not legally allowed to venture everywhere in public with their owners (only service animals have that right), they do come with perks. Equipped with a therapist’s letter, you may move your pet into an animal-free apartment or dormitory, and fly with your pet in a plane’s cabin for free. And nothing stops ESA owners from asking for further accommodations.
Support animal or service dog?
In 2014, the New Yorker’s Patricia Marx gallivanted freely around the city with five successive fake ESA creatures, including a snake, an alpaca, and a pig named Daphne, demonstrating how easy it is to trick bewildered staff into letting random animals into their shops, museums, and restaurants.
While no governing body keeps track of the figure, a study from the University of California at Davis determined the number of ESAs registered by animal control facilities in the state increased 1,000% between 2002 and 2012. By 2015, the National Service Animal Registry, one of several sites that sell ESA certificates, had registered more than 65,000 assistance animals. In the four years since, that number increased 200%.
While not all spurious ESAs wreak havoc, some do – with serious consequences. In 2018, Delta Air reported an 84% surge in animal incidents since 2016, including urination, defecation and biting. Recent media reports of emotional support peacocks causing pandemonium in airports, comfort hamsters getting flushed in a frenzy, and dogs storming the stage during Cats have further contributed to the sense that ESAs are an epidemic, part of a zoo where entitlement, biting, pooping, and pretty much anything else goes.
For people who do have genuine disabilities, the situation is becoming untenable.
Ryan Honick, 33, whose service labrador, Pico, helps him with myriad daily tasks, says people on social media who broadcast their fraudulent pets infuriate him. Not only can fake ESAs distract or attack working service dogs, but service providers who have been inconvenienced by bad behavior from an unruly pet often sour on accommodating all animals thereafter. (Delta Air, for example, recently banned all ESAs from flights over eight hours.)
Despite having a federally protected service animal, Honick is often denied rides from rideshare drivers; he films these exchanges and keeps a running thread of them on his Twitter feed.
“I’ve had drivers ask me point blank, ‘What happens when your dog defecates in my car?’ I’ve said, ‘That’s not how trained service dogs function,’” says Honick. “People’s perceptions get skewed because somebody brought in their misrepresented animal. And that makes it harder for people like me who have a legitimately trained dog like Pico, who’s never caused any problems, because there’s this wariness.”
At a glance, fake emotional support animals may look like a product of rampant entitlement, but they may reflect something more complex.
The National Institutes of Health reports that “studies have found that animals can reduce loneliness, increase feelings of social support, and boost your mood”, and any pet owner can confirm that having an animal companion is one of the most effective non-pharmaceutical antidotes to anxiety you can get.
Meanwhile, generalized anxiety was identified relatively recently as a mental health condition and is only tentatively understood, but its reported levels are soaring across generations. The causes are frequently beyond our control, or feel like it (climate change, gun violence, financial stress) yet the responsibility to keep our mental health in check falls squarely on individuals. To feel passably well, we are told to exercise, get more sleep, eat wisely, and maybe snuggle a couple of corgis.
Perhaps that’s why millennials, “the anxious generation”, are also America’s largest and most enthusiastic demographic of pet owners, with a 2018 survey reporting that of the 72% of millennials who own pets, 67% consider them their “fur babies” – or part of their families.
Surely, many people who get ESA certifications for their pets are selfishly motivated by convenience – they just want to bring their pets on to airplanes or into Starbucks. But others see it as a way to self-medicate without spending the time and money on an official psychological assessment to confirm what they already know: that anxiety is affecting their wellbeing.
Eliza (not her real name), 28, had no moral dilemma surrounding her decision to “register” her three-year-old pomsky, Buzz (also a pseudonym), through a website that also sold her an ESA tag, dog vest, and certificate.
“I haven’t been diagnosed with any psychological illness, but I feel as if I naturally have a great deal of anxiety and I find that having my dog around me most of the time greatly reduces it,” she says. “I see my pet as my family member; instead of a child I have a dog and I want to make sure he has the best quality of life.”
Yet deriving comfort from pets doesn’t entitle anyone to special treatment, especially when it comes at the expense of disabled persons. And while anxiety is a difficult condition, its intensity falls on a spectrum; official ESAs are intended to aid those who suffer only from its most debilitating manifestations.
Despite Rosie’s good behavior, Nick’s conscience eventually caught up with him, and he ceased flying with her masquerading as his assistance animal in 2017.
“When I started flying with Rosie, it wasn’t quite the thing that it is now,” he says, noting he came to feel that too many people were trying to “get behind the system” with untrained dogs. “Sometimes you could tell the dogs were uncomfortable traveling, that they were scared, they were distracting real service animals, and at that point I didn’t want to be part of it any more.”
‘Not just any pet’
The question is, short of relying on everyone’s moral compass kicking in, how do we cut down on fraudulent ESAs?
One solution could be a collective movement towards an increasingly pet-integrated society. A small number of colleges permit pets in dormitories, a policy more could consider. Normalizing the presence of animals in more spaces may reduce the impetus for people to game the mental health system just to spend more time with their dogs.
But the more likely and impactful fix might be a change in medical policy.
According to Cassie Boness, University of Missouri PhD candidate and co-author of an article on tightening ESA regulations published by the American Psychological Association this month, the professionals who sign off on ESA letters need to adhere to a strict and standardized evaluation model.
Her research proposes a four-point evaluation system developed to empirically ensure not only that the individual in question suffers from a psychological disability that impairs their functioning, but that the specific animal they want to certify both behaves appropriately to access the spaces where they are permitted and objectively improves their handler’s symptoms.
Boness and her colleagues hope their new regulations will be adopted and formalized by the American Psychological Association, but they expect backlash from scammers of all stripes.
In fact, guidelines would help anyone who requires an assistance animal: “As we have more clear guidelines, ESAs will hopefully start to be more well respected, because not just any pet can be certified,” says Boness.
With stronger regulations in place, the dog days of dubious ESA certifications will be over. Until then, we’re left with a failing honor system rife with confusion, selfishness, and profiteers.
- This article was amended on 13 & 16 August 2019: to further clarify the difference between service animals and emotional support animals and to more accurately cite the proposals of the research of Boness.
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