Paws For Purple Hearts

Golden Gabe | Paws for Purple Hearts via Land of Pure Gold

Rick Yount and his golden retriever puppy, Gabe, had separation issues every morning. "The dog kept looking at me at the door with those sad eyes, and finally it was just impossible to resist," Yount recalled. So one morning, "I decided to take him with me." Yount was then working as a social worker, and on that particular morning he had to take a young boy from his mother's house and drive him to new foster parents. The boy cried and cried. But halfway through the trip, the car suddenly grew quiet. "I looked in the back seat," said Yount, "and the puppy's head was lying on the boy's lap."

That demonstration of canine comforting in 1995 sparked the idea for a program that is getting underway at a Veterans Affairs hospital in California and at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. It's called Paws for Purple Hearts, and it is helping injured veterans and active-duty troops in two very different ways.

The program trains Labradors and golden retrievers - including many offspring of Yount's dog Gabe - as lifelong service dogs and companions for veterans who use wheelchairs. But for their first two years of life, these dogs spread their love around in another way. They are trained by veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. For many of these psychologically damaged warriors, this human-canine connection provides them with emotional sustenance, a mission and important lessons in patience that help them get on with their lives.

Read more of this article by Arthur Allen in The Washington Post.

Thanks, Soll