LMR Patriot Program
We are dedicated to those who serve; military, police, fire, medics, medical personnel and teachers.
A twenty percent discount is available for those mentioned above.
We have helped pair several veterans and dogs, as well as dogs for children suffering severe illness.
I served in the Army and come from several generations of military; my husband served 15 years in the Army and is a veteran of OIF and OEF.
The LMR Patriot Program provides dogs as companions at a drastically reduced fee for veterans.
If working with a certified trainer, please have them contact us.
We are working on 501c3 status for this side of our program.
An excerpt from my paper on PTSD and stigma:
There is an exceptionally small percentage of the United States’ population that stand apart from everyone else. In fact, as of 2015, only 0.4 per cent of the over 320 million people that call America home were on Active Duty status within the U.S. Military. Almost 7 per cent of the U.S. population, however, are some of the finest people to set themselves apart from the crowd, and can call themselves veterans. They are the people that chose to protect everyone else from the unfortunate reality of global conflict. They are, as Lt. Col. Dave Grossman suggests, sheepdogs:
If you have no capacity for violence, then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep.
If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath - a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed (180).
The difficulty is that not all of these sheepdogs do walk out, or come home, unscathed. Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), and the various smaller operations currently ongoing in the fight against extremist groups such as ISIS, have been the longest combat operations for the U.S. since Vietnam, around 17 years in duration. Since 2001, more than 2.6 million U.S. Military personnel (Institute of Medicine) have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in support of OIF and OEF.
Many of those deployments include personnel that have deployed more than once, and there is a correlation between the risk of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and repeated or prolonged exposure to trauma, with one study stating that soldiers that had deployed more than once were “more than 3 times as likely to screen positive for PTSD” (Kline et al. 278). Though it is accurate to state that not all soldiers that are exposed to trauma will develop PTSD, according to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA), it has been estimated that up to 20 percent of those returning personnel have PTSD. Many veterans are concerned with the difficulty and stigma of seeking and in some cases continuing help. Stigma is a formidable opponent to a veteran seeking care. Programs are already in place to help the veteran seek and continue care, however a lack of leadership and continued protection of warrior culture means that those programs are not being effectively utilized.