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Former soldier talks life after the military, self-training husky as PTSD service dog

Watertown Daily Times - 5/2/2022

May 2—WATERTOWN — On a quiet spring afternoon, Shawn M. Rafferty sat behind the counter at the 315 Artisan Market in the Salmon Run Mall, greeting customers and letting them know he's available should they have questions about the products in the store. Periodically moving from behind the counter with her handler to keep an eye on things was his service dog, or Luna Marie Rafferty on the rare occasion her full name needs to be used.

The 3 1/2 -year-old canine, a trained PTSD service dog, has been attached to Mr. Rafferty, who served in the military for 19 years, since he brought her home.

"She picked me at the breeders, there was no denying that," Mr. Rafferty said. "She picked me at 5 weeks old; 8 weeks old I was able to bring her home, and 9 weeks old I had a little 'in training' vest for her and had her out with me everywhere right from go."

Mr. Rafferty acquired Luna, a purebred husky, in 2018 from a private breeder that was American Kennel Club certified. He knew that he wanted to train her as his service dog, though husky service dogs aren't very common because they tend to have high-energy personalities. He said he took a lot of criticism and even had one trainer tell him she'd be happy to train Luna but would fail her because she's a husky and "there was no way a husky would pass as a service dog."

Determined to continue with his plan to train Luna as a service dog, Mr. Rafferty and Luna started going to Walmart a few times a day to get her socialized. He also brought as many kids around her as possible, figuring that if anything could break her calm, it would be them. But she proved able to handle whatever challenges were presented to her.

Early on, Mr. Rafferty researched how to train a service dog for post-traumatic stress disorder.

"The basic service dog stuff is kind of obvious, there's certain ways that a service dog would be expected to act in public, so that part was easy," he said. "The problem was I found that there's no training program for a PTSD service dog because everybody's triggers are different; there's no way to write a training protocol."

He eventually found a Facebook group of people who self-taught their service dogs and said it all comes down to the fact that the dog has to understand the human. He also found his way back to the Americans with Disabilities Act guidance, which says dogs trained by their owners can be recognized as service dogs after they've been evaluated.

Working from the guidance Mr. Rafferty could find — as well as trial and error — Luna eventually earned certifications like the American Kennel Club's S.T.A.R. Puppy, a program designed to get dog owners and their puppies off to a good start through basic training and socialization. She also received her Canine Good Citizen certification, which according to the AKC is recognized as the gold standard for dog behavior. For fun, they also wound up getting Luna her Novice Trick Dog certification, so a couple days after turning 6 months old, Luna had multiple titles on her record with AKC.

"I had somebody say, 'she's so well trained,'" Mr. Rafferty said. "I said, 'I'll say thank you, but I can't take credit for this. Really, it's on her, she just can't say thank you.'"

When Luna turned 7 months old, Mr. Rafferty was convinced that she was fully trained, the same day his youngest son, Lachlan, was born.

That night, he and his then wife had gone to the hospital not expecting much more than monitoring, but found that she'd been in labor all day and just didn't know it because Lachlan, now 3 years old, was so small. He was born via cesarean section weighing 1 1/2 pounds and measuring 12 inches long. With his son born weeks early, Mr. Rafferty was on edge that night wondering if Lachlan would be OK.

He didn't know this at the time, but Luna had figured out that Mr. Rafferty had his as-needed medication on his keychain. That was the night she started nudging at his hands until he understood what she was trying to tell him.

"Right after I took my medicine she jumped up on the hospital recliner with me and kind of pushed me back and once I was reclined, she put her muzzle down right on my chest, and boom, I was out. That's the last I remembered," he said. "Next thing I know she was licking my face to wake me up and then jumped down to lie on the floor as the doctor was walking in. That's when I found out he was doing extremely well."

After Lachlan was brought home, Luna acted like a second mother to him, protecting him as well as Mr. Rafferty. He has two other sons who also get along well with Luna — Holdyn, 13, and Deaglan, 12.

Convinced Luna was a trained service dog for him after that night — and understood him as far as he could tell — Mr. Rafferty ordered the tags for her vest and she was considered fully trained.

