Tripawd is dog-gone good therapy for everyone
Tripawd is dog-gone good therapy for everyone
By Edie Grossfield
Post-Bulletin, Rochester MN
Madonna Towers resident Dottie Chipault, center, visits with Tristan, a black Labrador trained by Rick Faber, left, and Pepsi, a Jack Russell terrier trained by Hank Pernu, right, on Feb. 4. Faber and Pernu are Olmsted County jail detainees who learned how to train the dogs for social visits through the TriPAWd program.
For Rick Faber, an inmate in the Olmsted County Jail, the chance to train an abandoned black Labrador retriever named Tristan was a chance to improve himself.
Faber, who is serving time in the county's work-release program, participates in a new social therapy dog training program called TriPawd. It matches up jail detainees and shelter dogs to create social therapy dogs for visits to nursing homes and other such facilities.
The program has taught Faber, who has three children, patience and parenting skills.
"It's a lot of responsibility. It's like having another kid around," he said. "I've learned about not yelling. It's helped me learn patience and to have control."
TriPawd is unconventional in a number of ways. One obvious aspect is the jail inmates. They participate in a six-week, hands-on dog obedience training program and then take the dogs to nursing homes for social therapy visits.
Since the inmates are in the county's work-release program, meaning they are able to go to their jobs during the day and then return to the jail in the evening, they are considered very low risk, said Olmsted County Sheriff Steven Borchardt.
"The only people that would be eligible (for TriPawd) are those who have been convicted and sentenced to local time. And those folks are usually on our sentence-for-service crews or on work-release anyway," he said.
Allison Sullivan, the founder of TriPawd, teaches the inmates how to train the dogs. She sets up the nursing home visits and supervises the dogs and their trainers during visits.
Another unusual element of TriPawd is that it uses shelter dogs; in this case, from Paws and Claws Humane Society. Most social therapy dog training programs use purebreds with known backgrounds.
"I knew what was most important to me was using the shelter dog," Sullivan said. "And there's not a lot of work that shelter dogs can do because they're not too terribly reliable — we don't know what their backgrounds are. But one thing they can do is make people smile. So, I was like 'OK, we'll go with that.'"
Her first training session recently ended, successfully, and she is now choosing dogs and trainers for the next round. The four dogs she had in the first session all were adopted by their foster homes, which kept them during their training. That is another benefit of TriPawd: a well-behaved dog is a more adoptable dog, Sullivan said.
The most important thing Sullivan can teach inmates during dog training is how to control their emotions, which is an important skill to take back to their homes and work lives, she said.
She described a common training moment in which a detainee might become frustrated with his dog because it's not behaving or doing what it's being asked to do. In this situation, the trainer can easily lose his patience.
"But I'm right there, and I can see that you're about to lose it with this dog. And let me remind you of a couple of the things that we've been talking about. Let me remind you of what a benevolent leader you can be. And then, all of a sudden, after however many times of me watching you about to lose it, you become your own coach," she said.
At a recent visit to Madonna Towers, an assisted living complex in northwest Rochester, Sullivan marveled at how Faber and another inmates worked with their dogs and interacted with the residents.
"I love the pride the guys have in being able to answer questions about their dogs," she said. "And I love to see how patient they are in difficult training situations, and I love to see the kindness and respect that they show to the residents. Doing something well and sharing it is what life is all about, I guess, and TriPawd is giving them tools to do it peacefully."
During the training program, the inmates and dogs bond, which can make the eventual parting painful, Faber said. He had to say good-bye to Tristan, who was adopted by the family that fostered the dog during the training program.
"It's kind of sad, but he's going to a good home," Faber said.
Faber is now training another dog in TriPawd.
