I bought a dog from a private company. They said it would be trained to help me but it is not working out and I am having problems. Can you help me? Expand The capacity of our charity’s work is limited by funds and resources. Our charity is already working at full capacity to help our clients who have applied for a support dog through our existing programmes.
Do you provide dogs to help people with mental health issues, anxiety or panic attacks? Expand We do not specifically train dogs to assist with these conditions, although some of our clients report that this is a secondary benefit they have experienced in
Do you get any government funding to pay for the dogs and the training? Expand We receive no government funding and rely entirely on voluntary donations and fundraising to continue transforming lives of those affected by autism, epilepsy and disability.
Do you train dogs to alert to non-epileptic seizures? Expand Our charity’s area of expertise is training dogs to alert to epileptic seizures and we are also limited by our resources.
My dog is helping me already can I just register with you and buy an assistance dog jacket? Expand All support dogs must go through our charity's rigorous selection assessment and training programme inline with Assistance Dogs International guidelines and standards before they can become a registered as a support dog with our charity. This process can take up to 2 years.
Do you provide dogs to people living in Northern Ireland or overseas? Expand Due to our limited resources we currently have to restrict our coverage of support to the whole of Mainland UK (England, Scotland, and Wales). The exception to this is our autism programme, which again due to particularly high demand and limited resources, is restricted to a maximum of 2 hours road travel from our Sheffield training centre.
How much does it cost to train and maintain a Support Dog? . Expand We provide our services entirely free of charge to those who will benefit from our work. We do not ask for any payment for our work.The cost to our charity of each support dog partnership, from initial training, to client training and support throughout its working life, is approximately £36,000.
Is there an age limit for the autism program? Expand We normally place dogs with children aged between three and ten years, and within a catchment area of any distance that can be driven in two hours from our national training centre in Sheffield S9 2RX.Sadly due to the impact of the Covid pandemic we are currently dealing with a huge backlog of applications and so currently can only accept new applications for children aged between three years old and seven years & six months old. We of course aim to increase this as our resources and capacity allow.