From Puppy Love to Purpose

A childhood bond with a golden retriever inspired Kyria Henry Whisenhunt to build paws4people Foundation, a nationally renowned assistance dog training organization, and the nation’s only university minor in service dog training at UNCW.

Kyria Henry Whisenhunt was only 10 years old when a golden retriever named Riley helped spark what would become her life’s work. Decades later, that childhood connection has grown into paws4people Foundation, the nationally recognized nonprofit placing assistance dogs with people across the country.

Whisenhunt founded the nonprofit, now based in Castle Hayne, in 1999. Over the past 27 years, the organization has grown to include 23 employees and hundreds of volunteers and has placed more than 1,600 assistance dogs with people living with disabilities throughout the United States. Along the way, the organization has built a nationally unique training model involving students, inmates, volunteers and highly customized service dogs.

“The simple desire to utilize my dog to bring joy to others is really the seed that started it all,” Whisenhunt says.

The journey from simply wanting a puppy, and parents who required her to train and care for the animal herself, instilled a lifelong respect and love for dogs.

“It was a really big challenge for me to figure out how to reign in Riley’s enthusiasm to keep peace in the house,” Whisenhunt says. “Training, by necessity, became a hobby of mine.”

As a young girl, she saw the joy that well-trained Riley brought to the faces of nursing home residents in the Washington, D.C., area. Her father, Terry Hunt, facilitated the visits by arranging logistics with the homes. It became an act of community service the father-daughter team enjoyed doing together for many years.
In high school, they began implementing service dogs to work with special education classrooms.

“Dad would bring the dogs to me on early release or study hall times, and we would work in the rooms with severe and profoundly challenged special education students,” Whisenhunt says. “That was a big focus of paws4people in the first five to seven years.”

Through luck and a series of divine interventions, Whisenhunt’s path kept turning back to dog encounters.

She took her dog to college with her in West Virginia, where she got to participate in another dream, cheerleading for Division 1 sports teams. But a unique opportunity arose at a nearby women’s prison that soon demanded her spare time.

“During my sophomore year a kind of serendipitous event happened,” she says. “Someone from my university connected me to a staff person from a nearby women’s federal prison. They were interested in starting a rehabilitative program centered around dog training. I did not have the resume to begin that at the time, but I think the program just happened because it was supposed to happen.”

By the time she graduated from college, Whisenhunt was directing dog-training programs in five federal prisons in the mornings and going to school in the afternoons.

“That was a huge turn for me,” she says. “Originally, I thought I was going to get a business degree and find some normal job. But this ‘hobby’ ended up being so much bigger than me; by the time I graduated I had to figure out how to make it sustainable.”

The training by inmates allowed paws4people to start developing highly customized service dogs — transitioning from therapy dogs who just make occasional visits to people to service dogs who reside with people and are trained to meet the Americans with Disabilities Act definition of being dogs who can mitigate someone’s disability.

As she was figuring out next steps for the growing nonprofit in D.C., Whisenhunt realized there was a bottleneck, a missing step. They needed people who could take the dogs out in public to increase their skills.

“I thought, I would love to see college students do something that is bigger than themselves,” she says. “They could take these well-trained adolescent dogs from the inmates and go out and about all over town. That’s what college kids do, go everywhere. That could be the perfect marriage of the things we need. And so again, as the universe works, there was a networking introduction made through UNCW.”

A whirlwind of activity began in 2009 with Whisenhunt writing curriculum for an exploratory course in service dog training while simultaneously obtaining a master’s degree and managing her growing nonprofit. The course landed on the UNCW curriculum and proved to be very popular. It has since certified 400 students as a paws4people Service Dog Public Access Trainer.

In 2011 Whisenhunt, her father and paws4people moved to the Wilmington area.

“I’m on faculty at UNCW leading our program, which is now a fully accredited minor, the only one of its kind in the country,” says Whisenhunt, a resident of Leland with her husband, young daughter and three dogs.

The 18-credit hour degree is earned through UNCW’s School of Health and Applied Human Sciences. It prepares students to be Assistance Dog trainers, utilizing animals in a variety of settings, such as hospitals, schools and long-term care facilities. In addition to serving as executive director of the paws4people Foundation, Whisenhunt is the program director and instructor of the University of North Carolina Wilmington Assistance Dog Training Minor.

While Whisenhunt and her father were fundamental in making paws4people a reality, she says the stars of any encounter are the service dogs. After 27 years of working closely with them, Whisenhunt is still amazed at the intuition dogs have.

“Our staff and volunteers shape the dogs’ lives so that they behave properly and recognize things,” she says. “With that foundation and their natural ability on top of that, they read a situation. They understand on a deeper level a lot of what is needed for their client. They know more than we could ever verbally communicate with them.”

Whisenhunt says the dogs can learn more than 100 commands, and it takes approximately two years to train an assistance dog, with additional training required between the paws4people client and their dog.

“It’s amazing to watch how intuitive the dogs are, how they will change their own behavior to be appropriate for different situations,” she says. “The dogs are the magic part of the equation for the services we train them to provide.”

The dogs are not purchased or owned by the clients, they are entrusted to them. The paws4people organization retains ownership of the service dogs to regulate their wellbeing and to ensure they are being utilized for the purposes for which they were trained.

The estimated value of a fully trained service dog is $100,000. To assist paws4people in providing dogs for those in need, clients are asked to pay-it-forward by fundraising one-tenth of the dog’s value, or about $10,000.

The dogs sought and bred by paws4people are carefully selected lines of Golden Retrievers, Labrador Retrievers and a hybrid mix of both, Goldadors.

“These breeds respond best to our training philosophies and tactics and, over the past decade, have had the highest graduation rates in our programming as Assistance and Facility Dogs,” paws4people states.

Of working with dogs trained to medical alert a client, Whisenhunt notes, “They have this almost unquantifiable ability to sense things and put chains of things together. Sometimes they know what a person needs from them before the person even realizes it.”

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paws4people Foundation
To learn more about the history, programs, ways to volunteer and how to donate to the internationally accredited paws4people Foundation:
paws4people.org
(888) 762-PAWS.
To learn about the Assistance Dog Training Minor at UNCW, visit:
uncw.edu/academics/majors-programs/chhs/assistance-dog-training-minor