The making of an American Service Dog. Thank you to my friend Anne Marie Shumate from Lasting Image Photography for doing such a great job photographing Ziggy and me.
Ziggy is a SDIT (Service Dog in Training) He has passed two of the three major test and four of the ten outings. Once he completes his other test he'll get his final certificate from Soldiers Best Friend, a non-profit 501c3. Jamie Barilla is my trainer. She works with the two of us two days a week. Sometimes Ziggy catches on quicker than I do, so I think Jamie is training me! Jamie works with Soldiers Best Friend a non-profit 501c3. Besides working on Photography with my own non-profit 501c3 I spend a great deal of time training Ziggy. Not counting the 2 1/2 hours of training Ziggy receives a day, I have to write a daily report of what we do everyday. I now can understand the complexities involved in training a service dog. He already knows over 64 commands, with a lot more coming down the road. A lot of the commands Ziggy first learned, even though they were OK at the beginning had to be tweaked to make it even better. So if you see a service dog you know it takes a lot of work, 50 to 70 percent of dogs that enter a service dog program don't make the cut, either the dog doesn't have the proper temperament or the person doesn't have the time or energy to put into the dog.

The making of an American Service Dog. Thank you to my friend Anne Marie Shumate from Lasting Image Photography for doing such a great job photographing Ziggy and me.
Ziggy is a SDIT (Service Dog in Training) He has passed two of the three major test and four of the ten outings. Once he completes his other test he'll get his final certificate from Soldiers Best Friend, a non-profit 501c3. Jamie Barilla is my trainer. She works with the two of us two days a week. Sometimes Ziggy catches on quicker than I do, so I think Jamie is training me! Jamie works with Soldiers Best Friend a non-profit 501c3. Besides working on Photography with my own non-profit 501c3 I spend a great deal of time training Ziggy. Not counting the 2 1/2 hours of training Ziggy receives a day, I have to write a daily report of what we do everyday. I now can understand the complexities involved in training a service dog. He already knows over 64 commands, with a lot more coming down the road. A lot of the commands Ziggy first learned, even though they were OK at the beginning had to be tweaked to make it even better. So if you see a service dog you know it takes a lot of work, 50 to 70 percent of dogs that enter a service dog program don't make the cut, either the dog doesn't have the proper temperament or the person doesn't have the time or energy to put into the dog.

Good day to you, Bruce.

A perfect photograph and a lovely story.

I met my wife, also English, in Mexico in 2007. Jean was living near Hermosillo. (Long story..) I left England in 2008 and went to live with Jean. Jean was almost full-time rescuing dogs from Mexican streets, looking after them for a while, and then finding homes for them, mainly in Arizona.

Jean had plenty of dogs at home, roughly 20, and I brought my German Shepherd with me from Devon. UK. There was so much to learn from these dogs so in 2009 I wrote a book called Learning from Dogs and then started a blog under the same name. We came north in 2010 with 15 dogs, much to the amazement of the US Border official, and Jean and I were married in Payson, Az later that year.

Long way of asking if I may republish your photograph and story on my blog!