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| Dogs get their training by women inmates |
| By oregonlive.com |
| Published: 10/13/2009 |
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The heavy steel door clanks shut behind us. Only when it is closed does the next one in front of us slide open onto a long hallway. Navigating a maze of concrete and steel, we finally arrive in a small conference room. Around the U-shaped table sit seven women. They all wear blue outfits emblazoned with the word "Inmate" in bright orange. By the feet of each woman lies a puppy. The women are prisoners at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, serving long sentences for serious crimes. The puppies under the table live with the inmates, who train them to become assistance dogs for a national organization called Canine Companions for Independence. CCI breeds Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers and mixes of the two. The dogs undergo more than two years of training and are finally given -- free of charge -- to people with physical, cognitive or developmental disabilities, as well as to the hearing impaired. CCI dogs know as many as 50 commands and can open doors, alert their owners to dangers, turn lights on and off and provide calming emotional support. Newborn puppies in the program are house-trained and taught their names by volunteers until they're 4 months old. Then some go to jail. There are more than 1,000 CCI puppy-raisers across the country. In Oregon, since 1995, some of them are at Coffee Creek. The dogs live at the prison for a year or so, depending on how quickly they learn. Then they're off to one of five regional CCI training centers, where they get their finishing touches for about six months. While the dogs are at Coffee Creek, inmates keep them in their cells (cellmates must agree). Being locked together in tight quarters makes for good assistance dogs, the woman who trains the trainers says. Read More. |
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