Page 751 - Total War on PTSD
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The lady who gave us JP, she gave us JP for free and taught me to train him. She gave him to me and told me that I already paid the price through my service. I think that there's a much better connection when the Veteran is able to train their dog themselves, or when the trainer can train the Veteran and the dog at the same time. So, Janet and I, we take that same premise, and we help our Veterans coming back with PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injuries. We do the same thing. We teach them how to train their dogs for their own specific needs and we do it at no charge. We have kind of expanded it a little more to also include the same training/services for first responders.
JP is a Blue Merle Great Dane and my Service Dog and the only other dog we have in the house. The lady who gave me JP named all her dogs after something to do with the military with exception of the females whom she named after First Ladies. JP’s real name is Nonjudicial Punishment but it's JP for short. My wife and I actually call him “J” but everyone else knows him as JP. The story with JP was that Janet was doing a lot of research about PTSD because of the issues I was dealing with when I came home. I was really broken when I got back and she was trying to understand it all. She came into contact with this woman on the internet who lived in North Carolina and they became friends via a Facebook page that Janet created named PTSD The Truth in Numbers. Well, one month later Janet was highlighting Service Dog organizations on her page and we made arrangements to take JP just in the role of puppy-raiser for her friends’ organization (on behalf of another Veteran) and he came to us at three months of age in 2011. I was going to train him for someone who needed him more than I did, but I got very attached to JP and I asked if we could keep him instead. It was the first week...actually the first couple of days...when I was working with him a little bit, when Janet said, "Don't you get it? This is the
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