Welcome to Happiness Unleashed with your host, Brittany Darenbacher, presented by Live Happy.

We've all seen service dogs in action, but most of us don't know just what heroes they are.

Today's guest is here to tell us all about the secret lives of service dogs.

Shannon Walker is the CEO and founder of Northwest Battle Buddies, a nonprofit providing

service dogs to combat veterans with PTSD.

Inspired by her father, who was a veteran, she also founded man's best friend dog training

and has worked tirelessly to not only train

service dogs, but to educate the public about what they do and how they provide a vital

lifeline for veterans. Let's have a listen. Hi, Shannon. Welcome to Happiness Unleashed. I'm so

glad you're here today. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on the show. Super excited.

So we're going to talk about

service dogs today, which I'm super pumped to talk about. I recently just did the keynote address

at Norton Children's Hospital and I got to meet all of the dog handler teams there. And so this is

definitely a topic near and dear to my heart. And before we really start digging into this topic, I would just love to know just a little bit about you and what brought you into this field.

Great question.

And thank you.

Often I don't get to go that far back.

So I've been a dog lover.

I've been an animal lover my entire life.

And horses and dogs, but cats, anything that was on the side of the

road or even on a sidewalk I knew needed to be safe. And so, and my dad would always be like,

no, it's, that's his house. He doesn't need you to save it. You know, I just wanted to save everything.

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