Local UPS man saves the day

It’s the last thing anyone wants to hear: that someone they love has gone missing. For Rita Stewart of Conrad, it was her service dog Bianca, who works with both elementary and high school students at BCLUW, and when she first came home to an empty kennel on Jan. 11, Stewart expected the worst. Bianca was spotted in the country just south of Beaman a few days later, however, and local UPS deliveryman Kyle Dougherty became a hero to both Stewart and her Comet family as she was reunited with her dog.
 
Stewart has been volunteering at BCLUW for the last five years and recently became a full time aide, and she also trains service dogs (she has 30 years of experience in the field) so that they can be prepared when they’re sent to a person in need of one. Bianca, a 110-pound golden retriever, is actually an ambassador dog who assists in the training of other service dogs, and her presence has become a staple at the school: students get to spend time with her as a reward for good behavior and grades, and she can be used as a stress reliever for students enduring personal struggles or trying to get through tests. But when Stewart came home just over two weeks ago, Bianca’s kennel was overturned, and she was nowhere to be found.
 
“I was just sick because number one, she doesn’t like the cold,” she said. “It was just the fact that somebody would take her.”
 
She went on to explain that the long waiting period for service dogs (the average wait is between two and two and a half years) has created an illicit market for the animals, and thieves travel across the Midwest to steal them and eventually try to sell them in large cities like Chicago. Stewart surmises that once the con artists realized that Bianca was an older dog with medical issues and requires special medicine, they abandoned her and left a dog that has spent much of her life in Florida to fend for herself in the cold heart of an Iowa winter. 
 
Read more in this week's Grundy Register.