Why not other breeds?

We wish there were more breeds that made good Service Dogs, but other breeds don't have a good track record. Personally, we love each and every AKC dog breed, but...each breed was originally created for a specific purpose and their resulting characteristics don't match the requirements of a Service Dog. 

- The Service Dogs we choose to train need, for our program, to have a rare combination of: A. Low energy, and B. High intelligence. This combination is not common in dog breeds (smart dogs tend to be high-energy, while low-energy dogs tend to not be very trainable).

- In addition to those requirements, the Service Dogs we work with also need to have high pack-drive, pretty low prey-drive, low fight-drive, and low flight-drive. 

- The breed must also have the traits of low reactivity/high biddability/low tenacity (which is a rare combination).

- If all these requirements aren't enough, the dogs also need to be the right size because small dogs can grow fearful from being stepped on in crowds.

That's a lot of requirements! More details are on our page about breeds.