Somewhere over the Ranger-bow!: Alfie the assistance dog

Hi, it's Emily again. After exhausting the topic of arts and crafts in my last two posts, I was really struggling to think of a new topic to write about - but then I remembered that my family has an amazing dog in the house that deserves a post.

My family is involved with a charity called Canine Partners, which is a charity that trains and provides assistance dogs to people with physical disabilities in the UK. We are one of the many families that volunteer to foster the dogs (look after them) at weekends whilst they are going though advanced training for a 17 week period before they are matched with the person they are going to help. At that point we have to say goodbye to them and off they go to be full time assistance dogs.

We have now fostered a total of around 5 dogs over about 3 years, and they were all lovely and well behaved (okay, most of them - one of them was crazy and failed training but was still super cute).

We have had a labrador named Alfie since November 2019 and he passed his advanced training (with flying colours) in March this year, and was briefly partnered up with the person he is going to help, just before the lockdown started. However, the training centre had to close when the lockdown started, so Alfie came back to us and has been stuck with us for the whole of lockdown so far. We love having him and Alfie also quite likes this situation because all he has to do at the moment is sleep, eat, and scare off pigeons.

Here are some photos of Alfie - he is very photogenic.

Canine Partner dogs are trained to do all kinds of jobs around the house to help their human partners such as:

Opening and closing doors
Unloading and reloading the washing machine
Retrieving objects
Helping their partner get dressed
Picking up the phone (just taking it to their person, not answering it, although that really would be amazing)
Getting help in an emergency
...and mainly eating food crumbs off the floor (Labradors are basically hoovers)

Since Alfie is not required to work at the moment, he needs some reminders of his training, so we have to get him to do some tasks everyday using commands (he's very good at picking up any washing my mum drops and giving it back to her).

Although Alfie is very good, lockdown is making him very bored so he has recently been up to a bit more trouble than usual. He now likes barking at the neighbor and scaring me (hes a loud dog), climbing on my knee when I'm sat on the floor (labradors are too big to do this - he does not care), stealing gardening tools, and his most recent fiasco - running across the garden with a wheelbarrow (that he was meant to be tethered to) dragging behind him.

When the lockdown is over, the training centre will reopen and Alfie will be able to be reunited with his partner that he is going to help. Although we have become very attached to him after having him for so long and will miss him alot, we know that he has a very important job to do and that he is going to transform someones life.

Canine Partners do amazing work and it is definitely worth checking out their social medias to see how the dogs change peoples lives. Their youtube channel is https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ4tPfeRm100E86l8z9pShA , their facebook is @caninepartners, and instagram is @caninepartnersuk.

Here are some funny and cute photos of all the dogs we've had - hope you enjoy them.

-Emily