The Kindness Matters Podcast
So. Much. Division. Let's talk about how to change that. Re-engage as neighbors, friends, co-workers and family. Let's set out to change the world. Strike that. Change A World. One person at a time, make someone's life a little better and then do it again tomorrow and the day after that, through kindness.
Kindness is a Super-Power that each of us has within us. It is so powerful it has the potential to change not only your life but those around you, too. Let's talk about kindness.
The Kindness Matters Podcast
Unleashing Kindness: How Service Dogs Transform Lives
What happens when a veteran ICU nurse combines her medical expertise with 30 years of dog training experience? Pauline Hoegler reveals the remarkable answer on this episode of Kindness Matters.
Pauline's organization, GOFIDog (Golden Opportunities for Independence), has developed innovative programs that harness the extraordinary capabilities of Golden Retrievers to serve communities in ways that transform lives daily. The stories she shares will leave you astonished at what these four-legged heroes accomplish.
Picture a police officer approaching a child in crisis—a situation that typically escalates to ambulance calls, emergency room visits, or even arrests. Now imagine that same scenario, but with a Golden Retriever by the officer's side. Pauline shares real examples where these Community Resource Dogs completely transformed outcomes, de-escalating volatile situations and creating connections where traditional approaches failed. "Within five minutes, he was back in class," she explains about one remarkable intervention with an autistic student.
Beyond community policing, Pauline's facility dogs support students from elementary school through college, while her service dogs assist people with disabilities, PTSD, and medical conditions like seizure disorders. The science behind these capabilities is fascinating—these dogs can literally smell biochemical changes that signal an oncoming seizure, allowing them to alert handlers before symptoms appear.
What makes Pauline's approach unique is her commitment to creating successful human-dog partnerships through comprehensive training that goes beyond basic commands. By focusing on problem-solving skills and building deep bonds, she's achieved success rates far beyond industry standards.
Want to experience some kindness in action? Listen now to discover how these golden-hearted heroes are changing communities one wet nose at a time. Then visit GOFIDog online to learn how you can support their mission through donations or their upcoming fundraising events.
This podcast is a proud member of the Mayday Media Network. If you have an idea for a podcast and need some production assistance or have a podcast and are looking for a supportive network to join, check out maydaymedianetwork.com.
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Kindness Matters podcast. I'm your host, mike Rathbun. On this podcast, we promote positivity, empathy and compassion because we believe that kindness is alive and well, and there are people and organizations that you may not have heard of in the world, making their communities a better place for everyone, and we want you to hear their stories. On this podcast, we talk about matters of kindness because kindness matters. Hey, welcome to the show, everybody. I am so glad and so thankful that you chose to take 30 minutes out of your time, 30-ish minutes out of your day, to listen to this podcast. I appreciate it so much. You have no idea and you know what, if you're not already, go ahead and subscribe wherever you're listening to this podcast, whether it's Spotify or Apple or YouTube or wherever. Go ahead and subscribe because we appreciate that and that way you can keep all up to date on any of our new episodes, like this one. I have such a great episode with you guys today.
Speaker 1:If you know me at all, you know how I love dogs, and this one just kind of fell into my lap. My guest today is Pauline Hogler, and she is an RN and a certified professional dog trainer with over 30 years of experience with competitive obedience, agility, consulting clients and group dog behavior. She is also a critical care nurse, which makes her the perfect candidate to lead Go-Fi Dogs. And you're asking well, what's Go-Fi Dogs? Go-fi stands for golden opportunities, for independence. Welcome to the show, pauline. Thank you so much for taking the time to be on today thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:This is wonderful um, and this is now in addition to all your dog training experience you are also a breeder, is that correct?
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 1:And you breed exclusively Golden Retrievers. Correct why.
Speaker 2:Golden Retrievers, I think because of my lifestyle. When I first married my husband, I wanted German Shepherds. Probably wanted German Shepherds most of my life. They're just the coolest dog. But he was right when he said we have nieces and nephews coming through the yard all the time, people coming over and that kind of thing, and we really probably should focus more on a family breed. And so I got my first Golden Retrieverver oh, I'd say, over 30 years ago and she became my first breeding dog. My parents bred dogs growing up, so it's something that I absolutely love, love, love. I love puppies. There's nothing better than a litter of puppies and puppy breath Puppy breath is the best, so it's.
Speaker 2:It really is in your blood isn't it.
