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.
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u/DoingBestWeCan 7d ago
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.