Local woman seeks help with service dog costs

Linda Hren has spent the last 20 years training dogs she rescued to be reading heroes for area children. Now she needs her dog Argos to be her hero as her service dog.

Hren adopted Argos, who is half German Shepherd and half Australian Shepherd, when he was 9 weeks old in October 2022 with the intention of training him to be a third-generation bookhound. The pup had spent his early weeks surrounded by children and had the emotional intelligence to be a good therapy dog.

But a health crisis changed everything in December when Hren found herself in the hospital fighting for her life. Hren spent a week in a coma and two months in the hospital, struggling first with the flu and then multiple bouts of pneumonia, complicated further by congestive heart failure and lung scarring from the pneumonia.

“My heart has an ejection rate of 30%,” Hren said. “My heart rate goes up to try to compensate, and my blood pressure drops because my heart isn’t pushing as hard as it needs to.”

The time in the hospital was followed by a month in rehab trying to regain enough strength to manage at home.

“I could barely walk to the bathroom alone and couldn’t take care of my dogs,” Hren said. “A neighbor stopped in to feed my cats and clean litter boxes, but I missed my dogs terribly.”

Retired therapy dog Bonita stayed with a friend, and another neighbor took in the young Argos at her farm.

Failing health forced Hren to retire from her job as director of the Gnadenhutten Public Library and separated her from the dogs she loved. “I felt like my life was over,” she said.

Bonita finally came home on April 28, and Argos came home a week later on May 7. When Hren went into the hospital on Dec. 9, Argos was 4 months old and weighed 20 pounds.

When Argos came home, he was 9 months old and weighed over 80 pounds. Friends and family were worried the huge pup would knock her down or chew the 40 feet of plastic oxygen line Hren relied on for air. They suggested she rehome him, but Hren saw something in Argos others could not.

“I named him after Odysseus’s dog Argos, who waited 20 years for his master to come home,” Hren said. “Argos had waited for me to return home too, and I would not give up on him.”

Argos surprised everyone by being surprisingly gentle and careful around Hren. He didn’t bother the oxygen line, and he started bringing her stuffed toys and laying his head in her lap when she felt especially bad.

“One day it finally hit me that he acted like he was alerting to my heart rate or blood pressure,” she said. “I started checking both when he seemed extra attentive, and there was a correlation.”

In August Hren took Argos to be evaluated by Tom Falkenstein at Stein’s K-9, a Gnadenhutten dog trainer with experience training service dogs. Falkenstein confirmed what Hren had suspected and also believed Argos had the intelligence and temperament to make a good service dog. Argos also had the strong bond to Hren that service dogs need to do their job well. Hren knew Argos had found another calling.

Service dog training is expensive. A trained service dog can cost from $20,000-$50,000, and organizations that provide service dogs would rather place a dog they have raised and trained than work with a pet. They also don’t place dogs in homes with existing pet dogs.

According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, owners can train their own service dogs, but Hren doesn’t have the strength or stamina to do so alone. Falkenstein is willing to help at less than half what a service dog organization would charge to train Argos.

Hren tried applying for grants to cover the cost of Argos’ training, but helping with the costs falls out of the parameters of organizations that help with medical bills or equipment.

As a last resort, Hren has turned to GoFundMe to raise $6,000 to cover the cost of finishing Argos’ service dog training.

To help Argos help his mom, visit gofund.me/8f4aa217.