Photograph by Katherine Bish
You watch entranced as Zion, a chocolate standard poodle who clearly loves his job, braces to help Faun Collett rise and leans in to support her when she pauses. She eases into a chair, joints stiff, and asks him to pick up a piece of paper for her, and he adroitly lifts one edge with his mouth and presents it, then does the same with the pen she’s dropped. “Lap,” she says, then, “Snuggle,” and he puts his front paws on her lap and lays his head against her shoulder. She whispers something in his lamb’s-coat ear, and he leaves the room. “Hurry up,” she calls. “You got it?” He trots back with the requested toy, then obediently tugs it from her to demonstrate how he can open a refrigerator or cabinet door.
Zion is Collett’s demo dog, as well as a big help personally, and she’s shown him off at the Warrenton, Mo., chamber of commerce and local schools and hospitals. She and her husband, Doug Collett, have 15 acres in Warren County and a dream: to set up 10 cabins on their land and house four young men in each—kids who have aged out of foster care, need a home and are willing to care for and train service dogs like Zion. Talk about everybody winning: People trying to move away from a troubled youth get a transitional home and a solid foundation for their adult lives, learning social skills as they learn to train. The dogs get their own vo-ed. And people with disabilities get a free partner who can perform tasks their disabilities preclude.
You listen rapt as Faun talks about the younger kids they’ve already helped in the past, using the dogs she was breeding at her Faunhaven Kennel as animal therapy so troubled teens could learn to deal gently and positively with other living beings. When girls who’d been abused learned to groom the poodle puppies, she says, “it changed their whole countenance,” smoothing out the anxiety and self-doubt. When a boy told her, “We ain’t nothin’ but worms; nobody cares what happens to us,” she replied instantly. “You have a gift. Your gift will make room for you.”
The Colletts could bend hard hearts, the way they talk about young people and the warmth and belonging they need and how it’s crazy to kick a foster kid out onto the street at 18. “More than 200 kids have crossed our path,” Faun says. “Adjudicated, at risk, from alternative schools … Then we became foster parents—three siblings, ages 14, 15 and 16, their mother overdosed on crack cocaine and they had nowhere to go.” The kids stayed a year, and then, when Doug had health problems—a 20-foot fall onto concrete left him with a degenerative bone disease—they went to live with relatives that they’d rediscovered.
You wonder how the Colletts manage financially, and you wonder—because in this age of professionalization you can’t help yourself—about Faun’s credentials. She’s established a 501(c)(3), AMEN (Academy of Missouri Educational Network) Graduate Dogs, Inc.—but her wall is filled with certificates in Christian ministry, not dog training or dog breeding or kids at risk or people with disabilities. For her, it’s all about instincts and common sense.
She gives a quick summary: Born in, of all places, Dogtown. Trained her first pup at age 8 and won a blue ribbon. Went to camps and worked at them; loved nature, animals and kids; learned every campfire song by heart. Studied physical education for a couple of years at Southeast Missouri State, then married. Became the “music lady” for 22 preschools. Enrolled in a greater St. Louis clown competition and won first place and went pro—
A clown?
She grins, quoting scripture. “‘A merry heart does good like a medicine; and a broken spirit dries the bones.’
“When I drove a school bus, I wrote a song called the ‘School Bus Driver Blues,’” she adds. “I oughta sing it for you.” She proceeds to do just that, belting out, “Oh, I’m a school bus driver … I load ’em in the morning, before the break of day; their parents shake with laughter as I drive the kids away. Oh, I’m a school bus driver …”
Four stanzas later, she resumes her story: “I’m like a Cesar Millan, a dog whisperer. I’m also a husband and teenager whisperer; I taught my husband to sit down and stay just by giving him the remote. So I figured I could be a good dog trainer.”
Zion’s one example. The question, according to some who are familiar with Collett’s history, is whether she can multiply her success by about 40, in a way that’s fair to both the dogs and the troubled young adults she yearns to help.
Publicizing the dream’s proving easy: Faun wrote an article published February 15 in The Focus News in Warrenton that described how AMEN Graduate Dogs serves the community “by raising and training service dogs for the handicapped and aged” (it doesn’t mention that she’s not currently placing any), and both the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Warrenton Journal wrote glowing articles in late March about her plans.
Realizing the dream will require hundreds of thousands of dollars, a professional staff, furnished cabins and legal and financial safeguards.
