Life After Service: When a Service Animal Retires

Event description

Free
Health and wellness
Inclusion
Open to the public
Professional and career development

Join Interim Dean Manuel Avilés-Santiago for the next installment of Catalyst Conversations, featuring communication scholar and disability advocate Melba Vélez Ortiz.

In her talk, "I Had Some Help: The Messy, Emotional Ethics of Retiring a Service Animal," Vélez Ortiz explores the ethical questions surrounding the retirement of service animals. Drawing on her expertise as an ethicist and her experience with her guide dog, Chad, she examines the grief, gratitude and responsibility that accompany the transition from working partnership to retirement, and what it reveals about dignity, dependence and care.

Catalyst Conversations is a speakers series sponsored by the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts and features change agents in the community and academia who are igniting a new way of thinking and inspiring change.

About our speaker

Dr. Melba Vélez Ortiz sitting alongside a golden retreiver service dog

Melba Vélez Ortiz is a communication scholar, ethics professor and disability advocate at Grand Valley State University's Frederik Meijer Honors College. A native of Caguas, Puerto Rico, she earned her doctorate in communication ethics at the University of Illinois and writes on blindness, knowledge and human dignity, including her 2022 essay "Blindness as Empeiria." She served six years on the Guide Dogs for the Blind Alumni Association Board and was the 2025 Keynote Speaker for Disability Awareness Week in Kent County, Michigan. Her work pairs rigorous ethical analysis with a practical commitment to accessibility and equal access.