Super Star Service Dogs, L.L.C., on rural Business 30 is a bustling place to be every Saturday morning.
Business owner Jackie Galvin said that’s when trainers from across the Midwest make the trek to help continue training for their service dogs.
“We see people from Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Illinois, Wisconsin, as well as people from across our state training with their dogs here,” Galvin said. “They come here once a week to work at our facilities and along with our trainers. It routinely blows my mind how busy our location gets once or twice a week.”
What makes the training so popular, Galvin said, is probably the focus on the dogs being able to learn multiple skills tailored to the conditions of the owners.
“I like to say ‘don’t tell us what a dog can’t do, because we don’t care about those limitations,’” Galvin said. “Dogs can do a lot more than three or four skills or tasks, you just have to work with them on the training for the different symptoms or items that their owner may need assistance with.”
Galvin said that some people may have a guide dog who helps them get around, but also have items like post traumatic stress disorder or other ailments with physical symptoms that are important for the dog to recognize as well.
She also notes the popularity of the center may be because of a lack of training centers in general and how few people are working in the field.
Galvin, who spent 20 years previously working as a registered nurse, said that she knows how important service dogs are to people, for all amounts of ailments. She has trained dogs of all types since she was 12.
“When I knew I couldn’t do work as a registered nurse any more, I was looking at my skill set and thinking what could I do, and the idea of training service dogs came to me,” Galvin said.
Dogs serving at Perry this past few weeks
Following the shooting at Perry, several dogs trained by Super Star Service Dogs have been providing trauma therapy for the students at the building, including Roscoe, Mount Vernon schools service dog, and Skye, the dog from Camp Courageous that Super Star Service Dogs has been training.
Galvin said that they heard about the need for dogs who were trained in trauma therapy from word of mouth, but also a request from one of their clients, Scout, who works with the Child Protective Services unit at Saint Luke’s.
“We know that prior to Scout working with CPS, that kids would have a 30 percent rate of communicating with counselors about the trauma they had witnessed,” Galvin said. “With Scout’s work, that has gone up to more than 80 percent.”
Galvin and a few other instructors and handlers of these service dogs have been stationed at Perry for the past two weeks. As far as she knows, she is one of the only service handlers from the state of Iowa who has been helping at that location, but there have been service animals from across the United States there to help students as well.
The first week there, she and members of Super Star Service dogs were at the elementary school working with students. This last week, she and the staff had been at the high school building.
“Seeing where the incident happened has been severely impacting,” Galvin said. “I came from a larger school, but it’s still surreal to think something like that happened in our state.”
She said many of the animals have helped students feel safer entering buildings for the first time since the incident.
“I remember one elementary school student giving Rosie, one of the animals we were working with, a hug as she was leaving and saying ‘thank you for making me happy today,’” Galvin said.
Galvin said it is a lot to be in that cafeteria, even for someone who didn’t go to that school, and having the trauma therapy dogs handy for those who did witness the incident at Perry is a benefit.
Super Star Service Dogs success
She and her business have been in Mount Vernon for eight years, since 2016-2017. If people see her and dogs wearing purple vests out in the community, those are service dogs they are training.
She said one of the reasons they are so successful is they do not hide their training techniques from handlers or the dog’s owner.
“It’s no big secret,” Galvin said. “We train based on Pavlovian training techniques and with treats, absolutely no shock collars.”
She said the only breeds she does not like working with are breeds like chihuahuas and other smaller dog breeds, that they are not a good fit for service animals. Almost any other breed she is happy to work alongside. They have trained dogs like Newfoundlands, wolfhounds and other large breeds.
“The thing I love the most is seeing the different skills that dogs will learn to do,” Galvin said.
Some skills, like learning to open a door for owners, is a process they start with something smaller like a wheeled suitcase. This gives the dog the idea of nudging something with their head or pulling, and then later combining the many mini skills and steps to the process of opening a door.
On staff at Super Star Service Dogs are seven employees, including teenagers who work with the animals every week. Some of the staff originally came as clients for the organization and Galvin said they have now become indispensable members of her organization. Teenagers, Galvin noted, are important to be on staff if you are working with a teenage client, as they sometimes do not like listening to adults, but they will listen to their peers and work better with them.
Dogs are trained for several ailments, including multiple sclerosis, cardiac conditions, allergies or other needs of a client, to mobility assistance or guide dogs. She said even training the dogs on cortisol levels rising for different conditions, the trained dogs have alerted to someone else going through similar things in public.
“I know we have a client who suffers migraines and they were out at an event in public, and the dog kept alerting to the person in front of them and trying to get their attention,” Galvin said. “When they got to talking and the client asked if the person deals with migraines on occasion and the person said yes they did, it was ‘you’re probably about to have one soon because he is alerting to your levels.’”
Part of that training that Super Star Service Dogs does is getting out into the community. She wants people in Mount Vernon and Lisbon to know if you see a dog in their trademark purple vests, they are working with that dog on training in certain areas for their client.
As for the future, Galvin said she would like to expand the business, but Linn County is a stickler on the amount of space for the facility at the moment.
And Super Star Service Dogs also works with puppy training and obedience, as well as correcting problem behaviors for other dogs.
More information about Super Star Service Dogs, L.L.C. can be found on their website – https://www.superstarservicedogs.net/
Jackie Galvin gets a hug from service dog in training Fiona.