Speaker 2:It really is. My father was a farmer and so he would tell me stories about him raising the horses. I can't talk, that's fine. So he had all kinds of animals and just the stories he would always tell when we were kids about the horses and the pigs and the cows and all of that stuff. I thought it was really cool. So growing up my parents bred dogs and when I became old enough and had my own house that I was able to do it myself, I continued on with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I love golden retrievers. I grew up with Labrador retrievers, which I think is probably about as close to a Golden Retriever, temperamental-wise, as you can get, but Golden Retriever just kind of another level, aren't they?
Speaker 2:They really are, just in the sense of their intuitiveness, really for the therapy dog work and the service dog work. A lot of what we do with people with disabilities also comes with nervousness, anxiousness, um, you know, the dogs really need to be in tune to that and be able to help the handlers through things like that, and so they fail. The golden retrievers are better in that regard. The you pair up a golden retriever with someone with a cane and they're going to slow down their steps on their own. You don't have to tell them a lab's probably going to take them down the street whether he wanted to go down the street or not so they're both great dogs, but I like the goldens with a little bit more of a.
Speaker 2:I feel they have a little more brain to them and a little bit more intuitive to personal feelings and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think labs are intuitive when it comes to water. Yeah, but that's about it. Yes, yeah, yeah, but that's about it. Yes, yeah, yeah. And I know what you're saying about family dogs too, because they really are. Yeah, we've had several. My wife and I have had several dogs. I've had several dogs and we have an invisible fence for our yard, which is great. All of our dogs have learned it and respected it. We had one dog his name was Sammy and he was a shepherd yellow lab mix, and at his peak he was like 110 pounds. He was enormous and he saw a rabbit in the neighbor's yard and blew through the fence, yipped on the way out and then stood there and looked at the neighbor's yard and looked back at his yard, looked back at the neighbor's yard and went. He came back in our yard, yipped on the way back in too, but never, ever breached that fence again. So I mean, you know, oh, wow.
Speaker 1:But that doesn't mean other dogs can't get into your yard right and then pull them off, but we've never had one that we were afraid to have, like the kids have their friends over, or what have you.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But there is that concern, of course, and that's where Goldens come in, and you were talking a little bit about all of the different, because you're dogs at Go-Fi Dog, you have a lot of different programs. Right, correct, you've got we help a lot of people. Yes, okay, let's go through them one by one. You have the community resource dog. Let's talk about that type of dog.
Speaker 2:Okay, community resource dogs is a trademark that we came up with when we were working with the police department in our town and he's a community resource officer and so it really fit in perfectly because his job is connecting the community, bridging people together, making police departments a place to go to help, not a bad place that you go when you're in trouble. And so we were talking for quite a while and trying to figure out what are we going to kind of call this dog. It's not really a comfort dog in the sense of it's not just kind of helping at the station with the people, it's not just providing comfort, it actually does. It passes certain tests. We go through rigorous training throughout the dog's life and so when the puppy turns six months of age, that puppy goes through a test, kind of coined by the AKC, called the Puppy Star Test and just making sure that the socialization is there, the owners are knowledgeable, the handlers are knowledgeable about what the dogs should have, their vaccines, their licenses through the town, all of that kind of stuff. And then for the next six months you work on the canine, good citizen kind of things, and that's really just your.
Speaker 2:It's not so much basic obedience, it's basic obedience combined with tolerance for different situations, different people. Um, one of the test piece test items is can somebody else come up and brush your dog? Can somebody else lean over them and pat them on the head, um, and those kind of things. So it it takes the obedience. You know you can your shepherds and your malinois. They can be the most obedient dog in the whole world, but don't pat him um so um. You know, knowing that most of my dogs that I breed are going into homes, either family homes or someone with a disability or a community engagement type of situation, that's why we've really focused on the dogs that we do breed and I have to say it's not even just so much that they're golden retrievers, because within my bloodlines I have a very lab-like I call it line bloodline.
