27 November 2009
Every year, instead of traditional Season’s Greetings cards, Intervet/Schering-Plough Animal Health supports charitable projects or organizations with activities that benefit animal welfare and people. The donation supports projects that focus on the human-animal relationship. For 2009 we will support Assistance Dogs International Inc. Their purpose is to improve the areas of training, placement, and utilization of Assistance Dogs as well as staff and volunteer education. Information on previous Seasons Greetings Donations can be accessed at our Responsibility pages.
This year we are delighted that Intervet Canada Corp. has also joined this corporate initiative.
About Assistance Dogs International Inc.
Assistance Dogs International Inc. (ADI) was founded in 1987. ADI represents the worldwide assistance dog movement and has over 160 member organisations on four continents. ADI is a registered, non-profit organization with an international executive board. The head office of the ADI is located in Santa Rosa (California, USA).
The many tasks of ADI
The purpose of ADI is to improve the areas of training, placement, and utilization of Assistance Dogs as well as staff and volunteer education. Members of ADI meet regularly to share ideas, attend seminars, and educate the public about Assistance Dogs. Additionally, ADI initiates actions to enhance the legal rights of people with disabilities partnered with Assistance Dogs, sets standards and establishes guidelines and ethics for the training of these dogs, and improving the utilization and bonding of each team.
About Assistance Dogs
Assistance Dogs not only provide a specific service to their handlers, but also greatly enhance their lives with a new sense of freedom and independence. In most countries in the world disabled individuals with Assistance Dogs are guaranteed legal access to all places of public accommodation, modes of public transportation, recreation and other places to which the general public is invited.
The three types of Assistance Dogs are:
Guide Dogs for assisting blind and visually impaired people by avoiding obstacles, stopping at curbs and steps, and negotiating traffic. In this partnership, the human's role is to provide directional commands, while the dog's role is to ensure the team's safety even if this requires disobeying an unsafe command.
Hearing Dogs for assisting deaf and hard of hearing individuals by alerting them to a variety of household sounds such as a door knock or doorbell, alarm clock, oven buzzer, telephone, baby cry, name call or smoke alarm. Dogs are trained to make physical contact and lead their deaf partners to the source of the sound.
Service Dogs for assisting people with disabilities other than vision or hearing impairment. These specially-trained dogs can help by retrieving objects that are out of their handler's reach, opening and closing doors, turning light switches off and on, barking to indicate that help is needed, finding another person and leading the person to the handler, assisting ambulatory persons to walk by providing balance and counterbalance, providing deep pressure, and many other individual tasks as needed by a person with a disability.
Although Guide Dogs for the blind have been trained formally for over seventy years, training dogs for physically and/or mentally disabled individuals is a much more recent concept.
