Assistance dogs give disabled people better qualities of life (and can save their lives too)!

I am guilty of passing our dog off as a service animal, even though he was never professionally trained for that. Randall took Duke everywhere with him. Noone ever questioned it, because Randall was a double-amputee. Dogs carry less diseases to us than humans and the dog was a bridge that made Randall more approachable by strangers. Before that, people would talk down to my husband/best friend only because he was in a wheelchair. They didn't know that he was a math genius and brilliant computer systems engineer who also became a project engineer during the short 7 short years that he was healthy enough to work after his kidney transplant. They didn't know that he overcame type 1 diabetes by working hard to become an Eagle Scout or that he had hiked The Grand Canyon rim-to-rim several times before the amputations began!