Speaker 2:where they're busy they might rip things apart. And then I have different bloodlines that I would never put into a social kind of thing because they're so shy and timid that it's stressful for them. So really kind of trying to find, even within the dogs that I breed, that special dog, that special bloodline that can go anywhere, do anything, generalize situations and be confident in those situations and still be able to be on task for what they need to do, with distractions and things like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just going back to that community resource because that's so huge, when you see oftentimes cops, right or wrong, have depending on the neighborhood. Cops, right or wrong, have depending on the neighborhood might have. There might be some hard feelings there.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:But when you have a cop walk up with a golden retriever, it really kind of smooths things out, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:100% and I can't even begin to tell you the amount of stories that the officers tell us. Literally on the very first day I had one officer call and was like Pauline, you wouldn't believe what just happened. And this kind of thing happens a lot with our dogs. He said there was a child who was having a tantrum and he literally was in the bathroom and he ripped everything apart. He ripped the toilet paper thing off of the wall. He was having a really hard time and we don't encourage when people are in that kind of state to utilize the dog so much because we don't want them to get hurt. But he felt confident that after a conversation with him he said it's officer chad. It's like not right now, officer chad, not having a good day. And he said well, do you want to just come out and talk to me for a few minutes? He's like no, not today. And then he said oh, really, um, okay, maybe for a minute. And he said he came out of the bathroom, he sat on the ground, he pet the dog. We do we train them task work. So we train them to lie across laps to do a weighted pressure, which science shows that it's really beneficial in situations like this and he said within five minutes he was back in class. And so a lot of these stories, especially the autistic community. We don't really know as a society how to deal with people that have autism, even any kind of mental health. We don't really as a society know how to deal with that. We haven't figured that out yet but I feel like the dogs have. We have made trips to the hospital in an ambulance.
Speaker 2:That officer in my own hometown here said a girl was in school, got into a fight, was having a tantrum, she was throwing um things left and right. And he said he showed up at scene and there were four officers surrounding her in a resident front yard and, um, he said nobody was getting anywhere with her and it was really pretty much to the point where they would have to arrest her. And that's the last thing officers want, schools want. You know, nobody wants that. And so he said you know, let's just try and calm down a little bit. I gotta let my dog out real quick. And he said as soon as he said the word dog, she honed in on him and he's like do you like dogs? And she said yeah, I like dogs a lot. And so he's like if you want, you can come and Pat sit down, take a breather, pat Rubble, and just see how this goes.
Speaker 1:And once again, that kid went back to school let alone instead of bail.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the fire department was on scene, the police were on scene and this dog, out of all of those people, was able to get this girl to go up, get up and go back to school and calm down enough that she was rational thinking and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:So, even financially, the amount of money that they save municipalities between not having to go to an emergency department I work in an emergency department. That's the last place that a child with autism should be. It's the last place that people with mental health should be. It's not last place that people with mental health should be. It's not geared towards that and unfortunately, with the shortage of care that we have currently, they sit in an emergency for days, and so to be able to not only save the ambulance trip preventing them from going to an emergency room, they're saving them from sitting in an emergency room for days upon days on end. So it's really really. It's blown my mind how really beneficial it is for communities, for just your, each town that gets one of these dogs cannot say enough about the work that they do and that they never imagined that they're able to do what they do in each town and every chief calls me and says Pauline, you wouldn't believe. And I say yes, I would. Yep.
Speaker 1:I knew what I was doing when I created this program.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's community resource dogs. You also have a program for facility dogs. Now, what type? Of dog, would that be?
Speaker 2:So we do a lot of schools. Many colleges BU, babson, curry College here in the area have our dogs In colleges there. It's a little different but the same in the sense that students going to schools there's a lot of stress when they're in college, their first year in college they're away from their family and I want to say probably the most common comment that people say is I can't leave. How much I miss my dog and it's so nice to be able to pat this dog because it's you know, it's a yeah, it's not being away so this is just for college students then we do.
Speaker 2:We do schools. We have dogs in elementary schools, which was my biggest concern. We really wanted to um, I think the whole time she was talking I was like it's not gonna work, it's not going to work, it's not going to work, it's working. And I have to say that dog is doing amazing things in a younger population, yeah, but also we have middle school that has them, high schools that have them yeah, a lot of times the guidance counselors will have them, and then dogs can I mean kids can sign up to see them, that kind of thing, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I know we have a lady up here who has put together a program for kids. Well, to bring dogs and handlers, therapy dogs, into um middle schools, because oftentimes when we know kids are stressed to the max these days, right, and a lot of it begins I think in middle school is what she found, and she brings the dogs in and they calm right down and yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So that's a facility dog.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And then the one I like the most service dogs.
Speaker 2:Service dogs are really cool. When I first started this program it was because I well, when I was thinking about doing this, I heard about cancer sniffing dogs and, as a nurse, of course that's a nurse who loves dogs Exactly, and you know I did my share of research.
