All of our dogs train through the Furgiving Project, a special initiative of the Furgiving Foundation in partnership with the PAWS program at the Idaho Correctional Institution Orofino (ICIO). This collaboration ensures every dog receives top-quality care and training while giving incarcerated trainers a meaningful way to give back to the community.

Each dog is carefully chosen for temperament and trainability and paired with a team of trainers who create a personalized training plan. Training begins with basic obedience and gradually progresses to tasks tailored to the recipient’s needs. Trainers document each dog’s journey with weekly reports and photos, which we share on our blog, Training Tails.

Understanding What Service Dogs Can - And Can't - Do

WHAT SERVICE DOGS ARE TRAINED TO DO

Service dogs are highly trained animals that provide life-changing assistance to people with specific disabilities. They perform tasks that directly help reduce or manage the challenges their handlers face, giving them greater independence, safety, and confidence.

Common service dog tasks include:

Mobility Assistance: Helping with balance, retrieving dropped items, opening doors, and even pulling wheelchairs to support movement and independence.

Psychiatric Support: Assisting during anxiety or panic attacks, interrupting harmful or repetitive behaviors, providing deep pressure therapy, and helping handlers stay grounded and focused.

Sensory Support: Guiding individuals who are blind or visually impaired, and alerting those who are deaf or hard of hearing to important sounds in their environment.

Environmental Safety: Alerting handlers to potential dangers such as oncoming traffic, unsafe situations, or approaching people, helping them navigate the world more confidently.

Every task a service dog is trained for is carefully chosen to match the recipient’s specific needs. This ensures the assistance they provide is meaningful, reliable, and tailored to improve the handler’s daily life.

WHAT SERVICE DOGS ARE NOT TRAINED TO DO

Despite common misconceptions or portrayals in media, service dogs have clear limits and cannot:

Perform medical procedures or replace professional healthcare.
Handle an overwhelming number of complex or unrelated tasks. Each dog is trained to perform a focused set of skills reliably.
Understand or respond to vague or unspecified needs without clear guidance.
Provide constant companionship without breaks; handlers are responsible for daily care, exercise, and ongoing training.
Replace the handler’s responsibility for their own health, safety, or well-being.

Training a service dog is a specialized process that requires patience, consistency, and clear communication about the recipient’s specific needs. Overloading a dog with too many tasks or unrealistic expectations can:

Affect the dog’s reliability and overall well-being.
Reduce the effectiveness of the tasks they are trained to perform.
Cause frustration or disappointment for both the dog and the handler.

Our goal at The Furgiving Foundation is to match recipients with dogs trained for tasks that truly improve their daily life and independence — nothing more, nothing less. By focusing on meaningful, practical skills, we ensure that both dogs and handlers experience success, safety, and a strong, lasting partnership.

If you’d like to learn more about the specific tasks our dogs can be trained to perform, please take a look at our training task list below.

Please note: Due to facility restrictions, we are currently unable to train medical alert or seeing eye service dogs.

Training Task List

Frequently Asked Questions