North Marshall Middle School students and faculty have partnered with Wren’s Pet Lodge to help provide a local veteran with something everyone needs: a best friend.
Students and faculty held the school’s first-ever “K9 Walk for Warriors,” a walk-a-thon style event, in which students and community members – joined by their pets – walked for pledges along a mile-long course Saturday, May 13 at Mike Miller Park in Draffenville. When all was said and done, students raised $2,400 to provide a PTSD service dog to a local disabled veteran.
NMMS teacher and event coordinator Dan Whitesides said it was a project that hit close to home. Whitesides was recently given his own service dog, he said, and the only condition of ownership was to pay the gesture forward in some way.
“I’m a service vet, and I know the importance of PTSD dogs and the help that they provide to the soldiers coming home,” Whitesides said. “It’s not always easy to come home.”
Whitesides said the U.S. sometimes lost more veterans to suicide than combat, averaging about 22 per day nationwide. Service dogs could bridge a critical gap in programs available to assist veterans.
It’s a mission Clay and Tracey McElya, owners of Wren’s Pet Lodge have taken to heart. The McElyas have worked to place six service dogs for those in need during the last year. A private donor approached the couple hoping to place a dog with a child suffering from cancer. Since then, the effort has grown; the couple breeds and trains dogs, three of which have become service animals. The two have worked to help raise funds with other donors to provide for the animals’ care, equipment and training costs in hopes of placing those dogs.
“For us it’s a growing process,” Clay McElya said. “I mean, the training is the same as all the other training I’ve done, it’s just more in depth and it takes a lot of time. So far we’ve been really successful at doing this. North Marshall Middle School contacting us wanting to do a fundraiser was a huge help. I mean, we can’t do the training and the fundraising and the breeding and the raising puppies, I mean there’s just too much. So, it takes a lot of people to put in their part to pull it together, and that’s what we’re hoping to do so that we can help place the service dogs.”
It can be a lengthy and expensive process. Clay McElya said the typical service dog training can take up to 18 months and could cost anywhere from $15,000 to $25,000. The McElyas’ goal is to be able to provide service animals for closer to $5,000 and in a shorter time-frame.
“I’m a vet, also,” he said. “I didn’t like that price. When you get into seeing-eye dogs, diabetic alert dogs, seizure detection dogs, OK, I’ll go with that’s the price it’s going to take. But when you’re talking about PTSD or dogs for kids with autism or dogs for kids with cancer, they’re not specializing in an odor detection … something like that that’s not needing that specialized training, just needing the basic obediance so that’s what we’re keying on.”
For Kyle Finley, it’s a much-needed and valuable service. Finley, who assists Clay McElya in training the animals, served in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. He was there about six weeks when he was injured in an explosion that sent shrapnel into his thigh and ultimately left him wheel-chair bound. He was medically retired in 2008.
Thanks to NMMS students, Finley was given Harley, a chocolate lab puppy undergoing the service-dog training.
“I did a lot of work in Clarksville with other veterans in a group that all of them had PTSD,” Finley said. “They were all going to a group just to meet and get better. There’s no help. When I got out of the Army, there was nothing like there is today. I got out in 2007, and there wasn’t all these go skiing trips or nothing. So, I wanted to find something to do to help.”
NMMS students, too, will do their part to help each year going forward. Whitesides said as much as it is about providing veterans with a service animal, it’s about good citizenship.
“I know one of our goals as both a county school system and a school is to not only educate kids in the core curriculum but to make good stewards of the citizenry, and to make good citizens and neighbors,” Whitesides said. “One of those attributes is a conscious and active civic duty, and I think that this not only has helped a lot of our kids grow in that way, but it has also raised some awareness about service animals and their real purpose and what they do. They’re not pets walking around in the store, they’re doing a job, they’re working. It’s good for our kids to recognize, ‘that’s a service animal, that’s not a pet. I shouldn’t ask to play with it; I shouldn’t go pet it, even though I really want to.’”
For more information about donating to help place a service dog, to find out more about getting a service dog or learn about helping someone else receive a dog, call Wren’s at 270-527-5529 or visit kylakedogs.com.