Speaker 2:There were people doing it, but ultimately it came back to as much as they can do it, I think, ethically. What are we going to do? Put a bunch of dogs in cages and have them sniff samples, kind of thing? So I did get off of that, but it did get me on the track. My niece is paralyzed and so I had been spending some time with her and we both. I just kept on saying you need it, you need a service dog, you need to get a service dog, just like I don't want to have to work oh yeah, I mean okay, they would love it, they would love to work for you.
Speaker 2:Um, and then, shortly after we had that discussion, a girl that worked for me through high school, helped them with the dogs and the animals, came back and said I've been thinking of starting a service dog program. And so it was literally like the next morning. I'm like that is just the craziest thing. So clearly it's meant to happen.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah.
Speaker 2:And here we are, 10 years later.
Speaker 1:There are so many different categories of service, Doc you have service cards for veterans for PTSD for disabled people you do first responders as well, I think, or no, we do do first responders.
Speaker 2:Because and it's sort of the same thing as the veterans, but maybe a different kind- well, ptsd is ptsd and they're all kind of out in the line of fire out there.
Speaker 1:So right um they're beneficial did I miss a category of service dog?
Speaker 2:disabled people, ptsd um children, veterans, um people with disabilities. We really focus our service dogs on who we can help the most and we don't necessarily pick a population we go with. Who can we do the most for what would the best scenario for our dog be? What's the best scenario for someone taking in one of our dogs? And we like to stay local, right in our own community. We try and just focus 25 miles from um Walpole but um, we're getting to the point where I feel confident that we can kind of start to work outside of those lines. But the primary reason for that is that the majority of service dogs that get trained fail and I thought that was just awful, you know they fail they fail.
Speaker 2:Um, the success rates for service dogs is pretty bad, um, and so I wanted to change that, and I feel the primary way to change that is that people have to know more. The people have to be able to troubleshoot when things go wrong. They need to have a better bond with their dog. Most of the programs do a couple of weeks where they put the dog and the human together and then they do training, they learn I want to say the buttons to push for the most part. They do training, they learn. I want to say the buttons to push for the most part, but they don't learn.
Speaker 2:One case in particular I was at a Dunkin' Donuts with one of the dogs that I had in training and he was right around a year. So that's kind of a hormonal stage for them. They go through fear, stages, stages and out of nowhere a german shepherd popped up from under one of the tables and lunged at him and of course we both jumped and at the time they had a huge statue, a cardboard statue of grom, so we jumped into that. That fell down on top of the dog and it was a. It was a nightmare, it was your classic nightmare, and from that it took a long time to get that dog to feel comfortable going into Dunkin Donuts again, going into stores and without having to look under under tables and chairs and things like that, and so I feel strongly that the people need to be able to know how to help your dog through things like that, because they happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. You have no idea, and trying to train for every possible scenario must be impossible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is impossible.
Speaker 1:I am so impressed with these dogs and I'm sure this must fit into your categories, like the ones who know can sense a seizure, for example, coming up and will bring their person down to a sitting position, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of our very first dogs was a seizure detection dog, and so he was Bridget's sibling, and so Bridget's pretty much the OG of Goofy. She's almost 12 now, but she definitely was the one dog who was in tune. If you walk in somewhere and Bridget pulls you to somebody, you know to let her go and stay with that person because she's just so in tune. But Buddy, her brother, was a seizure detection dog for a girl who was 18 at the time and she had lived a life of not having really any privacy. The parents couldn't really get a good night's sleep because seizures happen at night time. Um, that's the most, um, the highest death rate is when they're in bed and they seize and you don't know about it. So one we say that the only thing that we really can do or can guarantee is not the right word for it either, but we can't really say that the dogs know that they're about to have a seizure.
Speaker 2:But I've seen it and it's truly amazing. Whether it's the chemistry within the human or body language within the human, I don't think we've quite figured it out, but I am nearly certain it is scent, because that's what we actually train them with on seizures. If someone's having a seizure, you take the shirt that they were wearing and you use that as a testing shirt and you do it all through scent. So I have to say this then like I said in the beginning, the cancer sniffing dogs scent work is amazing. Dogs can smell through a concrete wall. Of course, they can smell inside of you, you know they. There's a lot of studies that have high specificity and high sensitivity for urine cultures, sputum cultures, being able to smell and detect certain things, even in COVID. They trained them to detect COVID on humans. So that's just, it's an amazing superpower that they have.
