Paws & Effect: The Healing Power of Dogs - Softcover

Sakson, Sharon

 
9780385528566: Paws & Effect: The Healing Power of Dogs
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385528566 ISBN 13: 9780385528566
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Dogs have always been our friends and changed our lives for the better. But they may save our lives as well. Seamlessly weaving scientific research with compelling narrative, Paws & Effect tells incredibly moving stories of beloved pets who have supported their people through periods of ill health and other crises—with miraculous results:

*Little Ben, a Chihuahua who can sense impending epileptic seizures

*Abdul, a Golden Retriever/Lab mix, who was the world’s first service dog and helped his owner by retrieving keys and phones, medicine from countertops, water from the refrigerator, and could even hand in credit cards at the grocery store

*A Dalmation named Trudii, whose obsessive behavior prompted her owner to seek a medical examination that revealed melanoma

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sharon Sakson earned an MFA in creative writing from the New School. She is a journalist and television producer who has worked for ABC, NBC, and local stations in Baltimore, Chicago, and San Francisco. Sharon is also an American Kennel Club dog-show judge. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

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Chapter One


Living with Healing Dogs


When I trace back my interest in the healing power of dogs, I have to start at the beginning, which takes me back to age twelve. In that year, my mother took to bed with an unexplained illness. Because I was in seventh grade, breezy, confident, and wise, I assumed she had a lingering case of flu and sighed with annoyance whenever she asked me to look after my three younger siblings.

Our relatives and friends said, "Your mother will be better soon," and I believed them, the way a child would. Instead, over the next months, the situation deteriorated. There were fewer and fewer days when my mother felt well enough to get up and help us with homework. Finally, one warm May afternoon, we arrived home to the sight of an ambulance in the driveway, and just beyond it, parked askew, our father's car.

My brother, Johnny, and I ran into our house, where we saw the even stranger sight of our father descending the staircase, carrying our mother.

He had never carried her before. He often complained that she was too heavy, that her clothes were too tight, that if firemen ever came to our house to rescue us, they wouldn't be able to get her out. It wasn't true; she was a petite 5 foot, 1 inch and 105 pounds. He amused himself by playing on her anxieties about how she looked. Yet now here he was, carrying her in his arms. She looked frail and small. He laid her on the gurney and the ambulance workers strapped her in.

Our father told us she was going to the hospital because she needed more treatment and it would be better for her to get it there. She would get better in the hospital, and then she would come home. He sounded very certain, so we were reassured.

It was a confusing time. In an excess of sympathy and caring, no one wanted her children to know that she was dying. Instead, they continuously tried to cheer us up. Their strategies worked because we had been trained to believe what adults said.

The next day, our maternal grandmother, Kay, took us to Robert's Pet Shop, on a corner of Warren Avenue near her apartment in Trenton, New Jersey. We needed food for Johnny's two turtles and some pebbles and a fancy castle for Sandy's goldfish. My pet had been a dog, a mutt named Shadow who resembled a black Golden Retriever. He was born in the stable where I took riding lessons, and while we loved him, he developed a troubling habit of attacking the men who did the gardening for the homes on our block. Our yard was not fenced. Shadow stayed near us, watching baseball or jump rope or hide-and-seek with one eye while he warmed himself in the sun. But the minute a gardener appeared in any of the adjoining yards, he flew off the property and not only barked but sank his teeth into the legs of any of the men he could get near.

We knew why. When he was only a year old, he had followed us across the Robinettes' lawn and onto the Mersons' property, where we took a path toward the back alley and planned to proceed to the home of the Hughes' children. We were a long stream of neighborhood kids. A gardener appeared in the door of the Mersons' garage, a hoe in his hand. With no provocation at all, he stepped out and smacked Shadow in the head. Shadow fell to the ground, unconscious. I was hysterical; Johnny thought he was dead; one of the Hughes boys, Brian, picked up Shadow and carried him back to our house. Shadow recovered, but he never forgot. From that moment on, he hated all gardeners. This event changed him from a calm, compliant dog to a dog who became a threatening monster on the several days a week gardeners were present. We were supposed to keep him in the house in the afternoon. We never remembered. Eventually, Mommy explained to us that Shadow was going to have to go out to the country and live at our grandparents' farm, where hopefully he would never see another gardener again.

In the cool glow from Robert's lighted aquariums, I exhumed a copy of Dog World magazine from a book rack. A Wire Fox Terrier graced the cover, and his beauty and stature took my breath away. Turning the pages, I fell totally under the spell of purebred dogs. Pointers and Chesapeake Bay Retrievers, Greyhounds and Bassets, Bernese Mountain Dogs and Great Danes and Chihuahuas and Collies and Corgis. All these dogs amazed and enchanted me. With this magazine in hand, I was able to put aside the thought of our mother, hooked to oxygen and intravenous fluids in the hospital, and think about something else. In that split second in the pet shop, a future opened before me that I had not contemplated, a future filled with beautiful dogs. I would be the one holding the well-groomed Standard Poodle on the thin show lead, smiling as we accepted the Best in Show trophy.

My father was cold, distant, and preoccupied, but he was roused by my insistent prodding to drive us to Merrybrook Kennels in Long Valley, New Jersey, where I chose a Wire Fox terrier with the guidance of the great breeder Mrs. Franklin Koehler. I didn't know it at the time, but she was a pillar in the breed and would become my first mentor. It was amazing that my father, so cheap in many ways, agreed to shell out the whopping $350 price of a purebred dog. He was not inclined to be so generous when it came to Dolly's housing arrangements. He put up a makeshift fence that he assumed would hold an active, eager terrier puppy during the hours I was at school. He was wrong. Dolly escaped, and only two weeks into our partnership, she was struck and killed by a car.

While I was interviewing men for my book Paws & Reflect, several of them mentioned that they saw the deaths of their childhood dogs as lessons in the impermanence of physical life and the permeating quality of love. If Dolly's death was supposed to be a lesson for me, I missed it. I was already depressed about my mother's absence. When Dolly died, I took to bed and was unable to get up. My father returned to Mrs. Koehler for a second puppy, Bonnie, who was granted permission to stay in the house when I wasn't with her in order to avoid the fate of her predecessor.

If someone asked me now which breed would be best at consoling a child over the loss of her mother, a Wire Fox Terrier would be low on my list. Bonnie did not like to sit still. She would absorb only a few minutes of hugs and kisses before demanding to be set free. She was always busy chasing small animals or barking at passersby. Like most terriers, she abstained from making direct eye contact. But when my mother died, Bonnie was the only physical being who offered me any kind of comfort. She didn't lower her standards because of my grief and allow me more cuddle time. She just made it clear that she didn't see the point. There was a big world out there to explore. When the leash was snapped to her collar, we walked endlessly through Cadwalder Park. Down to the freezing cold creek where she lapped a drink while I hopped from rock to rock. Across to the playground, where she refused to ride the swings or the wheel but let me push her down the sliding board. Into the bushes behind Kathy McCormack's house, where we spied on my best friend and her family.

In the weeks after my mother's death, no one noticed us passing through the house like ghosts. Everyone was consumed inside by his or her own grief. I wanted to shut the door of my bedroom and never come out again, but I couldn't do that because of Bonnie. She felt like my heart, the only part of me that carried on. She was unfailingly lively, cute, sweet, and beautiful in my eyes. I had to carry on with my life because she did.

The black depression of my mother's death settled over me like a cloud and many, many nights I decided that the only way out was to die. I spent a lot of time considering various methods of suicide. Would the gun in my father's bedroom closet go off if I put it to my head? How...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385528566
ISBN 13 
9780385528566
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9
Plovdiv
Bulgarien

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