Puppy Dog Hotel

Dogs for Good

Dogs for Good is an innovative charity, exploring ways dogs can help people overcome specific challenges and enrich and improve lives and communities.

Our assistance dogs support adults and children with a range of disabilities and also children with autism. We train activity and therapy dogs to work with specialist handlers in communities and schools. Our Family Dog team also gives specialist advice and support to help people get the most out of their relationship with their pet dog. We believe dogs are good for us and we continue to explore new ways dogs can help people in the future. Read some of our success stories below and visit our Youtube channel please click here to watch how our dogs make a difference.  

Heather and assistance dog Eider
Heather Farley is a fighter and she needed that strength and resilience as four strokes in six years robbed her of mobility, seriously affected her speech and imprisoned her in her sitting room for four years while she waited for her house to be adapted.

“At one stage I’d lost the use of arms, hands and legs and couldn’t even blink, says Heather. “I felt I’d lost my whole identity. I used to run 10k three times a week, work, look after my husband and four children, decorate and do the gardening.  Now what was I fit for?” Overcome by depression, Heather attempted suicide.  

In 2014 Dogs for Good partnered Heather with Eider. “She picks up anything I drop, empties the washing machine, opens doors and drawers, presses access buttons for lifts and helps take off my clothes and fetches the hoist sling to get me to bed.”

“The most important thing Eider gives me is confidence,” says Heather, “Every day I battled to get myself out to work and deliberately avoided people. Now I’m happy to goout with Eider by my side. I’m so lucky. Not many people survive so many strokes. My husband has been a rock; I couldn’t have done it without his support.”

Toby and Autism Assistance Dog Sox

In 2012 the Turner family hit an all-time low. Toby (then eight), who’s badly affected by autism, felt out of place especially at school and even at home, and began to talk about ending his life. He threatened to jump out of his bedroom window and mum Vikky couldn’t let him go upstairs to his room without ensuring the windows were locked. He also began to talk about jumping off a cliff. Sox arrived in June 2013. In just two weeks, the atmosphere in the house was transformed. Toby, now nine, says, “Sox has filled a huge hole in my heart. We’re connected by an imaginary string from his heart to mine. I just feel better now Sox is here.”

Mum Vikky explained: “It was weird, Sox just broke the need for Toby’s ‘bubble’ and just like that Toby became more confident and less anxious. The psychologist has discharged him because of Sox’s amazing effect.”

Community Dogs For Schools

Through our experiences supporting children with assistance dogs, the charity is now exploring how trained dogs working alongside a professional handler can bring benefits to children in schools.

Launched in 2014, our Community Dogs for Schools programme has been exploring how a dog, working alongside a professional dog handler, teachers and therapists, can bring benefits to students in two Special Educational Needs Schools, Round Oak School in Warwickshire and Stocklake Park School in the Vale of Aylesbury.

The presence of the dog has already brought a new dimension to the school community, and we have observed many benefits including:

• A greater enjoyment of being in the school environment and willingness to learn

• A better understanding of how to take responsibility for another living being, possibly leading to greater knowledge of one’s own responsibilities.

• More effective therapy sessions with goals being reached in a shorter space of time, or even more complex goals being achieved.

Greater access to the community, with the presence of the dog giving the students confidence to go out on short trips outside of the school. We are continuing to develop this programme and explore further opportunities where the Community Dogs for Schools could be of benefit.

• How you can support Dogs for Good:
  Make a donation

  Sponsor a puppy

  Volunteer for us

  Fundraise for us

• Please visit our website for more information: www.dogsforgood.org

Dogs for Good
The Frances Hay Centre, Blacklocks Hill, Banbury, Oxon OX17 2BS
01295 252 600
info@dogsforthedisabled.org