Trained Together, Bonded for Life: Service Dogs for Disabled Veterans in North Texas

Our mission is to empower disabled veterans through the life-changing partnership between veteran and service dog.

By training both together, we foster trust, confidence, communication, and independence. Our program is dedicated to developing each veteran and canine into an exceptional team—one that understands, supports, and brings out the fullest potential in one another.

A service dog by itself does not undo what a veteran carries home. What works is everything together. Medical care, counseling, peer support, family, faith, and a dog trained to meet one particular veteran’s needs. We build our program around that whole picture, and we work alongside the doctors, counselors and VA staff a veteran already trusts.

Our volunteers make it possible. They help condition and train our dogs, they stand with veterans through the months of work a partnership takes, and they carry that same steadiness into hospices, hospitals and the homes of the dying, where a calm and well-trained dog brings a kind of comfort nothing else quite reaches.

Join us in answering the Call

Post-traumatic stress does not answer to any single solution. The veterans who come to us are usually already doing the work. They are seeing clinicians, sitting with counselors, managing medication, leaning on family and on faith. We add to that. A well-matched service dog belongs inside a veteran’s whole plan for getting better, never in place of it.

So we start where most programs finish. Rather than delivering a trained dog to a veteran who has never met it, we bring the two together early and train them as a pair. The veteran learns to read the dog. The dog learns to read the veteran. Over the months that follow, a routine takes hold, then trust, then something closer to partnership. Our trainers and volunteers stay with the team the whole way, and we remain on call long after the training ends.

The result is a veteran who is steadier, more independent, and far less alone. In our experience, veterans who work through the full program — clinical care, counseling, peer support and a trained service dog together — very rarely reach the point of harming themselves. A dog gives a person a reason to get up, a reason to go outside, and something that needs them every single day.

None of it happens without people who decide to help. Our volunteers train dogs, foster them, drive them, mentor veterans, sit on committees, and bring our gentlest dogs to people in hospitals and hospice care who need company. Others give, and their giving covers veterinary care, equipment, training hours and the long tail of support every team receives. There is room here for whatever you have to offer.

A Story of Service & Success

Faithful Friend began in 1999, when Les Castro started bringing trained dogs into juvenile facilities across Texas. For more than two decades, our volunteers went into detention centers and state schools with dogs who could hold a room, using them to teach obedience, self-control, patience and trust to young people who had rarely been shown any of it. Facility staff reported calmer units, better attendance and better grades among the students who took part.

That era taught us the lesson our whole program now rests on. A dog reaches people that words alone cannot reach. A dog does not care what you did, where you have been, or how badly you think of yourself. It shows up, it pays attention, and it asks you to be someone worth following. We watched that change young lives, and we watched the young people who helped train those dogs stand a little taller for having done it.

Many of those dogs went on to serve disabled American veterans, and over the years it became clear that this was where the deepest need lay and where our particular gift did the most good. Today our work is devoted entirely to veterans and the dogs who serve them. The quarter century that brought us here remains one of the things we are proudest of, and everything we learned in those rooms we carry into this one.

Les Castro

Les Castro lives in Dallas Texas and is the president of Faithful Friend.

Les is the former CEO of H & L International, Incorporated and holds a master’s degree in International Management from the Arizona State University Thunderbird School of Global Management. He has lectured on international business at four universities and is an entrepreneur and business owner, having developed products for international import and export. Les has traveled widely and enjoys fishing when time permits.

He began this work in 1994, walking into juvenile prisons with a Dallas-based ministry and a German shepherd who turned out to be the best teacher in the room. Through that ministry he met Jennifer, his wife, who was a volunteer counselor with the same group. What began with one dog and one invitation has since grown into a program that places skilled service dogs with disabled veterans across North Texas and Oklahoma.

Together they lead Faithful Friend.

She is by far the most vocal of Faithful Friend’s four GSDs and has learned to communicate her needs (and wants) with various tones. She is the most high contact of Faithful Friend’s GSDs and loves to snuggle up for ear scratches and belly rubs. She is very friendly and loves people. However, Bella understands she is at work when she is wearing her service dog vest and waits for Les’ okay before greeting others. She is completely bonded to and protective of Les and will stand between him and any perceived danger.

At home, Bella is like most pets: desiring interaction and play with Les and Jennifer. Just like her human counterparts, the hard work is offset by fun and loving contact and activity. She loves long walks, especially if she is off leash on acreage and gets to chase the rabbits and explore where the coyotes and bobcats have passed by.

Every dog we have worked with has taught us something we did not know before, and Bella is teaching us still. She stands in front of rooms, meets veterans on their hardest days, and shows people what a life built on trust actually looks like.

That focus made her extraordinary in front of an audience. She could be dramatic or funny, formidable or affectionate, depending entirely on what she was asked to do. She drew undivided attention not through spectacle but through the closeness of her attention to her master, and much of what she taught came from that relationship rather than from any single trick. Audiences around the world came to know her: Pepper appeared on screen in The Chosen as the disciple Matthew’s dog.

Pepper gave us 14 remarkable years. We lost her in 2024, and the quiet she left behind is still there.

That focus made her extraordinary in front of an audience. She could be dramatic or funny, formidable or affectionate, depending entirely on what she was asked to do. She drew undivided attention not through spectacle but through the closeness of her attention to her master, and much of what she taught came from that relationship rather than from any single trick. Audiences around the world came to know her: Pepper appeared on screen in The Chosen as the disciple Matthew’s dog.

Pepper gave us 14 remarkable years. We lost her in 2024, and the quiet she left behind is still there.