TL;DR: A service dog would help me tremendously with my disabilities, I’ve found a service dog provider to work with and have been put on their approximately 1 year wait list, but I need help raising the $16,500 needed to bring the service dog home when they are ready. Hi, I’m Reid! I’m a queer non-binary disabled human. While my disabilities are invisible, they do still have a major impact on my life – and this has become especially apparent while navigating the COVID-19 pandemic over the past several years and now attending grad school. While medication and working with my health care providers helps and will be something I continue, after a lot of thought and consideration, we believe a service dog could be a wonderful part of helping me have a more fulfilling and richer life. I grew up with dogs and have always loved them. I’ve wanted a dog of my own for many years and since January 2024 have been volunteering with a local non-profit animal shelter where I work with their Canine Care volunteer team on a near-weekly basis to help care for a wide variety of dogs and puppies. I undertook this in part knowing that being around dogs more often would be a huge benefit for me, but also so that I could be sure I would be up to the task of having my own dog in the future and being able to provide for them. And it goes without saying that it’s also incredibly rewarding to be able to help the dogs and puppies at the shelter and to see them adopted out to their forever homes. But a service dog is very different from the animals you meet at a shelter. Not only does a service dog undergo incredible amounts of specialized training – and specific task training for supporting their handler’s disabilities – but their intelligence, temperament, and reactivity levels are crucial to their success. They need to be able to focus on their handler in stressful and distracting environments, to not be reactive to people or animals or noises, and they need to be able to perform their specific assistance tasks in a variety of settings. Many potential service dogs fail out of service dog school, in fact (but they go on to have wonderful lives as family pets). Consequently, the right service dog can be difficult to find and incredibly expensive because of the amount of training they’ve had to undertake from a young age to ensure that they will meet the requirements for Public Access and supporting their handler. This can cost up to $50,000 for a fully trained service dog and sometimes involves wait lists of several years. While there are occasional grants or other financial assistance available for very specific types of service dogs or handlers (such as PTSD service dogs for veterans), it’s often up to future handlers to raise the money because insurance does not cover acquiring a service animal in any capacity. I’ve found a service dog provider, Angel Retrievers, that identifies and trains Golden Retrievers as service animals and places them with their handlers for continued self-training when they are between 4 and 12 months old. They are able to offer less expensive service dog options than many other providers because they are not fully trained, but still provide a high level of confidence that the young dogs will make good service dogs. Of course it is up to the handler to continue them on that path to becoming full service dogs. Which is why, even more importantly, they provide ongoing training support and lifetime monthly lessons to help you continue your service dog’s training and address any issues that may come up. They’ve approved my application and I’ve given them a $750 deposit so that I can be placed on their waiting list for a service dog at their Southern California training ranch, with a target date of October 2024. But I now face the challenging task of raising $16,500 to bring home a 10-12 month old service dog in training, which will set me up for the greatest level of success while trying to save money. All of the funds raised will go towards the service dog fee, and if I manage to raise any extra money it will go towards future care of the service dog, including pet insurance, veterinary care, food, etc. Any help that folks can offer is deeply appreciated. My providers and I really think this service dog will be a wonderful and life changing experience for me, and helping me make it reality means the world to me.
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