A Perfect Match: Why Service Dogs Sometimes Fail - a podcast by Ty Brown

Today I want to write a little about service dog failures.This is something that not many people like to talk about it, and I honestly don’t either. Failure isn’t fun to think about or dwell on—but they do a lot to teach. They’re important lessons that help us to understand what constitutes a good situation for a service dog.


We’ve recently been training a lot of service dogs for a variety of situations. Primarily, we’ve been training dogs to deal with PTSD, autism, diabetes, and seizures. Overall, things have gone well. Our dogs have gone on to live in the home, do a good job, and improve their owner’s quality of life 80-90% of the time.


There’s an old saying, however, that 80% of your success comes from 20% of your effort. Though failures constitute only abut 5% of our service dog placements, I would say that in 10-20% of situations there are challenges beyond what we’ve anticipated. The longer I train service dogs, the more I identify the characteristics that go into successful and unsuccessful pairings. Today I want to talk about those characteristics.


The first principle is commitment. This quality leads to the biggest successes and the biggest failures. We drill into people’s heads before adoption, over and over, that the service dog process involves work. Even though the service dogs we send out are trained, a trained dog will become untrained very quickly if certain maintenance isn’t done.

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