2022 is a year for the history books of Patriot Service Dogs! This small organization took many big steps over the last twelve months and enjoyed many moments to savor. Before we start 2023 (a year already gearing up to be great), we look back at the top 10 moments of 2022. Of course, this list will inevitably miss the smaller, daily joys and victories made possible by the amazing PSD community. To everyone who volunteered, donated, voted, and cheered on PSD this year, thank you. The Top 10 are not in any order. 1. Assistance Dogs International (ADI) Since the founding of Patriot Service ..read more

This summer, Patriot Service Dogs is offering a brand-new volunteer opportunity! We are excited to introduce “Service Dog Summer School!” Don’t worry—it’s going to be a lot more fun than real summer school. What is summer school for service dogs? Our organization is lucky to have five promising puppies training in our WOOF Prison Program to be service dogs for veterans. The incarcerated women in the WOOF program are excellent trainers and have already taught our puppies more than most family dogs learn into adulthood, but prison is a limited environment and to be successful service dogs, th ..read more

You asked and we answered! Last month, we asked subscribers to the Patriot Service Dogs digital newsletter (if you’re not a subscriber, add your name and email here to receive the latest PSD updates) to submit their questions about training service dogs, PSD, matching dogs and veterans, and anything else relevant to our community. We received many thoughtful questions! Thank you to everyone who took the time to submit. We took the most common questions and themes and asked Patriot Service Dogs CEO, Julie Sanderson to answer them in our first video Q&A! The result is a 15-minute video cov ..read more

As many of PSD's supporters know, we have welcomed five new puppies to our training program! While these little guys and girls are cute little puppies now, in two years. they will make up Patriot Service Dogs' Class of 2024. We are excited to officially welcome them and introduce them to all of PSD's supporters. In age order...meet the Class of 2024! Elvis: Elvis is sponsored by AmVets of Leesburg. He ain't nothing but a hound dog--actually, he is a Dalmation Mix, but we are probably going to keep using that joke until he graduates. Elvis is a very unique looking dog--he has a beautiful ..read more

As service dogs become more common, people naturally have a lot of questions about the many differences between organizations. Some groups use rescue dogs, some help people self-train, others work with one dog at a time—no service dog program is identical and there is no “right way” to train a service dog, but we do have “our way.” At PSD, there are four questions regarding our organizational policies that we are asked on a nearly weekly basis. Since we get them so often, we figured that maybe our supporters, like you, had some of these same questions. So, here are our answers! Question 1 ..read more

As many of you know, Patriot Service Dogs introduced our first Rottweiler to the program in late 2021 when we welcomed Rosie (sponsored by the Jacaranda Island Neighborhood). Almost exactly a year later, Rosie was joined by her little sister—same parents, different litters—Dolley (sponsored by Douglas Brodbeck). Our two Rottie girls have been a pleasure to work with; they are both quick learners and love to train. To make sure we are adapting our training from our usual cast of retrievers, PSD has formed the Rottie Team! What is the Rottie Team? The team is made up of a small, dedicated gr ..read more

The Class of 2024 is already looking strong with our "New Triplets" (Millie, Dolley, and Bear), but now we've added another sibling pair to the team--Bailey and Mattie! These two black labs are brother and sister and come to us from the same breeder who we got Patton (Class of 2023) from. So far, Bailey and Mattie are doing great with their training and showing their very different personalities. Before they go out for their first visit with our Weekend Raisers next week, we want to take a moment to formally introduce them with notes from the people who know them best--their inmate-trainers ..read more

On February 25th, Patriot Service Dogs will send off a trio of golden retrievers our team has come to know as The Triplets--Norman, Auggie, and Captain (they will be joined by their younger pal, Cutter as well). In truth, two of the three boys are biological brothers, and one was born to a different mother, but they’ve always been raised and trained as “The Triplets,” or “The Boys,” “The Brothers,” “The Golden Boys.” Because all three were donated to PSD by our long-time friend, Traci Thompson, at Country Goldens, we sometimes refer to them as “Traci’s Three.” But all these collective titles ..read more