Paws4people Presents Veterans Talking About Their Service Dogs

In this day and age, many of us who are friends and advocates of people with disabilities are constantly astonished by the continued lack of progress in our fellow Americans’ understanding and acceptance of people with different abilities and the assistive technologies they employ.

My name is Kyria Henry, and in 1999, at the age of 12, I founded the nonprofit, paws4people™, fulfilling my simple dream to use dogs as a means of helping people. With the assistance of my father, we launched this program to enhance the lives of special and regular education students, seniors and those living with a serious illness or disability by utilizing the “special powers” of canine companionship. Our highly-trained Assistance Dogs provide support in areas including: mobility service, psychiatric service, educational assistance, rehabilitative assistance and social-therapy.

To date, paws4people™ has more than 175 dogs within its various specialized programs. These dogs have accomplished more than 300,000 therapeutic contacts. Additional dogs are in various stages of their training and will also enter these working programs. In all, paws4people™ has more than 150 volunteers and operates in nine states.

Working in, developing and progressing the field of Assistance Dogs for the past 12 plus years, I have discovered countless times that the lack of acceptance, which impacts Americans with disabilities on a daily basis, readily extends to the Assistance Dogs so highly trained and relied upon to serve those individuals.

Almost everyone today is aware of the service Dog Guides provide to people who are blind; and the ways we should interact (or rather, not interact) with them in public – the fact that they have access to absolutely any public place with their handler who is blind and so forth. More recently, the public has become accustomed to people with obvious mobility limitations, namely those who use wheelchairs, being accompanied by Mobility Service Dogs. Credit for this increased awareness is due to the many organizations nationwide – and now worldwide – that are placing Mobility Service Dogs, as well as increasing publicity and awareness of them and their importance in the lives of people with disabilities.

The mission of paws4people™ is to widen the scope of education about the limitless world of Assistance Dogs, the countless jobs they can perform and the wonderful recipients they so loyally and lovingly serve. So the next time you see a dog working in your neighborhood grocery store or politely laying under a table at your favorite restaurant, realize that the person on the other end of the leash might be someone you least expect. In fact, the Assistance Dog might be serving someone without you even being able to identify the reasons why and how. But isn’t that what the world of different abilities is about? Teaching ourselves and others to un-train our brains and expect the unexpected – that every individual is capable of achieving anything, regardless of the way their body or mind goes about doing it – even if it requires the help of a dog.