#service dog organizations

[thepuppost]

Expert Guidance on How to Train a Service Dog

🐶👨‍🦯 Are you interested in training a service dog? Look no further! Check out our latest article for expert guidance on how to train a service dog. 📖👀 #ServiceDogs #DogTraining #ExpertAdvice 🐾❤️ #thepuppost

A service dog is a specially trained animal that performs specific tasks to assist people with disabilities or medical conditions. These dogs are trained to help their owners with everyday tasks such as retrieving items, opening doors, or even alerting them to oncoming medical emergencies. Training a service dog is a critical process that requires patience, dedication, and the help of expert…

[pensivebathtub]

evan and blue <3

[leedrawsart]

lolz

Da longer I get triggered & angry da moar I think I ned a serv dog :///

[x22817]

I'm so grateful I have doctors actually listening to me for the first time in my life, but getting my blood drawn three times in one week has not been fun.

[teabookgremlin]

i want a puppy so much

[canisitsnotlupus]

SD organizations are moving away from poodles left and right because of the high wash rates (and numerous ones will even say that's why lol) and people still push them as a fab four breed (along with collies and gsds, yikes) 💀 there's a reason almost all accredited organizations use labs, goldens, or labxgolden mixes... it's because they have the best and absolute highest success rates out of any breed, hugely ahead of all other breeds in their success rates and like, i am the FIRST to admit that sometimes off breeds can become SDs, i worked a BC, but the fact is.. one can set themselves up for success by going with a lab or golden (or labxgolden)

[largemouthbassnation]

Gundog Training at Dig It Dogs with Cheshire Canine Services

Mike Crawford of Cheshire Canine Services and Dig It Dog Training Club. Gundog training workshops. source

[ketchuppee]

During the 2008 recession, my aunt lost her job. Her, her partner, and my three cousins moved across the country to stay with us while they got back on their feet. My house turned from a family of four to a family of nine overnight, complete with three dogs and five cats between us.

It took a few years for them to get a place of their own, but after a few rentals and apartments, they now own a split level ranch in a town nearby. I’ve lost track of how many coworkers and friends have stayed with them when they were in a tight spot. A mother and son getting out of an abusive relationship, a divorcee trying to stay local for his kids while they work out a custody agreement, you name it. My aunt and uncle knew first hand what that kindness meant, and always find space for someone who needed it, the way my parents had for them.

That same aunt and uncle visited me in [redacted] city last year. They are prolific drinkers, so we spent most of the day bar hopping. As we wandered the city, any time we passed a homeless person, my uncle would pull out a fresh cigarette and ask them if they had a light. Regardless of if they had a lighter on hand or not, he offered them a few bucks in exchange, which he explained to me after was because he felt it would be easier for them to accept in exchange for a service, no matter how small.

I work for a company that produces a lot of fabric waste. Every few weeks, I bring two big black trash bags full of discarded material over to a woman who works down the hall. She distributes them to local churches, quilting clubs, and teachers who can use them for crafts. She’s currently in the process of working with our building to set up a recycling program for the smaller pieces of fabric that are harder to find use for.

One of my best friends gives monthly donations to four or five local organizations. She’s fortunate enough to have a tech job that gives her a good salary, and she knows that a recurring donation is more valuable to a non-profit because they can rely on that money month after month, and can plan ways to stretch that dollar for maximum impact. One of those organizations is a native plant trust, and once she’s out of her apartment complex and in a home with a yard, she has plans to convert it into a haven of local flora.

My partner works for a company that is working to help regulate crypto and hold the current bad actors in the space accountable for their actions. We unfortunately live in a time where technology develops far too fast for bureaucracy to keep up with, but just because people use a technology for ill gain doesn’t mean the technology itself is bad. The blockchain is something that she finds fascinating and powerful, and she is using her degree and her expertise to turn it into a tool for good.

I knew someone who always had a bag of treats in their purse, on the odd chance they came across a stray cat or dog, they had something to offer them.

I follow artists who post about every local election they know of, because they know their platform gives them more reach than the average person, and that they can leverage that platform to encourage people to vote in elections that get less attention, but in many ways have more impact on the direction our country is going to go.

