I hafta tell you I’m really having a hard time staying positive lately, to the point of sometimes thinking about bagging my whole involvement with service dogs, especially getting them to veterans.

Almost every day I see questionable things from supposedly responsible organizations and people in the service dog world, particularly where veterans are involved. Like the veteran working his dog with no leash I just saw in a slick fundraising video from a service dog place that focuses solely on veterans (watched it four or five times and I still couldn’t believe it).

Or the veteran in a news story a month or so ago about how he and his dog are being discriminated against by a bus line who shows off a worthless registration card from one of those flaky places that sell ‘em and says something about how he even has documentation for his dog (probably just didn’t know better, but he – and the reporter – should).

Or a recent news video where a veteran with serious post-traumatic stress issues intentionally places both himself and the dog who’s supposed to help him with those issues into a stressful situation, the irony of which wasn’t lost on me (and, yeah, sure, you can take the dog pretty much anywhere, but should you?).  And so on…

What makes it even worse is not only do most people not pick up on this stuff, they usually actually think it’s great and get behind it!  Between the news media, people with thousands of Facebook friends or Twitter followers,  continuous mindless retweeting, etc., I start feeling like one little ol’ guy nobody’s paying attention to who’s constantly swimming upstream against a strong current.

I’m torn – I’m really very tempted to start calling people out on this stuff, but I also don’t wanna “go negative” and end up spending my life arguing with people – there’s no future in that.  So, for now, I’m just gonna continue to try to show you the way things are supposed to be, hope you pick up on that, and that you notice when things aren’t. That could change at any time, but I’ll try.

It all comes down to something one of my fellow Group Sergeant Majors taught me when we were on the Air Force Academy staff many years ago and that’s stuck with me. We were talking about some incident out in ‘”the real Air Force” where some sleazoid messed up bigtime, and I half-jokingly said, “You know, instead of handpicking only the best people for the staff, maybe we oughtta start bringing in some slugs so cadets can see what they’re like, too.” My compatriot said, “Nah, Al, trust me – they’ll see ‘em soon enough. We just need to keep setting the standard and example so cadets know how things are supposed to be and count on them to get it.”

Hey, I understand – the vast majority of people see a veteran, a dog, put the two together, and automatically say, “Wow, that must be a great thing.”, even though it may very well not be.  It’s not so much that I wanna give people the answers – I just want ‘em to start asking the questions.

Ah, I’m not really planning on going anywhere. There’s too many good things going on, like the two fantastic service dog placements with seriously wounded OIF veterans that Canine Companions for Independence just made in the last couple weeks.  More about those later.