Mr. Rafferty, 46, was born in the small Vermont town of St. Albans. He wound up in the north country thanks to the Army. Though his father had a career in the Air Force, Mr. Rafferty didn't want to start off on the same path and instead joined the Marine Corps in 1997 and continued until 2002.

He served in the Air National Guard for the next seven years until he realized that he was bored at the age of 32. There was no chance of going back to the Marine Corps, so he decided to join the Army, completing seven more years of military service with the branch before medically retiring from the military. Ultimately, Mr. Rafferty's back is what put him out as he was deemed no longer fit to serve after 19 years, two months and two days.

"I think the anxiety might have already been in there," he said. "With behavioral stuff, after I got out and was completely separated from the military, my symptoms became more evident to me; things were more of a struggle. It wasn't the same life that I'd known for the last 19 years, and I think part of it just came down to I finally relaxed my brain enough from going 1,000 miles an hour. I really actually had a problem that was making me this way."

When Mr. Rafferty was doing Veterans Affairs paperwork, the best advice he received was from his health care provider who told him, "When you go to fill out your paperwork, that's not the time to be a hero. If you think that you might have PTSD, just put it on the paper and let them disqualify you for it." Mr. Rafferty started recognizing the signs and so did his doctor, and it was an ongoing shuffle for a while after diagnosis. Getting Luna proved to help quite a bit.

"My psychiatrist over at the VA was a little leery when I walked in with this 10-week-old husky puppy in a training vest. He had his doubts at first," Mr. Rafferty said. "Especially being a husky, nobody does that. I've never actually met another service dog that's a husky — she's pretty rare."

While his psychiatrist said he had doubts at first, he eventually came around and said Mr. Rafferty might have been onto something because he was seeing a huge difference in his patient. Over the past six years, he's gotten to know Mr. Rafferty well and has seen him on both good and bad days, but he's convinced now that Luna is a great benefit.

Based on his experiences with Luna, Mr. Rafferty said he would recommend other veterans look into service dogs of their own. He said a man he talks to at church, a fellow single father and former member of the armed forces, told him his doctor said he might want to consider looking into getting a service dog.

"I said honestly, you should; you'll never realize how much you really have an appreciation for the things that a service dog can help you understand about yourself, the comfort that service dog can provide for you," he said. "I know, like anybody else, it's easy to put on a smile out in public and then go home and be like 'this sucks.' It's easily done — Luna just doesn't let me do it anymore."

According to a 2018 observational study on the "Benefits and challenges of using service dogs for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder" in the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal, veterans reported that service dogs reduced hypervigilance by alerting and creating boundaries, and disrupted nightmares, which improved sleep quality and duration. The dogs also helped veterans turn their attention away from invasive trauma-related thoughts. Other reported benefits include improved emotional connections with others, increased community participation and physical activity, and reduced suicidal impulses and medication use. It was noted that some challenges include demands of training, adjustment to life with a service dog and delayed benefits.

A 2021 article on Military.com states that results from a long-awaited study by the Department of Veterans Affairs indicated service dogs trained to support veterans with PTSD can decrease the severity of their symptoms better than companion dogs classified as emotional support animals. The most significant finding was a 3.7-point drop in PTSD symptom scores among those with a service dog, "along with sleep improvements in both groups and declines in suicidality and anger over the 18-month period in the group with service dogs." The results indicate service dogs, as opposed to emotional support dogs, are beneficial to veterans suffering from PTSD, though institutions agree that more research should be conducted.

Before Luna, Mr. Rafferty had a cat named Jasmine who had to be put down after what was thought to be a large cyst on the side of her face turned out to be an aggressive tumor. His ex-wife used to joke that she was his emotional support cat and the loss hit him hard.

Not too long after Jasmine died, one of his ex-wife's co-workers had a litter of husky puppies on the way. The rest, as they say, is history.

