For 30-year-old Ukrainian special police forces officer Yuriy, the fighting with Russian-separatist forces has brought many bitter experiences. It would have driven him insane if not for one reason: his dog, Korsa.
Yuriy, who is about to return to the front lines after a short break and doesn’t want his last name published for safety reasons, says it was his pet’s unconditional love and loyalty that took away the pain.
Now both Yuriy and Korsa participate in Hero’s Companion, a joint Canadian-Ukrainian initiative that means to train special service and therapy dogs to help Ukrainian war veterans through psychological rehabilitation.
See the photo gallery featuring the dogs of the Hero’s Companion.
It is an ambitious plan since training a service dog takes from one to three years and each dog is trained for a particular person. But the result is worth waiting.
A trained service dog can help a veteran with things like pushing the wheelchair or bringing shoes. But it can also wake up the master from a nightmare by turning on the light.
Unlike the service dogs, the therapy dogs’ training takes about a week. Therapy dogs can work with different people and are trained to behave well in public and entertain the master.
The initiative’s Canadian partners, dog training organization Courageous Companions, has trained more than 300 service dogs in 15 years of its existence.
In Ukraine, the project was started by Canadian Ukrainian Kalyna Kardash, who served as a volunteer in a Canadian charity organization “Guardian Angels Ukraine.”
Kardash says that most of the soldiers she met didn’t want to get the help of a professional psychologist because they were afraid they would be labeled crazy. So she started to search for alternative ways of psychological help.
“I saw more and more pictures of Ukrainian soldiers adopting cats and dogs and having them as their pets at the war front, so I decided why not use this bond,” Kardash explains.
Within several months, she agreed on cooperation with the Courageous Companions and the Ukrainian organization of cynologists.
In August, Canadian trainers came to Kyiv to help select the first dogs for training.
“We look for fear and aggression. If the dog has these, it is not good for a veteran who has the same issues himself,” says Mark Lapointe, a dog trainer and director of Courageous Companions.
Lapointe is a war veteran himself, with 25 years of service and five missions behind him. He believes his service dog has saved his life.
“I came out from isolation. I was isolated after the war,” Lapointe says, adding that his dog also helps him overcome his hyper-vigilance problem. “I always look around for danger so when we sit or stand, she’s always watching my back.”
So far Canadian trainers have selected some dogs to train and have two participants, Ukraine’s war veterans, who will be taken to Canada to study to be the dog-trainers.
The organizers say that all the selected dogs will be properly marked. The service dogs will wear yellow vests with a warning not to touch or feed them while they are working, and the therapy dogs will wear yellow neckerchiefs.
A psychologist and a war veteran Volodymyr Nezhenets is one of the initiative’s participants who will go to Canada to learn how to train service dogs.
He says he knows the post-traumatic syndrome issues first-hand and believes that dogs can help handle them.
“But after all the best thing they give is their loyalty, for people like us it is very important that we are not betrayed and dogs don’t betray,” Nezhenets says.
The initiative is financially supported by Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, but the organizers seek support and food sponsors for the dogs in Ukraine.
“This is something very new for Ukraine and the society needs time to understand the need of this and the importance of public access to such dogs,” Kardash says.
