Trust your dog: Training service dogs for U.S. Veterans with PTSD

Abstract: "Trust Your Dog: Training Service Dogs for U.S. Veterans with PTSD" investigates what it means for veterans with PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) to come to trust their service dogs by means of training with non-for-profit organizations that instruct and/or provide dogs at no expense. Ethnographic research for this dissertation took place in Chicago and Wisconsin part-time for two years and full time for a year with four organizations that train service dogs. I shadowed dog trainings, both in training centers and in public, attended graduations and dedications, worked dogs in training, and followed trainers and veterans with their service dogs in training. The research also included virtual interviews with out of state organizations, where I learned about the history of the service dog industry and about general training standards. This dissertation analyzes the tensions inherent in a veteran trusting a service dog: even though the dog appears to lack agency due to its operant conditioning, the dog does take initiative to alert and task for its veteran. Veterans can trust their dogs expressly because the dogs act on their own discretion when needed and at other times maintain strict obedience. The dissertation starts by looking at the institutional history of the service dog industry, which, due to a lack of governmental standardization, led to a crisis of legitimacy: without any certification, how can a dog be legitimized and thereby trusted to be safe in public with disabled persons? Out of this came accrediting organizations as experts that set “standards of excellence” and eventually collaborated with government agencies. These accrediting organizations – alongside non-accredited organizations, veterans, dogs, trainers, and so forth – make up the PTSD service dog industry, which, by focusing on public access, projects onto veterans the moral project of achieving ordinary American sociality with a service dog by feeling safe in public as consumers. The service dog allows for disabled veterans to live a good life in the everyday present rather than focusing on a future cure, in part because the service dog makes veterans feel safe in public and also because the dog functions as medical equipment for its veteran. Service dogs are an animated kind of medical equipment that can accomplish tasks material medical objects cannot, such as sensing an oncoming panic attack. They can do this because the dogs and veterans are connected through affective bonds that we may envisage as motivation for the dog to work and encouragement for the veteran to trust their dog. It is because the dog has agency in an unequal relation of symbiosis in submission that dogs can learn obedience and decide to improvise when they run out of ways to draw their veteran’s attention to anxiety or some kind of physical condition.