Providing peer support advocacy and information to dog guide handlers throughout Australia
The link below will take you to the audio of the September 25 members meeting with Guest presenter Zoren Milasinovich the vet from Green Cross Vets in Narre Warren.
Zoran starts with a short talk about some common first aid situations and how you might handle these if you are blind or have low vision. He then answers questions on health, maintenance and general care of dog guides.
The duration is 1 hour 12 minutes, and the file size is 30.6Mb, in mp3 format.
Audio of the sessions at the DGHA 2018 National Conference held in November is now available!. Please go to our DGHA 2018 National Conference Page
ON the evening of Saturday 15 Sept in Sydney, Guide Dogs Victoria stalwart and champion, John Gosling OAM, was awarded the highest honour in the International Guide Dogs Federation movement, the Ken Lord Award.
This is such well-deserved recognition of the enormous impact John had made in the Guide Dogs world.
Guest on Vision Extra (29 August 2018) was Nadia Mattiazzo, President of Dog Guide Handlers Australia, inviting all to come to the Bi-annual Conference being held in Sydney on the 10th and 11 of November at the Novotel Sydney Brighton Beach.
To listen to the interview go to:
Presenters at this meeting are Nicole Homes – Access & Technology Officer & Kelly Prentice – O&M Specialist from Guide Dogs NSW/ACT who spoke about developments in technology influencing the future of O&M. This includes the use of video streaming, Bluetooth beacons & the changing face of O&M services.
To listen to the audio please go to developments in technology influencing the future of O&M
Qantas has recently updated it’s policy regarding travel with a service dog on their airlines. to read the full detail go to Travel with a Service Dog
The World Today By Anne Barker
cientists have come up with proof that shows dogs not only understand human language, but also know the difference between genuine praise and meaningless words.
Key points:
The research was conducted at the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, where they scanned the brains of 13 dogs trained to lie in MRI scanners and monitored what happened as they listened to their owners speak to them.
Dr Attila Andics, who led the study, said it confirmed that just like humans, dogs used different parts of the brain to understand language.
“We’ve found that in dog brains, very similarly to what was found in the human brain, the left hemisphere is more involved in processing meaningful words,” he said.
“We’ve found the right hemisphere auditory brain region will respond differently to praising intonation and neutral intonation, independently of word meaning.”
That means the dogs only registered they were being praised when both the words and intonation were positive.
Experiment offers a clue to when humans started using words
Dr Andics was most excited by what the experiment revealed about how and when humans developed language.
He said the findings suggested the mental ability to process language evolved in humans earlier than previously thought. There’s no special neuron mechanism, it seems from this study, in humans that made us able to start using words. It’s something else, it has to be something else,” Dr Andics said.
“Because the neural mechanism is there in dogs as well”. It seems that the ‘big boom’, if anything, is the actual invention of humans to start using words.
“The very idea that we can use words, and not only intonation, to communicate our feelings.”
The research was published in this month’s Science journal
Dog Guide Handlers Australia is holding its second national conference in Adelaide.
The Conference is being held on the weekend of Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 October 2016 at the Sage Hotel in South Terrace Adelaide.
For the full information, please go to our 2016 National Conference page
Source: Australian Human Rights Commission
The Australian Human Rights Commission has responded to an increased number of complaints regarding assistance animals, by holding a forum with various stakeholders to discuss issues around certification, accreditation and regulation of assistance animals.
Assistance animals, particularly assistance dogs, guide dogs and hearing dogs provide invaluable support to some people with disability to enable them to participate in various activities of public and private life.
But there have been a number of cases brought to the Commission, where people with disability have complained that services providers have denied them access because they won’t accept their assistance dogs. This has been particularly problematic when it comes to air travel. Members of the Australian Government’s Aviation Access Forum and other groups agreed to hold a specific meeting to further discuss this issue in coming months.
Age and Disability Discrimination Commissioner, Susan Ryan, opened the meeting. “It is clear that there’s an appetite for clarification of some of these issues, particularly regarding training, certification and accreditation of assistance animals, and we have agreed to
continue to work together to progress the issues,” said Commissioner Ryan.