October 9, 2002

Author: KEVIN KITTREDGE THE ROANOKE TIMES

It used to be a horse farm. Now it's a dog farm.

Lakeland Stables near Hollins University has become the first permanent home and training center of the Roanoke-based Saint Francis of Assisi Service Dog Foundation.

The well-known riding stables off Plantation Road beside Interstate 81 went on the market last year.

The foundation, which trains dogs to assist the handicapped, mounted a campaign to raise the $725,000 purchase price last spring. Donors contributed $600,000 in barely two months.

"It was just a tremendous opportunity," said Hazel Bernard, the foundation's executive director. "I think we were very lucky to find something so perfectly suited to our needs."

Carol Willoughby, a foundation board member and co-founder, said the site is almost ideal. It is close to an interstate exit and just a stone's throw away from hotels, which makes it easy for the service dog recipients to visit and get to know the animals. It already has buildings that can be readily converted into kennels and training areas. There is even a house on
the property, where trainer and kennel manager Kati Warren lives with several foundation dogs.

"I think this farm is going to put us in the league of the top programs in the country," Willoughby said. "I fully expect that some day when people hear 'Roanoke,' they'll say, 'Oh, that's where those service dogs are from.'

The not-for-profit Saint Francis of Assisi Service Dog Foundation was founded in 1996 to help meet the need for trained service dogs to assist the handicapped in Southwest Virginia.

"It's very difficult for anyone who needs a dog to get one in this area," Willoughby explained to a reporter in 1996. "We realized we needed to start an organization right here."

No one understood the problem better than Willoughby herself. Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis while still in her 20s, she has trouble moving about and must use a wheelchair when outside her home.

Although there are a number of places that train guide dogs to assist the blind, finding a dog to help people with mobility problems can be very difficult, she said. Willoughby paid several thousand dollars to have a golden retriever, Booker, trained to perform simple tasks for her in the 1980s.

Booker, now deceased, could turn light switches off and on, fetch mail and telephones, help make the bed and tote items at the grocery store. Willoughby now has a second service dog, Blake.

Not everyone can pay thousands of dollars for a dog, of course, assuming one is even available.

With Saint Francis, they don't have to. The foundation provides dogs at a fraction of the actual training costs. Applicants pay a $25 application fee, then $200 when they are matched with a dog.

For the record, the Saint Francis Service Dog Foundation is not affiliated with the Catholic Church - or any other church, for that matter. The founders just wanted to name it after the saint known for his love of animals.

For its first six years of operation, the foundation did most of its dog training in the homes of its own trainers, and on field trips to public places. The animals were boarded at area kennels and trainers' homes. Valley veterinarians and the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine help the foundation with health care for the dogs; all food is
donated.

Still, partly because of the cumbersome logistics, the foundation has been able to train and place just five or six dogs a year. "That was not meeting the need," Willoughby said.

The foundation board decided in January the time had come to look for a farm to buy, to expedite training. But fund raising "was basically at zero" when they noticed Lakeland Stables was for sale, Bernard said.

It was love at first sight. The 18-acre farm includes an indoor riding ring, a stable with 22 stalls, a house and a large pond, not to mention plenty of open space and lots of wooden fence.

For the moment, horses still caper about the gently rolling landscape, but they won't much longer. Bobbie Fisher, who has lived on the farm for most of four decades and run the riding stables for three, has retired. She and her husband have moved to Blue Ridge.

Fisher is happy to see her beloved farm going to the dogs. "It's probably the most wonderful legacy Lakeland could ever have," she said. "Saint Francis does so many wonderful things for so many people. It would have broken my heart if a developer had bought the property and built 50 patio homes."

Willoughby envisions the Lakeland grounds crisscrossed by walkways, with a dock at the pond and even an apartment building where the dog recipients could stay.

For the present, however, the Saint Francis Service Dog Center is largely potential. With horses still in the stables, the house where Fisher used to live has become the main training facility, as well as Warren's home.

Every day is training day in the Warren house. Straps hang from door knobs and the refrigerator door, for the dogs to practice gripping and pulling doors open with their teeth (they close them with a bump of the nose). A box with a light switch on one side and a light bulb on top rests against a kitchen wall, so the dogs can practice turning lights off and on. Sometimes
Warren takes the dogs outside to practice walking beside a wheelchair. 

Sometimes, too, she just takes them out to play. "People think they don't get any attention," Warren said. "That's not true at all. They're spoiled rotten."

Living with the dogs she trains is not a problem, Warren said. "I want to do it, to have my dogs with me, because they were in a kennel. I'm so used to living with dogs it doesn't make any difference."

Eventually the riding stables will probably be converted to a kennel for the Saint Francis dogs. The adjacent riding ring, which has a floor of dirt and sawdust, will be converted into offices and a large training area. Renovation plans call for new floors, interior walls and insulation - and probably lots of doors, light switches and other props to help the foundation pups, mostly golden and Labrador retrievers and Australian shepherds, learn their jobs.

With its own facility, the foundation hopes to increase the number of dogs it trains dramatically, from five or six a year to 25 or more.

"We'll be in one central location and can be so much more efficient," said the foundation's training director, Karen Hough. The trainers "will be able to help each other."

The dogs, too.

"The dogs learn from one another," Willoughby said. "It's amazing how competitive they can be."

The foundation's first hurdle, however, is to continue raising money to pay for renovations - another $600,000 or so.

If the first stage of the fund-raising campaign, which bought the farm, is any indication, that won't take long.

"Most of it came in within a couple of weeks," Willoughby said. "Roanoke is extraordinarily generous. Once you get people behind you, they'll make it happen."

Kevin Kittredge can be reached at 981-3323 or kevin.kittredge@roanoke.com.


Copyright (c) 2002 The Roanoke Times
Record Number: 0210090098