Helpful Hounds for Heroes
Kendle Frank, content coordinator at Freedom Service Dogs of America, shares the paw-some story of the Colorado nonprofit’s work matching assistance dogs with service members and others in need.
Would you share the origins of your organization and its purpose?
Freedom Service Dogs of America was founded in 1987 by PJ and Michael Roche, and since then, we’ve grown from a two-person effort to one of the country’s largest assistance dog organizations. We are accredited by Assistance Dogs International, a worldwide accreditation coalition that sets high standards for care, health, and training of assistance dogs all over the world.
Our mission is to custom-train and purpose-breed service, professional therapy, facility, and skilled companion dogs for veterans and first responders with PTSD or traumatic brain injuries. We also serve adults with autism or mobility challenges, as well as professionals providing mental health and crisis-support services. Recipients get their own assistance dogs and lifetime support services at no cost to them, thanks to our community of supporters.
How and where do the service animals undergo training?
Most of our service dogs-in-training—Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers, and mixes of the two—are a result of our in-house purpose breeding program here in Colorado. They are born on-site and spend their first few weeks of life in our nursery, where they undergo socialization and enrichment from our staff and volunteers.
They then receive their first formal training with our prison puppy-training program partners before being matched with a volunteer puppy raiser, who provides ongoing socialization and basic training until they reach adulthood. During that time, FSD covers the cost of their veterinary care, food, and supplies.
At about fourteen months old, our dogs return to the FSD facility for formal training, where they start working on advanced service dog cues and begin their custom training process. Our dogs learn to perform up to forty unique tasks that are directly related to an individual’s particular needs. For example, if someone living with mobility challenges has a hard time bending over, we can train a dog to do tasks such as pressing automatic door buttons and pulling laundry out of the dryer.
When we have a dog who we believe may be a candidate for someone on our wait list based on their skills and temperament, the individual comes to our facility to make sure the dog is a good fit. Once a match is made, the person returns for a two-week placement class, where they practice the custom cues their dog learned and go on outings with our trainers and the other teams to learn how to navigate public spaces.
At the end of the placement class, we hold a graduation celebration for the team and they officially begin their life together. They’ll continue receiving ongoing support services, including additional training and guidance. When an assistance dog retires at around age eight or nine, the recipient will have the opportunity to receive a successor dog to fill their place.
Would you break down the types of services your dogs provide?
Our service dogs can learn to perform life-changing tasks such as creating space in crowds, retrieving dropped items or medication, performing deep-pressure therapy, and more. Our PTSD assist dogs can also be trained to do things like recognize and interrupt anxious behaviors and flashbacks and awaken veterans and first responders from nightmares.
In addition, our professional therapy dogs and facility dogs are placed with professionals who provide mental health or crisis support services, including clinical therapists and members of law enforcement. Their main role is to provide joy, comfort, and stress relief to the public and specific populations, such as those within hospitals, schools, fire stations, and police departments.
Finally, our skilled companion dogs are partnered with first responders, veterans, active-duty military members and their families, and Gold Star families. While these pups aren’t trained to perform specialized tasks and don’t have public access rights like service dogs, they are skilled at providing loving comfort, and their main purpose is to bring joy to service members and their families.
What kind of impact does Freedom Service Dogs of America make?
We take great care to ensure that each dog in our program is placed with the person or situation where they’ll have the greatest impact. If a dog is not meeting our high standards of health or temperament required to graduate as an assistance dog, they may find an alternative career as an FSD skilled companion dog or be placed as a pet with a loving member of our community.
Our work is truly life-changing for both humans and dogs alike. Our dogs love their roles as assistance animals. We like to say our dogs wag while they work. And with an FSD dog by their side, individuals can go from being isolated to living a life filled with joy, hope, and independence.
For more info, freedomservicedogs.org