Like a lot of pups her age, she enjoys a good belly rub and whip cream pup cups from Goody’s Juice & Java in Manistee.
But when she’s wearing her uniform vest, Vina isn’t like other puppies. She’s on the job as an assistance dog in training.
Puppy raisers Michael Bull and Catherine Ciotti are retired and volunteer fulltime training puppies to become assistance dogs.
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Vina practices sitting calmly in a crowded Goody’s Juice & Java in Manistee. The 8.5-month-old Labrador is part of Paws with a Cause, an organization that provides service animals to people with disabilities.
Chrissy Streeter/News Advocate
The Pierport couple works with Paws with a Cause, a Wayland-based nonprofit with a mission to help people with disabilities lead quality independent lives.
The charity works toward this goal by matching clients with dogs that are custom-trained. Paws with a Cause has matched more than 3,200 dogs with clients since 1979.
Raising puppies
Ciotti, a retired math teacher, is a long-time fan of Paws with a Cause and first became familiar with the charity while attending a conference. She recalls sitting in the front row to watch a service dog perform “basic” tasks like picking up a magazine from the floor.
“Then the dog picked up a credit card. And then picked up a dime with its tongue … And I said ‘you have my money for the rest of my life,’” Ciotti said.
She has donated money to Paws with a Cause for the last 40 years through United Way contributions and later by providing for the needs of the pups she raises with her husband Bull.
The two are lifelong animal lovers and advocates who currently serve on the Manistee County Humane Society’s Homeward Bound Animal Shelter board. The couple also adopted rescued bloodhounds before working with Paws with a Cause.
When Ciotti and Bull had to put their last bloodhound to sleep due to health reasons, Ciotti had no interest in getting another dog.
“I said don’t ask me again. That one broke my heart,” she said.
But after reading the Paws with a Cause newsletter, Ciotti soon had a change of heart. The organization was advertising for a puppy orientation event with the hope of attracting prospective puppy raisers.
After talking with other raisers and meeting the tiny pups-in-training, Ciotti and Bull fell in love with the idea and soon received Karma, their first Paws with a Cause pup, in 2017.
How it works
Puppy raisers are just one branch of a system that trains dogs for four specific career paths: assistance to people with hearing loss, mobility issues, seizure disorders or children with autism.
The organization breeds all of its own animals and a number of the service dogs are Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers or a mixture of the two.
Smaller breeds like papillons are trained to be hearing dogs while standard poodles and poodle mixes can be placed with clients who require hypo-allergenic dogs. Bull explained that raising these pups requires teams of individuals.
“So there’s a group that looks after the breeding. There’s a group that looks after the whelping, the birthing, and the first 8 weeks of the pup’s life. At 8 weeks they go to people like Catherine and myself,” he said.
Puppies in prisons
Puppy raisers take care of the dog for 12-16 months. Then if the puppy passes a temperament and medical exam, they move on to the next step — prison.
“Just about all the dogs go into the prison system and they are in the prison system for four to six months. The inmates that are training the dogs, they’re sort of professional trainers and they do more repetitive type stuff. They teach them to do some specialty tasks like opening doors,” Bull said.
Working 24/7 with incarcerated people allows the dogs to receive intensive training that is not possible in puppy raisers’ homes. Ciotti and Bull work with Vina an average of two hours a day in total.
However, they still have to go about their daily lives running errands and performing household tasks.
People who are incarcerated, on the other hand, can devote constant time and energy to the animal to ensure they are prepared for any situation.
Ciotti said, “The inmates are able to do hundreds of repetitions throughout the day. So if they’re working on going through doors, they don’t just go in the door here. They go through an elevator door, they go in through sliding doors, they go in through doors that open toward you.”
This repetition becomes an innate behavior in the dogs and prepares them to stay focused on their client despite distractions they may encounter.
Both the people raising the puppies and the people who are incarcerated prepare their pups for general service and the dogs are not selected for a specific career path until after they leave the prison system.
Career dogs
The organization will first try to place the dogs in one of the four career paths to fill the needs of clients accepted into the program. But not all dogs are suited to become Paws with a Cause assistance animals. The dogs that do the best in Paws with a Cause tend to be calmer in nature.
“A lot of these clients are not particularly physically active. … The dogs just have to chill out underneath the desk while the client is doing their job. So if you have a high-energy dog that likes to run, that likes to explore, that is not, for example, a great match,” Bull said.
Karma, the couple’s first pup, was not a great match for assistance dog work. When this happens, the dogs are not regarded as failures — instead, these skilled dogs are selected for other careers. In Karma’s case, it was law enforcement.
Ciotti said, “Our first pup never stopped using her nose and she’s now a bomb sniffing dog for the (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) … She actually has a badge that says Karma.”
Bull and Ciotti speak enthusiastically about what their other pups went on to after graduation.