Over the years, the Colletts have had sporadic help from kids and adults who’ve passed through. “Now it’s just the two of us, and we’re getting tired,” Faun says. “We need help with dog food, we need someone to sponsor a handicapped person, we need money to buy the cabins and the 96 acres next to us.” That’s quite a dream. “It is vast,” she agrees happily. “I overwhelm people when I talk about my vision.”
You talk to Bill Fields, a thoroughly nice man who’s trying to help the Colletts write grants and acquire some business savvy. “They are kind of hand-to-mouth folks, but their hearts are—” His voice breaks, and it’s a minute before he can speak again. “They are such good people.” Later, in an email, he gives you publicity materials and a list of people to talk to—with a few caveats. “Some of the people are reluctant to being interviewed, as they are parolees and afraid of any attention. The service dog portion of the business has been inactive for the last 8 years and is just getting going again. Faun has been unable to find anyone who received a dog who is still alive.”
You come back to earth with a thud.
“When we get the kids back, we will train them to train the dogs,” Faun explains hurriedly. She had to stop teaching troubled kids a few years back—a grant fell through—and the foster kids left after Doug got sick.
And the past service dogs? “We’ve trained many but have placed very few in homes—Dolly, Honey, Buster, Zoe and a few others—because of lack of funds to pay insurance and do medical testing and have all the legal paperwork in place.”
Faun brings out an armful of 7-week-old chocolate labradoodles, but she doesn’t want to open the door to the outdoor runs. Eventually she acquiesces, and dogs are everywhere, jumping at the front fence of their runs, barking excitedly, manic for attention. These aren’t demo dogs.
“Now don’t be taking pictures out here,” Faun says (although she later relents). “I hate it; it looks like a kennel. There’s so many people who want to call you a puppy mill if they see more than three dogs. We try, we really try. But they are standing in poop right now.”
Twice, Doug Collett tells you they have about 40 dogs. You count either 54 or 58, depending on how many 7-week-olds have wriggled out of sight.
Conditions at Faunhaven were similar five years ago, says Janice Brennan, a service-dog trainer with Support Dogs, Inc., which just received accreditation from Assistance Dogs International. “She said she’d gotten a government grant and wanted to collaborate with Support Dogs, so we went out there. I was so upset when I left, I called the Warrenton Animal Protective Association. There was green algae in the dog water and poop everywhere. She was teaching at-risk kids, but it looked to me like they were doing scut work. The dogs were in runs that had igloos, and their hay was sodden, not dry and comfy.” At Support Dogs, Brennan says, “We have nine adult dogs, in indoor kennels, and they are walked to their pen where they eliminate, and we clean it up immediately. They get a 20-minute walk twice a day.”
Faun’s dogs are still in outdoor runs, with igloo shelters and a few toys, and the place still reeks of feces. There are past complaints on record with the Missouri Department of Agriculture office that enforces the Animal Care Facilities Act Program, and in mid-March there were open violations awaiting reinspection; Faun says that she was cited for chewed dog dishes and some fences in need of repair and that the repairs have already been made.
All the dogs look healthy except Toodles, a poodle with huge patches of fur shaven away and clouded eyes. Faun says she has some kind of vitamin deficiency, “and the medication stained her coat.” Faun leads the way through her grooming room—a barrel filled with murky water standing next to the grooming table. However do they manage not only bathing but also exercising all these dogs? “We come down and let the puppies out if the weather’s nice,” Doug says, “and if someone’s down here and says, ‘I don’t have anything to do,’ I say, ‘Take a dog for a walk!’”
At least, he did back when they had kids around to help. Some came from an alternative school program at Warrenton High School; others were special-needs kids; others they heard about in church or in town. “We would get these kids, some of them didn’t know how to cut meat or read a ruler,” Doug says. “One girl was a cutter. She’d been in 13, 14 different homes.”
Faun taught the kids to train the dogs, even when the Colletts weren’t placing them. But at the moment, she’s just focusing on breeding labradoodles and goldendoodles with hypoallergenic poodle coats. And that, current fad notwithstanding, takes several generations of careful breeding to achieve. “That’s why we have so many dogs right now,” she explains. “We have to pick the best of the best.”
Marilyn Pona, a St. Louis dog trainer who founded two assistance dog organizations, remembers meeting Faun years ago and advising her on how to strictly separate her nonprofit dream from for-profit breeding. “I was concerned that she had too many dogs and not enough staff to work with them—I think she had 30-something then,” Pona says. “It’s very easy for a program to get overdogged.” She draws an impatient breath. “It’s just not enough to want to do this from your heart. There are lives at stake.”
