In 1979, Paws With A Cause, first named Ears for the Deaf®, was born when Michael Sapp, Sr. offered to help a friend. Marty Jansen and his wife, Dianne, wanted to know if he would train their Cairn Terrier, “Crystal,” as a Hearing Dog. Soon, other Deaf/Hard of Hearing people showed up in the Jansen home each week, asking if they could have their dog trained.

In 1979 Guide Dog schools alone made up the Assistance Dog community. They operated with residential team training programs but the Service and Hearing Dog field was in its infancy. Only a few small organizations existed to train dogs for the majority of the disabled population which includes those individuals with the most severely limiting disabilities. Approximately 97 percent of all people with disabilities are not blind ; they are physically challenged in some other way and very few dogs were being trained to work with them.

By simply reaching out to help a friend, PAWS introduced the Community Field Instructor concept to the emerging Assistance Dog industry. In the early stages of its development, PAWS conducted all Hearing Dog training in the client’s home. Service Dog preliminary training was done in the trainers’ homes and finish work was completed in the client’s home and community.

That changed on November 1, 1987 when the Telephone Pioneers of America donated an 11,000 square foot building with offices, a conference room and 6,000 square feet of training area with space for 50 kennels. From that site, PAWS founders worked to expand the organization’s ability to serve their clients by building the Field Instructor network. In 1991 PAWS began obtaining Regional Representatives across the country.

From 1996 through 1999, PAWS emphasized its education component and took time out to recruit and train more staff trainers. Over the course of the past 25 years, the simple concept of utilizing community-based Field Instructors has revolutionized an industry that once provided a product -- a trained dog -- and it is turning it into one that fully addresses the needs of the client and the dog, by providing an ongoing service. Many Assistance Dog organizations have announced that they are enhancing their graduate follow-up programs.

Studies released in 1990 and 1992 indicated that the percentage of people with disabilities who wanted a dog trained for them had risen 13-fold. PAWS Board of Directors and administrators launched a private campaign to acquire a larger building and begin renovations that would allow us to train more dogs.

The new National Headquarters and Training Center opened on November 15, 1995. We tripled our total number of square feet from 11,000 to 35,000 by opening a new 24,000 square foot building with room for 100 dogs in training and a full office staff to handle the thousands of information requests we receive each month.

The Training Center at National Headquarters has a barrier-free two-bedroom training apartment equipped with motion sensitive cameras and a state-of the art kennel facility with indoor/outdoor kennel runs, radiant heat in ceiling and floor, built-in high pressure cleaning equipment, a grooming room, a vet room, and 13,500 square feet of open training area. Four fenced yards allow more than ample space for our dogs to exercise. The building is situated on an 8 acre tract to allow for future expansion so that PAWS can continue to meet the demand for our dogs. We now have nearly 1,000 people waiting for a PAWS Dog to be trained for them.

PAWS dedicated a new 14,000 square foot Canine Evaluation Center in September of 1998 on the same property as our National Headquarters. The location of this new building will help PAWS to reach our training goals while keeping expenses to a minimum. This building contains a fully-equipped veterinarian clinic as well as a quarantine area that allows new dogs to be introduced to our facility without the risk of infecting dogs that have begun training. Our new facilities bring us one step closer to our goals for the new millennium.

PAWS FUTURE

In an effort to meet the ever increasing need for Assistance Dogs, PAWS recently added an additional bulding.   The Canine Development Facility was dedicated in the Spring of 2003 to address the need for quality dogs for training. We would like to assure our supporters that this decision was not made without immense thought, discussion, and soul-searching. Additionally, we conducted a careful review of 3 years of shelter data from our records. We looked at many possible alternatives before making a decision to build a Canine Development Facility (CDF).