Speaker 1:Like golden retrievers, needed another superpower. Exactly. But yeah, I it isn't just art, it isn't just golden retrievers that have that power. Most dogs are some dogs too.
Speaker 2:Well, any dog can do it. I feel the real key to um, the labradors and the goldens is that they want to please you, and so you have to have that level of communication. So every dog will be like, oh, I smell something different. But if you train a dog of one of these guys on that sweat sample, that, this is what I want to do when this, when you smell this, when you see this exactly, and so being able them to be smart enough to one be able to figure out that it's a two-step process. It's no longer just a I say sit, you say sit, you sit. It's now. I say sit, you sit, and then you jump on me when you smell that, or you call me when you smell things like that, and so it's.
Speaker 2:It requires a smart dog, um as well, a dog as well as a dog. That is very in tune to you. I look at my dogs. I don't care where I am or what I'm doing at any given moment. I look at them, they're looking at me, and I think most people would attest to that. Yes, 100%. When I look at my dog, they're looking at me. What are you looking at?
Speaker 1:All of this training. It must be very expensive.
Speaker 2:It is very expensive, very expensive. It is very expensive, um. So we had a really rough year last year because we would have one. So the dogs would get dropped off monday through thursday and we have a trainer work with each of the dogs, um, and that's just not feasible. But I want to say that the price was probably up in the $50,000 range.
Speaker 2:But now we're actually starting a program where we have students that want to learn how to train a dog, and so we're going to provide them with our dogs. So school costs money and school you have to take time off from everything else. So if you want to really learn how to train a dog, this is the the best way to do it. We have academic portion where we have modules, tests and all of that stuff, but we also have the hands-on and so two days a week you come here three hours at a time, you do your clinical here and you learn how to do the hands-on portion, and so you start. Module zero is when the puppy's born, um. Module one is three months to five months and then just each module is another couple of months until the dog is two years of age basically, what's that you're training?
Speaker 1:your trainers basically what's that? You're training your trainers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes. You're bringing in a whole group, and we're allowing them hands-on with our dogs, but it also gets our dogs hands-on with humans, and so it's a very good model.
Speaker 1:How do you fund a nonprofit like this? I mean, is it?
Speaker 2:cool. We do a lot of just regular fundraisers. We have a golf tournament coming up in September. That's probably our biggest moneymaker for the year. We apply for grants. Our DA was very generous with grants for the police department so he would give she would give the police departments a grant to purchase our dogs. We have two district attorney offices that we work closely with in my local area that have found you know they. They can't stop at one dog. They're both on to at least 10 apiece, so they see the benefit of it.
Speaker 1:Well, this is. You have such a cool program here, pauline. I really really really appreciate what you do. Any thought of like, like taking this nationally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I'm not opposed to it.
Speaker 1:Perfect, I am going to have links to your website. I think you have a donation page on your website. I'll do that separately. Okay, and you guys are just making such a positive impact in the world and in the lives of other people and I think it's fantastic, it's amazing.
Speaker 2:Thank you, it's pretty kind.
Speaker 1:It is pretty kind, you're right. That's why you're here. That's why we're here together thank you so much for your time today, pauline. I really appreciate it you as well hey everybody.
Speaker 1:I want to thank you for taking this time to listen to this episode with my guest, pauline hogler from GoFee Dogs. I want to acknowledge right now I said it wrong the entire episode. I said GoFi, it's GoFee Dogs golden opportunities for independence. I hope you were able to take something positive from the time that you spent here with us. Maybe you'll be inspired, Maybe you'll be motivated, Maybe you'll be motivated, Maybe you'll be moved. If you experienced any of those positive feelings, please consider sharing this podcast with your friends and family and the butcher at the grocery store. Whatever the case may be, it would mean the world to me and I'm always striving to offer you a better podcast. So, you know, give me some feedback, Let me know how you think I'm doing, Email me, Leave me a message on our socials. It would mean the world to us.
Speaker 1:This podcast is part of the Mayday Media Network. If you have an idea for a podcast, let's say, and you need some production assistance. Or maybe you already have a podcast and are looking for a supportive network to join. Check out maydaymedianetworkcom and check out the many different shows they have, like Afrocentric Spoiled, my Movie Generation Mixtape In a Pickle radio show, Wake Up and Dream with D'Anthony Palin, Staxo, Pax and the Time Pals. We'll be back again next week with a brand new episode and we would be honored if you would join us. You've been listening to the Kindness Matters Podcast. I'm your host, Mike Rathbun. Have a fantastic week.
