How to Help

Max turns on a light for his handler.

Tao Service Dogs is expanding and trying to meet the needs of many students.  To do so we need to build various training stands for those students so their dogs can learn how to do certain tasks.  If you can build the following items, please contact us and arrange to help us.  Tao is working on a limited budget at this time, so donated items is always appreciated.

I need one or more handy dandy people in the Tao family unit who can build the following to step up:

A scent wheel.  Picture to come soon.  It will be used for those who need to train for detecting blood sugar or scent based tasks.

A light switch board with a adjustable height slider.  Some dogs are going to need to start low and have the switch moved up to position so they can learn at height to put their paws up on the wall and flip the switch.

I have all but one part to build a light stand that will actually turn on and off a working light.  I have someone who will cut the PVC piping for me, I need someone to run the wiring and hook up the light, secure the PVC piping and assemble the light stand.

An adjustable automatic door button stand.  This is for pushing buttons for automatic doors.  We'll have it feed to an easy button which will sound when the dog pushes hard enough to "activate" the button.  This will need three different types of buttons.  A round, square and small rectangle button.  The buttons will need to be measured around town for actuate size for real life and then placed on sliders to teach the dogs how to push them first and then moved to varying heights to get them to work them.  The round button should be set so it can be pulled out and on a rocker so it's not set firmly and the dog has to fuss with it to get it to actually activate the Easy Button to make it work, since that is typical of the round buttons around town.

These work stations should be easy to port, but stable enough for dogs to work with and not knock over.  These work stations are vital to teaching tasks our dogs need and will be needed for advanced task training.

Do we have volunteers?