Goblin, a pup born on Halloween, is now working as a service dog in Wisconsin for a client with mobility issues; Hepburn, number three, changed careers out of the program due to a medical condition and is now paired with a Vietnam War veteran with diabetes; and when talking about their fourth pup, Bull and Ciotti burst into laughter.
“We did have Jaisa, Hebrew for ‘god-enlightened.’ We weren’t sure who was being enlightened, Jaisa or us. She was another high-energy pup,” Ciotti said.
“She is off to some high-energy task,” Bull added with a smile.
Environments
The couple sat in Goody’s Juice & Java in Manistee, sharing stories between sips of coffee. Meanwhile, Vina, their newest pup, laid quietly under the table. She occasionally wagged her tail as customers smiled and tried to approach her. For some people, Vina’s soulful eyes and soft, black fur were too great of a temptation and more than one person asked to pet the assistance dog in training.
Ciotti and Bull are taught how to train their pups to follow basic commands, but also on ways to educate the public about assistance dogs.
“We ask people not to interact too much when they have their cape on because that distracts them from their primary working task, which is paying attention to their client,” Bull said.
Puppies learn at an early age the difference between playtime and work time. The vest, or cape, as puppy raisers call them, is a key indicator to the dog.
“We’re trying to teach them to pay attention to me rather than seeking belly rubs,” Ciotti said.
Going out in public helps get the dog accustomed to a variety of situations and environments. Places like the grocery store can bring a host of distractions from food dropped on the floor to delicious scents lingering in the air. Both Ciotti and Bull have found Manistee County businesses and organizations to be quite accommodating for the training process, welcoming their pups into restaurants, doctor’s offices and public transportation.
“I know that the law says that people have to, but I always try to ask because sometimes people aren’t comfortable,” Ciotti said.
Businesses are not able to discriminate against individuals with service animals, but until recently, the same rights were not shared with those training service animals.
The bill, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Tommy Brann, goes into effect as law in March to give service animals more opportunities to be trained in real-life situations. Bull feels it’s important for the public to recognize how much effort goes into raising and training an assistance dog.
“It’s not a two-week process where you go off to a training class at Petsmart. It’s multi-year, well structured, well thought out,” Bull said.
Besides regular daily training, Bull, Ciotti and Vina attend weekly sessions with the Ludington Puppy Club. There, field representative and trainer Eliese Tilmann leads a group of 8-10 puppy raisers.
Tilmann started raising Paws with a Cause pups in 2019 and has worked for the organization for three years. At a recent session in a classroom at the West Shore Community Ice Arena, Tilmann gave puppies and people raising them various tasks to practice.
“We’re here to teach fosters and puppies basic obedience skills and get them used to working around other dogs,” Tilmann said.
For the youngest puppies, that job appears to be a simple one.
Raisers say a pup’s name to receive eye contact. The pup receives a treat every time it completes this seemingly trivial task, yet, it is a crucial first step in teaching service dogs to check in with their clients for instructions.
Older puppies are taught how to interact with other raisers while some teams practice backing in and out of narrow passages. All puppies tend to be quick learners and treat bags quickly run empty during the hour-long session.
The individual fosters also spend time in the group sharing their experiences, the joy of success as well as the challenges. Tilmann explains that these sessions are a great way to provide support for the volunteers raising puppies because she believes it takes a special person to fill the role.
“(It’s) somebody willing to open their heart and home. Someone that has the time,” Tilmann said.
Clients
Paws with a Cause receives over 1,000 assistance dog applications every year but the organization is unable to match the vast majority of people who apply.
“About 400 or so of those (applicants) meet the definition of the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). But Paws only has about 60 dogs each year that are available to those new clients,” Bull said.
Once the dog becomes certified, it is given to a matched client at zero cost. The total cost of breeding, raising and custom training is estimated at $35,000 per assistance dog.
According to the Paws with a Cause website, the program receives financial support through fundraisers, individual donations, foundations and corporations. Those who sponsor a Paws with a Cause litter with a donation of $5,000 are given the opportunity to name all the puppies.
It’s the needs of the clients that spur Ciotti and Bull to continue to devote time and money to the charity.
When clients visit the Ludington Puppy Club to talk about their experiences with Paws dogs, the people raising the puppies are surprised by what the clients share with the group.
Bull said, “I always naively think they’re going to talk about tasks. …What they talk about is perception of other people when they view them with the dog.”
Clients with disabilities often share stories about how receiving a Paws with a Cause dog impacted their lives socially. They often report feeling more independent, but they also feel more seen.
Bull said, “The dog becomes a link.”
Though it’s hard to say goodbye to a pup when their training time is over, Ciotti believes that helping her community and other people is worth the tears.
Ciotti said, “We can’t get enough puppy raisers because people always say this, ‘Oh, I could never do what you do, because I wouldn’t give ‘em up.’ But when you meet a client, you know why you do what you do.”
