![]() The service dogs also are trained to notice when veterans are experiencing anxiety at night and will actively wake up the person from nightmares. Some trained tasks include picking up on cues veterans display when experiencing distress or anxiety and consequently nudging, pawing or licking them to encourage the veteran to focus on the dog. Veterans with a service dog also rated all of the service dog’s trained tasks as being “moderately” to “quite a bit” important for their PTSD. The study found that, on average, the dog’s training to both alert the veteran to any increasing anxiety and providing physical contact during anxiety episodes were reported to be the most important and the most often used in a typical day. The study was done in conjunction with K9s For Warriors, with support and funding from Merrick Pet Care, and is in preparation for an ongoing large-scale clinical trial that is studying veterans with and without service dogs over an extended period of time. Their research was published in Frontiers in Psychology. Rodriguez led the work with Maggie O’Haire, associate professor of human-animal interaction. “This study suggests that veterans are, in fact, using and benefiting from the specific trained tasks, which sets these dogs apart from pet dogs or emotional support dogs.” “There has been some debate on what kind of training PTSD service dogs need to be effective and how their assistance may be different than what a pet dog can provide,” said Kerri Rodriguez, a human-animal interaction graduate student and a lead author on the study. The study found that the task of disrupting episodes of anxiety ranked among the most important and most often used. But the exact role service dogs play in the day-to-day lives of veterans – and the helpfulness of the tasks they perform – is less known.Ī recent study led by Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine shows what trained tasks service dogs perform the most often and which ones are the most helpful to veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. ![]() Science has shown that service dogs can benefit some veterans with PTSD.
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