Mr. Rafferty said that during the period between losing his cat and bringing Luna home, he stayed in the house a lot and almost never went out. Now when he's out, he's had people tell him Luna is supposed to be walking next to him as a service dog. In response to the last person who said that to him, Mr. Lafferty replied by asking them to show him on paper where it says that. She always has been in front of him, where she feels most comfortable, standing between Mr. Rafferty and anything that she feels could be a problem for him.

Noting that Luna reacts calmly and adapts well to various situations, he said that every time the floors of the mall are polished, it drives her crazy walking around on it. He believes it may be because it feels like ice she's unable to dig her claws into. She's also not a fan of the lobby of the movie theater.

"I don't need her to be perfect," he said. "She's gonna have her bad days, too. I look at it as ongoing training."

Luna was there through Mr. Rafferty's divorce, and he said he would have been in a much worse place during that time had it not been for her. He said that she probably saw the worst of him and learned the most about him during that time.

The last time Mr. Rafferty recalls really having a problem while out was at Home Depot when, for some reason, it seemed everybody in the store decided to go to the checkout counters at the same time.

Usually, when people see a service dog moving toward them, they'll step back a little bit, Mr. Rafferty said, and Luna used that to her advantage in this case. She used the extent of the leash and moved around, nudging Mr. Rafferty until his back was to the end cap on an aisle. She had moved him so his back was against something semi-solid and cleared some space for him.

"I couldn't have taught her to do that, because it doesn't happen all the time," Mr. Rafferty said. "She knew what I needed, I just had to understand what she was trying to tell me."

If Mr. Rafferty doesn't pick up on what Luna is trying to convey, he said she knows she can pretend she has to pee if they're anywhere public.

"By showing me she's got to pee, whether she has to or not, she's just gotten me out of wherever we were into an outside space that's away from everybody else," he said. "We'll find a patch of grass and then she'll literally just sniff around. She's wasting time, but the whole time she's paying attention, watching me. She's kind of picked up on those early signs and early symptoms, things that I don't necessarily consciously maybe know myself yet. She's always been very good."

Right after he left the Army, Mr. Rafferty started selling cars at a Fuccillo dealership in Adams, but said that due to being retired and not needing to rely on the money, he lacked the gumption to want to tolerate the stress of a sales job like that. He left his position and was given the opportunity to go back and work on post at Fort Drum, but found that the military politics were worse on the Army civilian side of things and didn't stay with the job. He also worked for a time at United Parcel Service loading trucks, but that didn't last long as his back wouldn't take the pressure.

Though he strayed from it during his time in the military, Mr. Rafferty has always been into photography. Shortly before he left the military, he decided he needed to get a nice camera again. He said he had missed taking photos and had slipped into using disposable cameras for a while because it was easier than carting a digital one around.

"I shot portraits for quite a while, I'm just not a studio photographer by any means," Mr. Rafferty said. "Right after my little guy was born, I was completely burnt out with doing portraits. My love has always been shooting outdoor landscapes."

Photography is now Mr. Rafferty's full-time gig, and he has prints displayed in the 315 Market, where he has worked since the space opened in October. He also had some photos in the River Muse Gallery in Clayton before it closed its doors. His work can also be found at select farmers markets and vendor events throughout the north country.

"It's nice having something to get me out of the house and be social, and have my stuff out here to sell," he said. "I don't sell a lot of stuff, but what I do sell is stuff that I never would have sold while it was sitting in my house; I can't sell something if it's sitting in my living room."

Having previously used Nikons, Mr. Rafferty said he upgraded during the COVID-19 pandemic to the Sony a7R IV.

If nothing else, he said photography is peaceful, that he's always 100% into what he's doing when he shoots and would be lying if he said it wasn't a little therapeutic. View Mr. Rafferty's photography at www.f2studiony.com, on Facebook, or stop in to 315 Market.

Seasons may change, but one thing that remains consistent is the fact that Luna continues to serve Mr. Rafferty faithfully, just like he did for his country for nearly two decades.

"Dogs in general are amazing, the things that they can learn about people if we let them. Especially training her myself, I've learned that it's also a two-way street," Mr. Rafferty said. "I don't think I'll ever find another dog that I'll be able to play reverse psychology with, to teach this calm behavior."

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