Beauregard Tirebiter is one of the University of Southern California’s newest hires. He is well-liked on campus and doesn’t require students to do any homework.

That’s because he’s a dog.

Tirebiter, also known as Beau, holds the official title of USC Wellness Dog, said Amanda Vanni, his handler. Beau’s responsibilities include hosting office hours in the school’s wellness center, where he interacts with groups of students to create a calm and welcoming space for students.

Beau, a black goldendoodle, which is a crossbreed of a golden retriever and a poodle, hosts office hours in USC’s Office for Wellness and Health Promotion several days per week. For two hours per day, he works with students to calm and relax them. In those two hour stints, Beau sees between 20 and 50 students, Vanni said.

In addition to calming students, he also creates a sense of community on campus.

“He’s really started to create connections between the students that might not have ever spoken or interacted with each other otherwise,” Vanni said. “They’re sitting on the floor all kind of circled around him, having this common, collective experience because of him.”

From what Vanni has seen, Beau has been a help to students. She said she has had students say to her meeting Beau is something they look forward more than anything else during the week.

“They said they feel at ease and that this reminds them of home because they have a dog at home,” Vanni said. “Having this dog here gives them a sense of comfort and a sense of family.”

Beau was trained to be a facility dog at the Canine Angels Service Teams center in Grants Pass, Oregon. At Canine Angels, puppies are usually brought in to be trained when they are eight weeks old and are given to “puppy raiser families,” said Canine Angels Application Coordinator Sheila Kolby.

When they are a year and a half old, they are returned to the Canine Angels facility and are assessed to determine what field of work they’d best fit in, Kolby said. Canine Angels offers three paths for dogs: service dogs, facility dogs and pals.

Facility dogs are similar to service dogs, but differ in that they are trained to work with large groups of people throughout a facility, such as a school or medical center, Vanni said. Beau cannot be considered to be a therapy dog, either, since he does not work with students or patients on the individual level.

The team at Canine Angels saw that Beau was calm, even-tempered and good with people without getting overexcited, so they trained him to be a facility dog.

The cost of a dog from Canine Angels depends upon what kind of program the dog would be working with, how large the program is and how much financial backing the institution has.

With USC, Canine Angels charged the school $2,000. However, Canine Angels does not charge institutions for the dog itself.

Canine Angels takes on the necessary fundraising for breeding, health checks and general care for the dog before giving them to an institution. They only charge for the handler’s training program, which in USC’s case cost $2,000, Kolby said. After the dog is given to the institution, the institution is in charge of caring for the dog for the rest of the dog’s life, including medical care and food.

A service dog typically costs between $15,000 and $20,000, so USC saved a lot of money with Beau, Kolby said.

In terms of the benefits of Beau’s presence on campus, Vanni said she’s not positive of what they are quite yet.

“We’re in uncharted territory,” she said.

Published on September 28, 2016 at 9:47 pm

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