Hi, Guideposts. I’m Lori Raineri, and this is my dog, Daisy. We’re here in Yolo County, California where Daisy and I live, and she assists our Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig and his staff with crime victim assistance as a comfort dog. And she specifically works with victims of sexual abuse.
I believe that Daisy is a border collie mix. She came from the shelter. A client of mine gave me a gift subscription to Bark Magazine, and there was an article about dogs being used to help crime victims up in Washington state. And knowing some people involved in the criminal justice system here in Yolo County, particularly Judge Steve Basha, said, hey, we should have this in Yolo County, and I introduced him to Daisy. A pilot program was born.
Daisy started helping out at the district attorney’s office more than eight years ago. She’s very gentle and very sweet, and she seems to be very intuitive about how people feel. And she’s not only responsive to children, but also to the people who work in the criminal justice system, many of whom are also traumatized by what they’re dealing with.
She sits quietly while being loved and hugged. Daisy helps people in a lot of ways, and she knows a lot of tricks that, in the service dog world, they always want to call them skills. Very often, with children, even though they’ve been traumatized, they want to play. But I think mostly what she does to comfort people is just to be present and to make them feel like she’s happy to be with them. I think, because of Daisy’s training as well as the type of dog she is, she’s just so responsive to learning new things that, very often when she’s with kids, she’s just learning right then in the moment what they want her to do and the words that they’re using to tell her, and she’ll be responsive to that.
I think everybody who has a dog knows how trustworthy they are. It’s just baked into what dogs are. And what we find with this program, what I’ve been told by the professionals that work with Daisy and the children, is that the children have suffered a terrible betrayal because, very often, if they’ve been sexually abused, it’s been by somebody that they trusted or expected to protect them, and that trust was betrayed. And when they meet Daisy in the MDIC at Yolo County where she works, she’s very predictable, and she behaves like a dog, and that reinforces that positive trust that it’s OK to trust her, and it helps them get through the process.
Read Lori’s story, as seen in Guideposts.
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