All of this to say, there’s more than one way to do good in the world. Social media leads us to believe that the loudest, the most vocal, the most prolific poster is the most virtuous, but they are only a piece of the puzzle. (And if virtue for virtues sake is your end goal, you’ve already lost, but that’s a different post). Community is built of people leveraging their privileges to help those without them. We need people doing all of those things and more, because no individual can or should do all of it. You would be stretched too thin, your efforts valiant, but less effective in your ambition.

None of this is to encourage inaction. Identify your unique strengths, skills, and privileges, and put them to use. Determine what causes are important to you, and commit to doing what you can to help them. Collective action is how change is made, but don’t forget that we need diversity in actions taken.

[theinfernaldesiremachine]

9) If your off-leash dog runs up to someone using a working dog (guide dog, medical alert dog, etc) you are putting the person and the dog in danger in the moment, and possibly ending the dog’s career if the experience is traumatic

Everyone else talked about outdoor cats, it's time for me to talk about offleash dogs

[makingcontact]

The Rise of the New Labor Movement

Brunswick cafe, Little Dog, where workers organized a union. Credit: Alex Spear, Bowdoin Orient The last few years have seen a wave of labor organizing as it becomes more and more clear to workers that their work is not expendable, but actually the heart of every business. From walkouts to unionization, workers at every workplace from Starbucks to Amazon to your local coffee shop have come…

[arsenenicholas]

https://goodlawproject.org/crowdfunder/nhs-cyp-guidance/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaadkVMoRUHpcFptnjlifnc1xJ0i7YGVi78tfv2vEXVaVIQDPTEp1-ozNcY_aem_AfqNP9xEERFn6GRCZCIP7B2RriLi8ZN7pVAFzmNwdvqIXW0nmc1mTe5Hq0UV3xC6VPWdYe1x64wHk7O6-HPOhIdf

Please share, tag someone who could bring this to a lot of people, and post to other platforms. Not originally mine, idk who is the source of the screenshots.

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In thick white text on black background-> NHS ENGLAND ARE PLANNING A HONEYPOT WHERE THEY SEND ALL KIDS ON GIDS WAITLIST TO CAHMS TO HAVE THEM BE ASKED IF THEY ARE TAKING BLOCKERS/HRT VIA PRIVATE OR DIY ROUTES

Text is broken and in the middle is an excerpt from a leaked nhs document-> a) For medication sourced directly (e.g via the internet), explain the increased risks of harm due to the unregulated nature of these medicines/products. These may include the use of counterfeit chemicals, unsafe/unknown ancilliary ingredients or variability of potency etc. More information can be found here (link to nhs website). // b) Do not initiate or continue prescribing puberty surpressing hormones or gender affirming hormones. The General Medical Council's guidance to medical professionals on 'bridging prescriptions (a course of endocrine intervention managed by a healthcare professional outside of the specialised gender service while an individual is waiting to be seen) does not apply to care offered to young people under 18 years of age. // c) If the child/young person or their carer disregards your advice and you consider that this puts the child/young person at increased risk, then a safeguarding referral might also be appropriate in line with standard safeguarding approaches. Discuss with your line manager and your organization's safeguarding team.

Thick white text on black background continues-> ANY WHO SAYS YES AND DO NOT DESIST FROM DOING SO WILL BE THREATENED WITH SAFEGUARDING REFERRAL (TAKEN INTO STATE CARE)

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In black text on white background, from the news article linked above-> It seems to us - and to those inside the NHS who have leaked the document to us - that what purports to be an "assessment" in fact an exercise in bringing very significant pressure to bear on trans youth and their families to cease private treatment, backed up with a threat of a safeguarding referral to social services if they do not. // We are concerned about what appears to be a misleading exercise in gathering data on which trans youth are obtaining private treatment from abroad, for the purposes of seeking to cause or compel them to stop treatment.

In the same thick white text on black background as previous image-> So an internal NHS document has been leaked basically asking trans kids on excruciatingly ling waiting lists to come to a 'mental health assessment' where the NHS will harvest their personal information & threaten their families with a social services referral if they're found to be on private blockers/hormones & refuse to come off them. // This country is for dogs i swear.

