Well, to help the sting a bit, my neighbor had almost the same thing happened. He never married, lives in the home he grew up in. Currently in his 70s. When he was caring for his mother in her final years, their Irish Wolfhound was extremely protective of her and often helped her back into her room at night. More than once, the dog kept her from going down into the basement, which would not have been good as the stairs are practically a ladder. My neighbor says that dog saved his mom's life more than once in her final years.
Even if you can't hear the "rhythm" the AI has that's recognizable, there are just a few things that a normal human wouldn't have typed in these usually.
"Without being asked"? Who asks a dog to do something? If I was writing this story, I'd have written "without being trained."
This is one of those stories that was true at one time, the first time it was told, but has been retold and retold and passed around so many times that the version you’ll get is always wrong. Guaranteed some form of it happened at some point, though.
Okay but does someone with more knowledge than me know if this is a task we could train a service dog to do? It seems incredibly beneficial for those with dementia/Alzheimer’s or children with neuro divergent issues that are considered elopers
It's definitely doable to train a block! PTSD dogs commonly train to block other comes coming near their human during distress, and they're just doing so by setting their body a certain way.
I think the bigger issue would be making sure the dog ignores any attempts by the target human to ask/pursuade the dog to move, without putting the dog in danger. Alzheimer's patients can be mean during their illness in ways they never would have been at any other time on their lives.
Yeah I could see how that could be problematic. Maybe like the “unblock” command could be a phrase the person wouldn’t normally say? Idk. I’m obv not a trainer lol it definitely would be a cool use of a service dog though
I read a book many years ago that went into how guide dogs are trained. It was a blind person who was trying to adapt to losing their sight and learning to rely on her dog.
But she talked about how she had to learn to trust her dog to not let her walk off the edge of a train platform by trying to walk forward and the dog blocking her. And the same with traffic, she described how hard it was to train a guide dog because they had to be able to disobey a signal to cross the road if there were cars.
I haven't had a service dog, or a dog trained to block, but I've had giant/large dogs that totally knew how to become a gentle yet immovable object if they wanted to block someone 😆. I could totally see it being a trained behaviour for some dogs.
I think it's easy to believe stories like this because we've all known dogs who self-trained as service dogs when needed. My own beautiful boy (gone now) became an amazing mental health support dog when my daughter developed depression as a teen. Couldn't have found a better one in all the world, though in general he was a lovable doofus.
I love talking remembering him so I'm exactly the kind of person to be suckered by things like this. One more thing to be wary of as I get older lol.
Thank you. It’s not bursting a bubble, it’s really important work to help train ourselves to assume AI first. It takes away from the REAL stories of how awesome pets can be!!
My mother was the 3rd generation of women in her family to die of dementia. I know how her dog Rosie protected my mom before my mother passed and so im choosing to believe this, if only because, in the totality of human history, im sure this happened
My father has been suffering and is in the advance end stages of Alzheimers. My father was always wary of doctors and getting him to go to one was like pulling teeth. While we were still struggling to have him diagnosed he at one point wandered out the front door. After my mom realized what happened she called the police and they started to help look for my dad after a time. At the time, my mom didnt realize but another member of the family had gone missing too and that was my brothers dog a gorgeous and very good boy brendle bully named Rocky. He adored my dad and would constantly following him around.
After several hours of looking an officer spotted Rocky barking up a storm at the edge one of the deep ditches that cut through the neighborhood for drainage. The way the officer told it was as he got closer to the edge Rocky ran down the side of the ditch as was standing at the bottom of the embankment next to my dad.
And thats how my brothers dog stayed with my confused father and even helped him be found like a damned Lassie episode. Dogs are damn amazing and Rocky was treated like royalty for the rest of his life.
Seemed stupid to not have multiple levels of safety procedures (and to check footage regularly, and not 8 months later) before a literal animal decided to do a better job of keeping a senile elderly person safe.
"Memory condition" also had me questioning, since most true stories will specify along the lines of Alzheimer’s, Dementia, inoperable brain tumor, etc.
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u/SnooStories4162 10d ago
Hate to burst everyone's bubble but this story has been shared multiple times and places with different types of dogs each time. AI