The ADA Allows You to Train Your Own Service Dog. These Disabled Creators Are Doing it on TikTok [Video]

If you scroll the service dog sides of TikTok and Instagram, you’ll see lots of incredible dogs showing the many ways they help their disabled owners. Maybe you’ve seen guide dogs guiding their blind handlers through crowded environments, or dogs facing discrimination from business owners or other entities, or others still in training. If you’ve seen the dogs still in training, there’s a good chance that at least some of them were being trained by the person they’ll eventually work with as a service dog. On social media, young disabled creators are training their own service dogs and sharing their journeys online. It’s a niche community that I’ve been a part of since I began training my service dog, Rosalie, back in 2021 to help me manage the symptoms of my obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Like most disabled people who trained their own service dogs, I am not a professional dog trainer, I’m just a disabled girl …