Unemployment in today’s economy may be bad, but it’s far worse for dogs! Animals that used to be workers are slowly becoming fat pets. On the one hand, this seems like a pretty sweet deal for dogs: food, water, and shelter without the work! However- many dogs get depressed and neurotic without a purpose, much like many people. Since most humans nowadays don’t need dogs to pull us around, herd our sheep, or help us put dinner on the table, dogs are facing an enormous unemployment crisis. Thankfully, while more traditional roles as herder or hunter are in sharp decline, other fields are starting to open up to the canine job seeker.
- Dogs have found quite a calling in burgeoning medical fields such as blood sugar monitoring, PTSD treatment, and cancer detection.
- In researching endangered species, scent-finding dogs have proven to be unsurpassed in detecting animal feces for research.
- Dogs have new job opportunities in home-maintenance, finding bedbugs and toxic molds much more efficiently than any human crew.
- Many dogs excel at being personal trainers, by getting their owners out and active in K-9 Frisbee, Agility competitions, skijoring, and many more activities.
- Canines have been extremely effective in helping kids to read! This unlikely combination was recently put to the test by Tufts University, which concluded that kids that read aloud to dogs do much better in learning to read and maintaining their ability over the long summer break. Plus! The studies show that kids love to read to dogs, so much so that not even 1 child dropped out of the program. 30% of the kids that didn’t get to read to dogs dropped out.
Heard of any more new jobs for dogs? Let me know in the comments, or email me!
August 31, 2012
Health and Science, Training