Faun does have testimonials from kids she’s sheltered: Elvis Brandon, one of the three teens she fostered for a year, says, “She was very good to us, good with our feelings, our dreams, our goals. She’s the reason I am where I am. I really didn’t like working at the dog kennel, but it gave me one helluva work ethic. I’m working at a Ford dealership right now and going to school.”
Rebecca Arana worked at Faunhaven in her early teens, and she remembers how “kids who had bad home lives, bad school lives, nowhere else to go,” thrived when they came in contact with the dogs. “One kid was always pretty angry and frustrated toward everybody else, but eventually he really wanted to take care of his dog.”
Rachel Garrett, who’s now going into her junior year in equestrian science at William Woods University, also spent three summers in her early teens working, unpaid, at Faunhaven. “I believe Faun is doing a really great job,” Garrett says, but there’s hesitation in her voice. Does she believe Faun can realize her dream? “If she gets the right stuff going,” Garrett says slowly, “and puts money into redoing the kennels. They are not always as sanitary as they could be. A friend started helping me, and we spent six or seven hours a day just cleaning her kennels and hosing them out so the dogs would not be standing in their own urine and feces. We did it four to five times a day, got there at 5:30 or 5 a.m. in the summer and didn’t leave until 8 at night. I love Faun to death, but behind the scenes is just not pretty. It’s mostly she doesn’t have the money to do a whole lot, which I think is why she’s trying to go into breeding the doodles. But you have to work them.”
Service-dog trainers say you have to make a choice: Either you’re a breeder, moving the pups on as soon as possible, or you’re training service dogs, keeping them in a homelike setting to prepare them for their future career. Then you have to choose again: Either people are your primary focus, and you’re devoting time and resources to their therapy, with trained dogs as a bonus, or your primary focus is the service dogs, and you’re flunking out anybody who doesn’t have the patience and emotional stamina to train them properly.
Faun’s between roles right now, trying to gather money, staff and a team of what she calls AGRs (young people “at great risk”). In her February 15 article, she makes the dream sound imminent: “In our program, AGRs are led to understanding and changing negative behaviors,” she writes. “We are going to provide fully furnished Smart Home Park Cabins and computer stations, counselors, transportation, life skills instructors and specialized support groups … we offer viable animal therapy training, a staff and support group within our compound.” She ends with directions to “send your tax deductible contribution.”
Her amendogs.com website states that her nonprofit program “raises and trains dogs for the physically challenged” and provides “diversion programs, support groups, re-entry, residential transitional and independent living programs”—which is overstating the fact that the Colletts have four people in transition from prison who are living in their basement at the moment, and one is helping Faun do clerical work.
Faun has professional support on her board, though, including Donna Thornhill, a licensed family therapist who met Faun at church and was inspired by her dream. “As I see it, all these kids are going to come with a love deficit, a need for comfort,” Thornhill says. “Feeling responsible for that dog will give them a feeling of meaning and therefore give them the ability to work with those dogs, and it will be therapeutic for them, too—most of them need obedience training themselves!”
But as Bob Marchbanks, a professional dog trainer for decades, points out, “It’s very difficult to train people to train dogs. First of all, they have to have the desire, or they will get frustrated early on. They have to be able to concentrate completely on the dog.” Pona says you start a future service dog’s socialization at 7 weeks of age. “They go everywhere possible, and they live in homes or homelike settings. It’s not standard for assistance dogs to be outdoors; they get too doggy—not human-oriented enough—and they are isolated from the very things they need to hear, like vacuums or street and restaurant noises. They don’t get enough socialization to make them really stable around the kinds of things they are going to encounter.
“If you really have professional standards, you might have a string of four dogs that you are working with,” she concludes. “But you would have to be a super trainer and under 40 to even handle 10. And you would have to give yourself equally to 10 dogs every single day.”
You’re trying, hard, to imagine all this happening at Faunhaven, because the stories of the animals’ therapeutic effects seem so promising. “One girl was in a coma with leukemia; they said she had 24 hours,” Faun confides. “I said, ‘If you get better, I’ll train you how to train your puppy.’ The next day the girl was out of her bed, asking for fried chicken at the nurse’s station.”
Faun, who has driven the short distance from home to kennel and climbed from her car singing, “What a day for a daydream!” eventually excuses herself and drives back up to the house, explaining that there’s another reporter arriving, from the Warrenton Journal. Before she leaves, she points out a scrapbook of media clippings, so you flip through. According to the Post-Dispatch, the little girl with leukemia was already cured, just thin, depressed and stuck in her wheelchair, when her father decided to make one of her dreams come true and get her a dog from Faunhaven.
It made for a better story when Faun told it.
