Xxon helped him find that independence and confidence.” Malarsie when she and other widows of those killed visited survivors - said Xxon had been just as important for the family as for Mr. Malarsie’s wife, Jesse, whose first husband died in the same blast - and who met Mr. He has three children and said Xxon, with a sweet, gentle face not often associated with the breed, serves a more basic function: He helps him find his children when they hide from him.
“I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to let blindness slow me down,” he said. Malarsie, 25, said that when he was recovering at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center he decided he wanted a guide dog. In an interview last month before running a half-marathon in Hartford, Mr. He survived a severe injury that left him blind, though four others in his unit were killed. One of the dogs the foundation’s money paid to train is Xxon, a male German shepherd, who was paired with Michael Malarsie, an Air Force sergeant, a year to the day after he was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan in January 2010.
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Those that do are provided free to people who need them. And about 45 percent of dogs bred by the schools do not make the grade.
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One guide dog takes about two years to train and costs a total of $45,000 to $60,000, covering everything from boarding a dog to extensive drilling by professional trainers in serving the needs of the blind to a weekslong period acclimating dog to recipient. These schools need to raise money and engage volunteers on a very large scale to ensure they have enough resources to pay for the long, costly and often unsuccessful training of dogs. Yet if the cause is an easy sell, the work is not cheap. It would seem to be an easy cause for fund-raising.Īfter all, most people melt when they see a puppy - a big marketing tool for these schools - and helping blind people lead better lives seems to be an unqualified good. The mission of all guide dog schools is to create a team, pairing a blind person and a dog to give the person greater freedom and independence. That was when she decided to try to get a guide dog. “I was putting a lot of unspoken pressure on my husband and my son, which isn’t fair to them.” “I realized the white cane wasn’t cutting it,” she said. Murray said she realized she needed to become more independent to care for him. With the birth of their son, Liam, who is now 2, Ms. Her husband, an Iraqi war veteran, was going through a difficult time, and life was a struggle. Murray said she began to withdraw from the world.
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