Foster families wanted for medical alert dogs against diabetes and epilepsy

These dogs continue their training program to become authentic detectors of increases or decreases in blood glucose and anticipators of epileptic seizures. Their training, which begins when they are only two months old and ends when they turn 8, takes place from Monday to Friday from the morning until six in the afternoon. At the end of each day and on weekends, the animals return home to rest and play with their host families. However, the summer has made the tutorships falter and the Canem Foundation is calling for new volunteers.

A year ago, they already launched a guardianship program for the weekends that had a lot of impact, with more than 500 applications, but now they need families who are committed to taking care of the puppies until their training period ends and they are assigned to their families. assistance families. “The weekends were a pilot project to see how the puppies felt about going outside, interacting with people outside the team and then returning to Canem. In the final program, families who enroll have a puppy during the six months of training. What they have to do every day during the week is bring him to the center to work and come pick him up in the afternoon,” explains Lidia Nicuesa, psychopedagogist at the Canem Foundation.

To be a host family, there is no specific requirement: “We don't care if they are single-parent families, older people, with older or younger children, numerous, with a dog, with a cat, if they live in an apartment, in a house with a garden... - Lidia adds. That doesn't matter at all. The goal is for the dog to adapt to any environment because then the family with diabetes or epilepsy who requests it can live in any of those circumstances.” For the Canem Foundation, this contact with different people and environments is “fundamental” in the education of dogs, which in addition to the technical aspects to detect possible crises in their owners, must learn to live in diverse contexts to easily adapt to their family. definitive.