Assistance dog training for Ellie

Hello. My daughter is 17 years old and has Tourette's Syndrome, anxiety, joint problems & Irlens syndrome. We are currently waiting for an autism assessment. 

Ellie finds life very hard and had an owner trained assistance dog for 2 years but unfortunately he became very poorly and had to be put to sleep!

Ellie has now retreated in to her shell again and her tics have become very bad as she doesn't have an assistance dog by her side.

Ellie has physcial and verbal tics and she sometimes falls to the floor and is unable to walk. This is exhausting for her. The dog will be trained to do deep pressure therapy, distraction techniques, grounding, find an exit and person and hopefully alert to high heart rate when a tic attack is coming on. 

We are owner trained so have to fund this ourselves but would really like to train with a trainer and have 1-1 training sessions. This comes with a price tag of up to £10,000!  

We feel working alongside a trainer will give us a better chance of succeeding and this really is Ellie's last chance of leading an independent life, which she cant do without her dog. 

We have found a lovely local trainer called Suzie who is qualified to train assistance dogs and has lots of experience. We will be working with her for the next 18 months having 1-1 training sessions. Sometimes this will be an hours session, or a few hours training and other times it will be training days out with her. So we will continue to raise money to cover the cost of these training sessions. As you can imagine the price soon adds up!!

Having a dog will help Ellie do things we all take for granted and will give her the confidence to be able to go out which she doesnt want to do at the moment. 

Being a teenager is hard at the best of times without having to live with the daily struggles that tourettes syndrome & anxiety bring!!

Please can you help us? No donation is too small!

Thank you.