We have no plans to discontinue the use of dogs from shelters, however it would not be realistic for our program to rely on shelters to provide the kind of assistance our clients need. We need a very friendly, outgoing, and stable type of dog, with no medical problems or aggression in any form. Our dogs can be no older than two years of age. Most dogs in shelters are there for reasons of which we are not aware, and therefore, they must be evaluated very carefully. We cannot in good conscience provide a client with a dog that will require expensive medical procedures or may become aggressive, or one whose age prevents it from assisting its partner for 8 to 10 years.

We recently received the following statistics from a Humane Society that had taken in 5,665 cats and 2,813 dogs last fiscal year:

1. Only 29% (or 828) dogs were adopted;

2. 199 dogs were reclaimed by their owners;

3. 435 dogs were sick/injured, dead on arrival or too young to adopt;

4. 879 dogs were deemed not adoptable by the shelter for various reasons; and

5. 472 dogs were put to sleep by request of the owner.

Based on this Humane Society’s statistics, it can be determined that only one out of four dogs that came into their facility were adoptable.

We regularly go to 33 shelters in 9 states and in the past five years, have found a significant reduction in the number of adoptable dogs entering these facilities. Last year, we tested a total of 1,235 dogs in shelters. Only 80 of these dogs passed our temperament testing and went on for further evaluation (medical, etc). The good news is, the ones that did not make our program are more adoptable due to their experience at PAWS.

Three years ago we were able to rescue 260 dogs to begin our training. Last year only 80 usable shelter dogs were found. This is a 70% decrease in just three years. We have spoken to other organizations across the country that use shelter dogs and all attest to the growing lack of appropriate dogs from shelter sources. Most of these are smaller organizations that train 3 to 12 dogs each year. Reports in Dog World (May - June - July 2001) collaborate this fact.

We have attempted to work with breed rescue groups, however they charge an adoption fee that they will not refund if the dog washes out of our program for medical reasons. Not only do they keep our adoption fee, but they require that we return the dog. They then place the dog in a family home and charge the family another fee. Our experience over the last 12 years has shown that 75% of the dogs we procure from shelters wash out due to hip or elbow dysplasia, which according to OFA may not affect them as pets until they are older, but is a condition that is very detrimental to a working dog. Since most rescue groups are getting their dogs from shelters, the wash out rate will be comparable, thus making it a poor business decision for our program to pay their fees, run expensive medical tests and then return the dog if it is not medically sound.

We have been rescuing dogs to train as Assistance Dogs for nearly 25 years and our statistics have continuously shown that only 1 out of 8 rescues successfully complete our training. We have taken in over 5,000 dogs for training and only 625 have been successful in our program. We test over 1,000 dogs annually and only an average of 6% can pass the preliminary temperament test. The ones that we take are then put through another, more comprehensive test at our Training Center, along with a complete medical exam by our Veterinary Staff. These tests, which include x-rays of hips, elbows and shoulders, can be expensive. Often there are additional shipping costs for returning the dog if it was rescued from a shelter or rescue group in another state.

We have had a small breeding program for years. Three out of four puppies that we bred have successfully completed training over the past five years. This is quite a difference from the 12.5% success rate of shelter dogs. All Guide Dog schools have their own breeding programs that produce from 200 to 1,000 puppies each year. In each case, the success rate is much better than 1 out of 8 dogs completing training.

There are many facts about Paws With A Cause that are not given media attention, such as our efforts to find alternative jobs for the dogs that do not successfully complete our training. These include work with US Customs and Leader Dogs for the Blind.  Most often dogs that are "Career Changed" are placed in loving homes as family pets.

We would like to assure our supporters that we will continue to rescue dogs whenever possible. We also accept donations of dogs. It has always been a priority to rescue dogs to train as Assistance Dogs, however, we must keep our true mission in mind, which is to train Assistance Dogs for people with disabilities. While it may sound harsh, our primary goal is to facilitate the independence of people with disabilities through the use of Assistance Dogs, not to rescue dogs. Every dog we rescue is a bonus and a blessing, but our clients must be our top priority.