Essay: Gracie Pulliam Essay:
ESSAY: GRACIE PULLIAM RETRIEVING INDEPENDENCE Over the summer and throughout senior year, I have worked closely with Retrieving Independence. Retrieving Independence is a Nashville non-profit organization that breeds and trains service dogs to be placed with individuals who have physical, mental, or emotional disabilities. Retrieving Independence works with the Tennessee Department of Corrections, as well, to incorporate inmates into their training program. Once the dogs reach a certain age, they are sent into one of two prisons in the greater Nashville area to be trained by a select group of inmates during the week. Their goal is to help these inmates find their purpose and dignity by giving them the opportunity to contribute to society from within their specific environment. My research interests lie within the highly specialized training methods that RI uses when raising their dogs, as well as the mental health effects of volunteering on the inmates who choose to participate in Retrieving Independence’s prison program. Initially, volunteers at Retrieving Independence are instructed to use very specific language when speaking to the dogs in the program. This is to create a results based, force-free teaching environment. The idea is that when a thinking, feeling, individual (i.e. the service dog in training) has some control over its circumstances, they feel and behave better. Therefore, dogs in Retrieving Independence’s training program are allowed to make their own behavioral choices, and are either rewarded, redirected, or ignored based upon the accuracy of their choice. Volunteers never implement negative reinforcement, and are instructed to ask behaviors of the dog, rather than tell the dog specifically what it should or should not do. Words like “no”, and “bad”, are to be avoided at all costs. An example of this would be simply standing still when a dog pulls on its leash instead of responding by tugging the dog in the desired direction. As mentioned before, the training done at Retrieving Independence is very detailed for very specific psychological reasons. Up until about 12 years ago, the popular belief was that canines lack the ability to feel and process emotions in the way that humans do. However, in 2012, to prove that they do feel emotion, neuroscientist Gregory Berns trained a dog to go through an MRI scanner in order to map its brain in response to different stimuli. When he figured out how to properly train the dog to successfully go through the machine, he opened up his research to as many as 20 different dogs. In doing so, he noticed that positively correlated stimuli activated the same part of their brains as humans in every single dog: the caudate nucleus. The caudate nucleus is active when an individual is in a state of anticipation. When anticipating something associated with a positive outcome, the activity of the caudate nucleus increases significantly. “When we see this structure active in dogs, we can interpret that they are experiencing something important to them and something they like. This is completely analogous to what happens in human brains under the same conditions,” (National Geographic; Berns). The biggest discrepancy between humans and canines is language. When humans feel a positive emotion, they can describe it using a large array of vocabulary. Dogs are not granted that luxury. Whether or not they understand words as symbolic placeholders for emotion remains to be seen. Regardless,
- 97 -