[neil-gaiman]

Hi Neil! I’m an 18 year old Catholic high school kid coming to terms with the fact that I’m not heterosexual, and I’m struggling with the guilt of that because I want to love who I want to love, but God condemns it in the Bible so I’m scared. I’m crying while writing this so sorry for any typos, but you just seem like a safe person to ask about this. Please any advice at all? Idk I’m just scared and I don’t know what to do.

Also I like your dog he’s cute.

If there is a God who made you, they made you love who you love.

It is true that the Book of Leviticus tells us that men who lie with other men need to be put to death, but it says the same thing about men who have sex with women while they're having their periods. I don't know if this helps at all.

But mostly what I'd say is, you need friends, you need a support network, and you need people you can talk to and be safe around. Some of those people you may find online -- and a good place to start might be

And good luck...

[frankenmouse]

I don’t get why only cheetahs get service dogs for their anxiety. I also deserve to have a chill doggo who comes with me to public places and whose presence reassures me and prevents me from engaging in anxiety-related self harm/general highstrungness.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse election

I'm in to TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (Monday, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.

But unsubscribing from Prime? That's a fucking nightmare. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave. Now, there's two possibilities here: either Amazon's UX competence is a kind of erratic freak tide that sweeps in at unpredictable intervals and hits these unbelievable high-water marks, or the company just doesn't want to let you leave.

To investigate this question, let's consider a parallel: Black Flag's Roach Motel. This is an icon of American design, a little brown cardboard box that is saturated in irresistibly delicious (to cockroaches, at least) pheromones. These powerful scents make it admirably easy for all the roaches in your home to locate your Roach Motel and enter it.

But the interior of the Roach Motel is also coated in a sticky glue. Once roaches enter the motel, their legs and bodies brush up against this glue and become hopeless mired in it. A roach can't leave – not without tearing off its own legs.

It's possible that Black Flag made a mistake here. Maybe they wanted to make it just as easy for a roach to leave as it is to enter. If that seems improbable to you, well, you're right. We don't even have to speculate, we can just refer to Black Flag's slogan for Roach Motel: "Roaches check in, but they don't check out."

It's intentional, and we know that because they told us so.

Back to Amazon and Prime. Was it some oversight that cause the company make it so marvelously painless to sign up for Prime, but such a titanic pain in the ass to leave? Again, no speculation is required, because Amazon's executives exchanged a mountain of internal memos in which this is identified as a deliberate strategy, by which they deliberately chose to trick people into signing up for Prime and then hid the means of leaving Prime. Prime is a Roach Motel: users check in, but they don't check out:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – "relentless" (Bezos's original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented "one click checkout" – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent

But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.

Amazon's relentless union-busting spans a wide diversity of tactics. On the one hand, they cook up media narratives to smear organizers, invoking racist dog-whistles to discredit workers who want a better deal:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo

On the other hand, they collude with federal agencies to make workers afraid that their secret ballots will be visible to their bosses, exposing them to retaliation:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor-law-alabama-union-election-labor-official-finds-rcna1582

They hold Cultural Revolution-style forced indoctrination meetings where they illegally threaten workers with punishment for voting in favor of their union:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/business/economy/amazon-union-staten-island-nlrb.html

And they fire Amazon tech workers who express solidarity with warehouse workers:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-fires-tech-employees-workers-criticism-warehouse-climate-policies/

But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like "fairness" or "grievance":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

Amazon also invents implausible corporate fictions that allow it to terminate entire sections of its workforce for trying to unionize, by maintaining the tormented pretense that these workers, who wear Amazon uniforms, drive Amazon trucks, deliver Amazon packages, and are tracked by Amazon down to the movements of their eyeballs, are, in fact, not Amazon employees:

https://www.wired.com/story/his-drivers-unionized-then-amazon-tried-to-terminate-his-contract/

These workers have plenty of cause to want to unionize. Amazon warehouses are sources of grueling torment. Take "megacycling," a ten-hour shift that runs from 1:20AM to 11:50AM that workers are plunged into without warning or the right to refuse. This isn't just a night shift – it's a night shift that makes it impossible to care for your children or maintain any kind of normal life.

