This week, 16-year-old Gabe Maloney is helping first responders learn more about service dogs.
Gabe, who suffers from narcolepsy, is presenting with his service dog, Stanley.
"My brain doesn't really regulate sleep, and I can fall asleep at any time or when I do fall asleep, I go directly into REM sleep and I can't wake up,” Gabe said. "Stanley is that part of my brain that keeps me awake and tells me when not to fall asleep and if I do fall asleep, Stanley will climb over my lap and shield me and protect me.”
Gabe’s father Michael Maloney said Gabe has had Stanley for about a year and a half now.
“I was the one that would have to wake him up. It would be an hour and a half, five times trying to wake him up. Normally at the two hour mark, I just gave up and he would miss school that day, so we were doing very poorly in school. And Stanley now has been trained to wake him up in the morning,” Maloney said.
Maloney said now that Gabe has Stanley, he and his son have formed a closer relationship and Gabe has shown improvement in school.
“He's only fallen asleep once, where last year, he's fallen asleep 7 or 8 times a week. Even so it's really made a difference,” Maloney said.
According to servicedogcentral.org, roughly 387,000 people with disabilities have service dogs.
Throughout the week, Gabe and Stanley are training first responders at the Independence Fire Department.
“As a first responder, I know that we haven't had a lot of times when a person has an actual service dog with them. So he's brought a lot of information to us today that we didn't know about as far as how to approach him and how to approach the service dog and what to do once we get there,” Independence Fire Inspector Glenda Knisely said. “Because obviously the service dog is an extension of him, and we want to make sure they stay together if there is an emergency.”
While this presentation is part of an Eagle Scout project, he said the idea came from an incident when he tried to get into a restaurant with Stanley.
“All he knew is that if he didn't see a visible disability, that it wasn't real, that it was a scam” Gabe said. “So this is what kicked it off to just educate the public and just other people.”
Through the Americans with Disabilities Act, service dogs are permitted at any business where the public is allowed.
Gabe said he hopes these presentations will bring more awareness.
“Stanley is Gabe,” Gabe said. “He's a part of me, and I can't function without him.”
According to the ADA, people with disabilities cannot be asked to remove their service dogs unless the animal is out of control and cannot be calmed down, or if the animal poses a direct threat to others.
