A dog lover as long as she can remember, Robin Walloch has made a career of training the animals.
The 45-year-old Conway woman trains service dogs for people with disabilities, and she also has show dogs.
“I dragged my parents kicking and screaming into the dog world,” Walloch said, laughing.
She successfully won over her mother, Ann Fairless of Conway, who also has show dogs and does agility training.
“I don’t think they meant to go into the professional dog world,” she said. “Dad said to get her a hobby; he swears this is not what he meant.”
An only child, Walloch said her parents gave her an Airedale for her 10th birthday, and she started training it.
“I started an apprenticeship when I was 10 with a wonderful trainer, Ray Carlson of Conway. He was magnificent,” she said. “There were a lot of things in my life at that time that made things seem out of control. Dog training teaches you how to control your emotions and yourself, and you’re learning to communicate with a different species; most people would consider this impossible.
“By the time I was 16, I was running my own dog-training classes. I had high school teachers who were students of mine in class,” she said. And it was fun to turn the tables on them and tell them, “You’re going to have to do what I tell you to do.”
Walloch also trained show dogs for others, and when she was 18, she got her own performance dogs and started working with professional handlers.
Walloch turned her passion for dogs into a career. First, she went to the University of Central Arkansas in Conway and earned a degree in psychology — the human kind. Walloch said she also has a master’s degree in animal nutrition and a doctorate in animal psychology, both from a small online program.
She works part time as a nutrition expert for Blue Buffalo pet-food company, and the rest of her time is spent training service dogs for the disabled and working, along with her mother, with show dogs.
“Most of our dogs are Cardigan Welsh corgis, but we have Tibetan spaniels,” Walloch said.
Walloch has used service dogs since about 1990.
“I have a rare form of arthritis that makes my sympathetic nervous system not work correctly, and I have a heart condition,” she said. “Ninety-nine percent of the people who meet me … and I don’t have my dog with me … would not think anything is wrong with me.”
Her service dog is a Tibetan spaniel named Whimsy.
“I don’t know a person on the face of the Earth who would tell you a Tibetan spaniel would make a good service dog, but she [Whimsy] finds this particularly fascinating and wants to do it. You’re looking for temperament more than anything,” Walloch said.
Whimsy will be in the car with Walloch, for example “and she’ll tell me 20, 30 minutes before I spiral out of control, and I can pull over,” she said. “Even if it’s just a pain episode, it can be totally distracting. I need to be warned before things get totally out of control.”
Not every dog wearing a service-dog vest is actually trained to be a service dog.
“We have a bad problem with people just using dogs with vests. There are emotional-support animals, and people confuse them with service dogs,” she said. “[Emotional-support dogs] don’t have public-access rights, unless you’re on an airplane.
“What crosses them over into service dogs is that they’re trained for a task. [Their owners] must have a disability that profoundly affects their life. The dogs are trained. It can’t be completely natural, and the dog just does it when it feels like it.”
Dogs are capable of much more than people realize, Walloch said.
“People do get to know their own dog to a certain extent, but I’m floored to this day how people misinterpret what their dog is saying,” she said. “Everyone always says, ‘I don’t know how to talk to a dog; they don’t talk back.’ Dogs actually talk very well; people just don’t understand their language.”
Walloch said it’s not only possible; it’s easy once people learn a dog’s “language.”
“A common one that people miss is — the dog is either acting like they’re chewing or blinking a lot, or yawning,” she said. “People say, ‘Oh, they’re tired.’ [Dogs] don’t tend to yawn when they’re tired; they yawn when they’re stressed.”
And that happy tail wagging? Maybe not.
“They wag it in a different way when they’re stressed,” she said.
Walloch said she has trained 54 service dogs, and she has seen the good they can do.
“Probably one of my favorite ones, we had a single mother who had a disabled son, [and she] actually came to my mother and me looking for a pet, but in talking to her, this dog was going to be an extra burden on her …,” Walloch said. “What she needed was a helper.”
Walloch said the child has cerebral palsy. She said that instead of a pet, Walloch trained a service dog for her.
“It really made a vast difference in their lives,” Walloch said. “Instead of having to worry about his needs all the time, the dog could do a lot of that for him — getting things when he needed them, helping him get up and down.”
Walloch said she’s also worked with several people whose family members have dementia.
“Where they would have to place that person in a facility because they could wander off, just teaching those dogs a few things, that person can stay at home,” she said. “We’re seeing this with kids with autism, too.”
Walloch worked with Patricia “Patti” Heath of Conway to get the Patricia Heath Act enacted this year in the Arkansas Legislature. It aligns state law regarding service animals with the Americans With Disabilities Act, which covers service animals for psychological conditions, as well as autism, diabetes, allergies and more.
“When I started using a service dog back in 1990 — because people only recognized, really, Seeing Eye dogs, guide dogs, as really a legitimate service dog — it was really difficult,” she said. “Now that people are getting to know it, it gives us a way to legitimacy so people can say, ‘Hey, that’s why we are doing this. Dogs can help people,’ so I’m partnering with Patti. It has been really great to get us out there and not only change the laws to legitimize those dogs [for people] with invisible disabilities but to understand what these dogs do.”
Heath, who said she has noncombat post-traumatic stress disorder, said Walloch has helped her with two service dogs, Izzy and Micah, miniature Australian shepherds. Micah is being trained as a “backup,” Heath said, because Izzy gets nervous when it thunders.
“Robin has actually helped me out when I’ve had a hard time with either of my dogs,” Heath said. “She’s helped me a lot with Micah, but especially with Izzy. I wasn’t sure if Izzy was able to be [a service dog]. Because [Robin is] an animal behaviorist, she kind of observed Izzy out in public and had Whimsy with her, and [Izzy] did great.
“We’ve gone to restaurants with our service dogs, and I don’t know what to say, but she does. She explained to the owner of a Faulkner County restaurant that she was a service-dog trainer and that the law allows them to be there.”
Walloch said there is a lot of misunderstanding in the public, and among dog owners, about what psychiatric service dogs are. Some are used to help people with post-traumatic stress disorder, for example.
“Psychiatric service dogs are not there just to make them feel better,” she said. “It’s an actual piece of medical equipment; they’re there to do things the person can’t do for themselves, or find difficult to do for themselves.
“I get it that some people aren’t used to having dogs around when they eat or in the grocery store. If they only knew the good these dogs do for these people and the freedom they give them in their day-to-day life, we wouldn’t be barked at in the grocery store and chairs thrown at us.”
Walloch said her goal is to work toward better understanding, as well as to enhance legislation.
“I’d like to work on furthering honing the service-dog laws so we can get them a little bit more exact; there are a lot of gray areas in it right now,” she said. “We’re not sure how to do this because it’s an access issue. … We would like to see a way to differentiate legitimate service dogs from people faking their service dogs. In the service-dog industry, we call them fakers.”
She said she encounters a lot of people who think they’re following the law, but, for example, the registration cards that businesses ask for can be purchased on the internet and “are mostly a scam.”
Walloch also wants to continue to compete and win in dog shows, and will be taking a Tibetan spaniel to the American Kennel Club show in a couple of weeks in Little Rock.
Walloch will have her dog and plans to show a couple of dogs for friends.
“By the time I get there, no telling how many I’ll be showing,” she said.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.