Then there's Jeff Bezos's war on his workers' kidneys. Amazon warehouse workers and drivers notoriously have to pee in bottles, because they are monitored by algorithms that dock their pay for taking bathroom breaks. The road to Amazon's warehouse in Coventry, England is littered with sealed bottles of driver piss, defenestrated by drivers before they reach the depot inspection site.

There's so much piss on the side of the Coventry road that the prankster Oobah Butler was able to collect it, decant it into bottles, and market it on Amazon as an energy beverage called "Bitter Lemon Release Energy," where it briefly became Amazon's bestselling energy drink:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

(Butler promises that he didn't actually ship any bottled piss to people who weren't in on the gag – but let's just pause here and note how weird it is that a guy who hates our kidneys as much as Jeff Bezos built and flies a penis-shaped rocket.)

Butler also secretly joined the surge of 1,000 workers that Amazon hired for the Coventry warehouse in advance of a union vote, with the hope of diluting the yes side of that vote and forestall the union. Amazon displayed more of its famously selective competence here, spotting Butler and firing him in short order, while totally failing to notice that he was marketing bottles of driver piss as a bitter lemon drink on Amazon's retail platform.

After a long fight, Amazon's Coventry workers are finally getting their union vote, thanks to the GMB union's hard fought battle at the Central Arbitration Committee:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/04/26/amazon-warehouse-workers-in-coventry-will-vote-on-trade-union-recognition/

And right on schedule, Amazon has once again discovered its incredible facility for ease-of-use. The company has blanketed its shop floor with radioactively illegal "one click to quit the union" QR codes. When a worker aims their phones at the code and clicks the link, the system auto-generates a letter resigning the worker from their union.

As noted, this is totally illegal. English law bans employers from "making an offer to an employee for the sole or main purpose of inducing workers not to be members of an independent trade union, take part in its activities, or make use of its services."

Now, legal or not, this may strike you as a benign intervention on Amazon's part. Why shouldn't it be easy for workers to choose how they are represented in their workplaces? But the one-click system is only half of Amazon's illegal union-busting: the other half is delivered by its managers, who have cornered workers on the shop floor and ordered them to quit their union, threatening them with workplace retaliation if they don't.

This is in addition to more forced "captive audience" meetings where workers are bombarded with lies about what life in an union shop is like.

Again, the contrast couldn't be more stark. If you want to quit a union, Amazon makes this as easy as joining Prime. But if you want to join a union, Amazon makes that even harder than quitting Prime. Amazon has the same attitude to its workers and its customers: they see us all as a resource to be extracted, and have no qualms about tricking or even intimidating us into doing what's best for Amazon, at the expense of our own interests.

The campaigning law-firm Foxglove is representing five of Amazon's Coventry workers. They're doing the lord's work:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/05/02/legal-challenge-to-amazon-uks-new-one-click-to-quit-the-union-tool/

All this highlights the increasing divergence between the UK and the US when it comes to labor rights. Under the Biden Administration, @NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has promulgated a rule that grants a union automatic recognition if the boss does anything to interfere with a union election:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

In other words, if Amazon tries these tactics in the USA now, their union will be immediately recognized. Abruzzo has installed an ultra-sensitive tilt-sensor in America's union elections, and if Bezos or his class allies so much as sneeze in the direction of their workers' democratic rights, they automatically lose.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove

Image: Isabela.Zanella (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ballot-box-2.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[ninalinovna]

Here's my contribution to THE R STANDS FOR REDEMPTION: A DAMIAN WAYNE ZINE! All proceeds from this zine will be donated to CAN DO CANINES an organization that partners service dogs with individuals with disabilities. 💚

🦇 LEFTOVER SALES ARE OPEN NOW 🦇

Learn more @damianwaynezine!

[teabookgremlin]

i just spent like 20 minutes scrolling through service dog instagram accounts and crying bc the future service dog i’m raising rn is (hopefully) gonna go on to bring that much love, support, and freedom to someone someday and it makes me so happy