Tiffany Clouse:What intrigued
me about this documentary
and working on this documentary
really can be summed up
in one word dogs.
I’m a dog lover through
and through.
I always have been.
I’ve always had dogs.
My husband and I have three dogs
of our own.
My license plate says
Dogs Rule.
I have a pawprint tattoo
on my arm. So,
initially that was really
what drew me to it.
But over the course
of filming the documentary,
it really became
so much more than that.
Patrick Boberg: 2021, I was out to lunch
with my daughters,
sitting outside of a restaurant,
and some people sit down
next to us that have,
a service dog with them.
And my older daughter
at the time, I think was 4 or 5,
and she got excited
and I said, hey, hold on.
This dog’s working.
It’s wearing that vest means
we got to leave it alone.
And the guy was extremely nice
and just said, so.
That’s exactly right.
That’s what
we’re supposed to tell people.
And he says, this dog
and give us the name.
And then we’re just
casually talking over lunch
and he’s running me down on
Puppy Jake, which the dog is
from Puppy Jake Foundation.
And how it lives
with them for a few months,
and then it goes to prison.
And I was blown away by the idea
of this service dog
going to prison for training.
And from then
he just told me the whole story
of how they train dogs,
the Puppy Jake Foundation.
And I immediately in my brain
said, this is a documentary.
And I went back to work
after lunch and told my
supervisor,
who’s now the General Manager,
Andrew, Andrew Batt, said,
this is a documentary.
He said, okay, in time,
we’ll do it.
Here we are.
And it’s pretty much done.
Tiffany:I think that the
understanding
of the importance of service
dogs has really come a long way,
but there’s still
a lot of education
that needs to be done on service
dogs,
especially things like
public access and, service dog
etiquette and rights that
are afforded to a service dog
and their person through the ADA
and the Paws act.
And I really hope
that this documentary
can become a tool to do
just that,
to educate people
on the importance of service
dogs and really how they change
people’s lives.
We heard countless
stories of people who,
because of their disability,
whether that disability
is visible or not, were unable
to leave their homes,
they were unable to go out
and do something
with their spouse
or their partner.
They were unable to attend
their children’s social
or sports or school activities.
And because of their
service dog,
they were able to become
active participants
in not only their lives
but in their family’s lives,
and they were able to be
in public places and crowds,
attend
a concert with their spouse,
attend their child’s
basketball game
or choir
concert, whatever that may be.
Patrick: We really wanted
to make sure that we weren’t,
messing with the program that
these dogs are going through.
So we kind of changed our
like modus operandi
or how we go about things
and went from our normal
big Sony
cameras down to handheld ones,
and then even smaller ones
that are smaller
than your cell phone,
so that we could
follow these dogs without them
caring about us.
I mean, they register
there’s a human being there,
but they don’t think that person
has a 50 pound giant camera
or whatever
that is. They’re a dog.
They don’t know, but they
they just see us walking
with this little mini camera.
There’s so many times
where I was walking
with this little mobile camera,
where I just stick it over
my shoulder and turn it around.
I can monitor at my phone
or under, sling it and then,
you know, see them walking,
try and be at the dog’s eye
and the dog would not notice.
And that feels like
not only a win for us,
but a secret win for the
for the dogs in the program.
Because if they if they’re not,
if we’re not impeding
their process, that is great.
Tiffany: A veteran that we interviewed,
his name is Matt,
and he was telling us the story
of when he was working
with his service dog.
He and his family were there
with the dog and his son.
I don’t remember how old he was,
maybe 5 or 6, pretty young.
He looked at him
and he said, dad, you’re smiling
and I’ve never seen
you smile before.
And so what
a fantastic moment for this
father and son to have because
of this service dog.
Oh it really struck me
when we were filming
this documentary,
and this can really apply to
anyone that has a service dog,
whether it be for PTSD
or anxiety
or mobility or hearing loss,
whatever it may be.
But it really struck me
with our veterans
that these are people,
men and women,
who have gone out
and fought for our freedoms.
And because of that, they’ve
actually lost some of their own.
And their service dogs
have allowed them to get back
some of those freedoms.
Patrick: We could have easily
just followed Puppy Jake,
but I wanted other places
to provide scale.
So about two thirds of the way
through the process,
I reached out
to Canine Companions,
which is this dog right here,
and the trainer as well.
And they’re
their national organization.
So they’ve placed over 8000 dogs
in their 50-year time span,
which is incredible.
But when I went out there,
we’re filming,
we’re getting some
really fun shots with the dogs
and their training process and
interviewing families
that have been impacted.
But there’s a certain point
when I was interviewing a person
from Puppy Jake
about the change in the
American Disabilities Act,
and I just clicked in my head,
oh, we have the documentary.
We have everything we need.
You know, we have the facts.
We have the heart.
We have the dogs doing all types
of incredible things.
We have them traveling
to Chicago in New York,
and we’ve gone to Kansas City
to interview
a different type
of, service dog.
And it when that happens
in a documentary, I just get
super excited that like,
this is going to edit itself.
Tiffany: Three specific good boys
from the Puppy Jake Foundation,
Hal Hyde and Checkers,
and they were in the beginning
of their service dog training,
and when we started filming
and we went to, Chicago
on a training trip with
three trainers and three dogs,
and those were the three dogs.
And we witnessed them
not only from their journey
when they started
to grow into a service dog,
but just over the three days
that we followed them
around Chicago, we saw them grow
and become comfortable
with things
that they weren’t
necessarily comfortable with,
escalate is revolving doors.
Everything you encounter
in a big city and,
our last shoot for
the documentary
was actually their graduation,
and they graduated
from the program as full fledged
service dogs, and they went home
with their veterans.
Patrick: It’s really fun to meet people
who live for what they do,
not as a job, but as a volunteer
or the thing that they do
outside of their 9 to 5.
The volunteers for Puppy Jake,
they’re dedicated
in a way that I wish I was
dedicated to something outside
of my job, outside of my family.
It’s like they live
for these puppies
and for the people
that they are going to to help.
And they make lifelong bonds,
not only with a dog,
which may not be around
for more than 12 years,
but with these veterans
and with their family members
and I feel like driving home
from any of these shoots,
I just kind of found myself
with like a sense of awe that
there’s this dedication
out there to from these people
that they’re not receiving
anything other than the
the feeling of they’re doing
good out there in the world.
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