Knox’s best friend has already saved his life twice. Seven-year-old Knox was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the age of 2, and with the deadly risk of his blood sugar dipping too low, his mother, Ashley Bittick, knew she had to have a plan.
“I do a blood glucose check on him 10 to 12 times a day, and he gets a minimum of four shots a day,” Bittick says. “Every time he eats, he has to get insulin, but if his sugar is low, he would have liquid sugar — a juice box or something of that nature — to immediately bring up his blood sugar.”
While a sudden change in Knox’s behavior is typically a good indicator of a blood-sugar dip, “One low blood sugar can kill,” Bittick says, so she sought out another tool — a diabetic alert dog.
Through the Senatobia, Mississippi-based nonprofit organization Retrieving Freedom, Knox met Nellie, a yellow lab who, over the course of 18 months, has grown to be much more than a pet.
“Knox actually picked her out,” Bittick, a mother of three who lives in Arlington, says. “When we went down there, they gave him several options and let the dogs interact with Knox. When Nellie went up to him, they immediately bonded.”
Much of the training for service dogs includes standard obedience training, as service dog recipients often take their animals into public places. For diabetic alert dogs, the process also involves scent work. In the early phases of Nellie’s training, while she was housed at the Senatobia facility, Bittick would watch at home for Knox’s sugar to drop.
“When he would drop to 70 or under, I would have to put a cotton ball in his mouth and saturate it,” she says. “I couldn’t touch it; he would spit it into a glass vial, we’d double-Ziploc it, and freeze it.” The package would be dated and marked with Knox’s blood sugar level. After collecting several saturated cotton balls during each low-sugar episode, the Bitticks would pass them off to the trainer, who’d thaw out the samples and work with Nellie to recognize the scent.
Since the thawed cotton balls didn’t always retain a strong odor, the next phase of training involved “live alerts,” where Knox and Nellie worked one-on-one to teach Nellie that the cotton ball and Knox’s low-sugar scent were one and the same. “Of course, we wouldn’t always know when his sugar was going to drop, but there were times we were training [in person] and it would drop, and we would work with her in a short period of time to identify the low sugar,” says Bittick.
Nellie has been taught to paw at Knox or his mother when she senses a low-sugar episode. She has responded to two live alerts since coming home with the Bitticks last October.
The next step in Nellie’s ongoing training will involve a push-button alarm system that she can set off if Knox’s sugar drops too low during the night.
Working with Nellie, Bittick has gained a greater sense of assurance that her son won’t be impeded by his diagnosis. And Knox has gained a life-saving buddy. “Their relationship is on another level because it’s so much more personal,” says Bittick. “It’s bigger than just having a dog. They’re inseparable. They’re best friends.”
“It’s incredible — the bonds that these dogs form with their people,” says Charles Dwyer, co-president and co-founder of Retrieving Freedom.
Dwyer has trained dogs since 1999, originally for hunting and competition, but moved to training service dogs a few years later. “I started meeting veterans who had been affected by IEDs and saw how these dogs were able to help them get through the day,” Dwyer says, “and helped save their lives in a number of instances. So I shifted gears from training dogs for sport to training dogs to save people’s lives.”
Opened in 2010, Retrieving Freedom, the only facility of its kind in the Mid-South, first worked to place service dogs with disabled veterans and veterans suffering with PTSD. Today, they also train diabetic alert dogs, like Nellie, as well as dogs that assist autistic children.
For autistic children and veterans, the aim is not only to teach the dogs to provide much-needed services, but also to act as a social bridge. “We want these dogs to take the focus off the individual and draw that attention to themselves,” says Dwyer. While autistic children might be bullied in school, “Now he’s the cool kid with the dog. And [classmates] are not focusing on the screaming that the child might do; they’re focused on the dog and say, ‘Oh cool, what’s your dog’s name?’ So they get little bits and pieces of normal conversation that they might not otherwise get.”
When working with autistic children, dogs are also taught to be an “anchor” via a “tethering” training procedure. The child is tethered to the dog’s service vest and holds onto a handle while walking with the dog. If the child moves too far away and drops the handle, that’s a cue for the dog to sit and become an anchor. “That gives mom or dad a chance to get the child before he runs out into the parking lot or into traffic or possibly gets lost in a department store,” Dwyer says.
For cases of meltdown or tantrum, these dogs are taught a “snuggle” command, where they get up close to their human and provide pressure. “We can temper that pressure based on the child’s need,” he says. “If they like a lot of pressure, we’ll actually teach the dog to lay on the child.” This type of pressure comforts many autistic kids and helps alleviate the severity and length of a tantrum.
For disabled veterans who’ve lost one or even all four limbs, Dwyer says, service dogs can be trained to do as many as 85 different tasks. They can open and close doors, push and pull a wheelchair, find and pick up car keys and wallets, retrieve items from a refrigerator, and close the fridge behind them.
“If someone has a mobility issue, the dog is there to fill in for the person, so that he doesn’t have to bend over, possibly fall, or feel vulnerable,” says Dwyer. “We can teach them to alert, so if someone falls and they can’t get up, the dog can go push a panic button, which either can alert someone in the house or it can dial [an emergency contact] on a cell phone.”
While Dwyer says “fake service dogs” — that have not been properly trained — have become an issue, if you see a service dog on a plane, in a restaurant, or anywhere in public, respect the dog and its owner. And keep in mind that the dog is there for an important reason. A dog’s service vest will often be marked with “Do not pet” or “Ask to pet.”
If it says “Ask to pet,” Dwyer says, “That’s the person saying, ‘It’s OK to engage me. But if it says ‘Do not pet’ or ‘Medical alert dog’ — like Knox’s dog — those you don’t want to interrupt at all because they’re doing a job and they don’t need to be distracted.”
Part of Retrieving Freedom’s mission is to educate the public about the need for service dogs, as well as provide an understanding of what they do.
“A lot of the men and women that we work with, especially veterans, have invisible wounds — post-traumatic stress or a traumatic brain injury, or you can’t see that they’ve got a prosthetic leg under a pair of pants,” says Dwyer. “These dogs are trained to provide a service, and that’s where [the dogs] get their fulfillment — actually being of service.”
But the owners of service dogs reap the benefits, too — of the service, and the companionship, their furry friends provide.
“These dogs are not judgmental, they’ve always got your back, they are constantly monitoring your behavior, alerting for anxiety or blood-sugar events or any number of things that might cause someone issues over the course of the day,” Dwyer says.
Since its inception, Retrieving Freedom has placed nearly 100 dogs with people in need through its two locations in Mississippi and Iowa. From the Mississippi facility, dogs have been placed as far north as Minnesota and as far west as Texas. “We place dogs wherever the need is,” says Dwyer, “based on the person’s commitment to making a service dog a part of their life.”
