Devoted

by Rebecca Ascher-Walsh

BREED HISTORY: Native to Newfoundland, Labradors were crossed with other hunting dogs over time to improve their hunting skills.

  CHARACTERISTICS: Labs seem to enjoy having a job to do and want to feel like a member of the family. Many Labradors excel as guide and search-and-rescue dogs.

  FIRST JOB: Helping fishermen pull in nets from icy water

  Walker was flown to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he was found to have seven cracked ribs, a ruptured spleen, three fractures to his femur, a broken upper arm, and a smashed hand. Treatment involved ten hours of surgery and a medically induced coma. When Walker finally returned home, he and his wife made sure to thank Henry for his heroism. “We got him a lot of treats,” he says, “And we give him a lot of love. He’s my godsend.”

  HOW DID HENRY KNOW SOMETHING WAS WRONG? A dog’s sense of smell is a thousand times better than a human’s, so it’s no wonder that a dog can warn its owner of an epileptic seizure, low blood sugar, a heart attack, and even some types of cancer. Scientists do not know whether any given dog breed is better than another at sniffing out medical problems.

  Even though Luca is deaf he has learned to follow his owners’ instructions by their special hand signals. (illustration credit 17.1)

  Luca

  DEAF TO DISABILITY PIT BULL NEW YORK

  Sometimes, in order to really listen, it helps when you can’t hear anything at all. That’s the case with Luca, a deaf pit bull whose gift as a therapy dog stems from what others might perceive as a disability.

  Luca, who was adopted as a puppy from a shelter, was trained early on by his owners, Brooke Slater-Goldstein and Dave Goldstein, to make constant eye contact so he could follow their signed commands. For the at-risk or disabled youths with whom Luca now interacts as a therapy dog, that can often mean feeling—and being—recognized for the first time. “He doesn’t give these kids a choice but to make eye contact, because he walks right up to them and demands it,” says Slater-Goldstein. “There was one student who had emotional issues and was rocking back and forth. Luca walked right up to him to see what he was doing and the kid looked up, and smiled, and stopped. Another person who had never taken a step without his walker moved away from it for the first time on his own to pet Luca, who was staring at him from across the room and wagging his tail. Humans can’t do this. Humans have tried and haven’t come close.”

  Interestingly, despite their close genetic relations to domesticated dogs, neither can wolves: A study published in Current Biology in 2003 found that socialized wolves, unlike dogs, generally avoid looking at humans’ faces. This led the researchers to posit that “the readiness of dogs to look at the human face has led to complex forms of dog-human communication.”

  AMERICA’S DOG

  In 1903, two men and a dog completed the first cross-country American road trip: Horatio Jackson, Sewall Crocker, and Jackson’s pit bull, Bud. Bud wore specially made driving goggles and helped keep an eye out for bumps in the road.

  Because they were so popular in early 20th-century America, pit bulls were used by many companies for advertising. One of the most famous is the RCA dog, a fox terrier-bull terrier mix.

  Many famous Americans have owned pit bulls, including President Theodore Roosevelt, President Woodrow Wilson, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, and Fred Astaire.

  Luca follows commands by watching Slater-Goldstein and Goldstein and their hand signals, which make up a unique sign language—some of which is similar to American Sign Language and some of which is invented (“Good boy,” for example, is a wriggled thumb). Slater-Goldstein and Goldstein tell Luca whom to make eye contact with by pointing at the person he should look at or approach. “He knows eight to ten commands,” says Slater-Goldstein. “We cut out all the excess that people don’t even realize is just extra verbiage when it comes to training a dog. And we communicate with him via body language. I smile and his tail wags; I give him, ‘Mommy face’ and he knows he’s been bad and lies right down.”

  Luca inspired Slater-Goldstein and Goldstein to start Bruised Not Broken, a nonprofit organization and advocacy group devoted to pit bull rescue that has more than 200,000 fans on Facebook. The three are now planning to tour college campuses to help change people’s minds about the breed. They are also continuing to work with adolescents. “We are part of a program that teaches empathy and compassion. When Luca walks in the room and they see a pit bull, these 15-year-olds hit the deck screaming,” Slater-Goldstein says with a laugh. “So the first lesson is, ‘No prejudice. Decide how you feel after spending time with him.’ And then they start learning hand signals, and he’s following their commands, and they are really connecting with him. He takes them seriously. And they, in turn, take him seriously.”

  Luca inspired the organization Bruised Not Broken to help correct misconceptions about pit bulls. (illustration credit 17.2)

  Slater-Goldstein says that Luca is tired at the end of a day of therapy, but there is some recompense: Thanks to his deafness, he falls into a deep sleep utterly undisturbed by the noises of city life. “The work he does,” says Slater-Goldstein, “this is what he was born to do.”

  READING HUMAN EMOTIONS A UK study shows that dogs, like humans, exhibit a “left gaze bias” when looking at a human face. The right side of the human face tends to be better at expressing emotion, so when looking at a face the eye tends to drift left. Dogs may have developed this left gaze bias so that they could better read human emotions.

  Faith, despite being born with deformed front legs, has learned to walk upright. (illustration credit 18.1)

  Faith

  WALKING THE WALK mixed breed INDIANA

  Jude Stringfellow was used to her children bringing home animals in need, but the puppy her son carried into the house in 2003 really upped the ante. The three-week-old female part-chow puppy he had rescued from a nearby flea market required around-the-clock care and attention. Then there was the matter of her legs: She had been born with three, only two of which worked. (And her single front leg had to be amputated when she was seven months old.)

  “Shortly before my son brought Faith home, we had found baby ducks and tried to nurse them, but it hadn’t worked out,” remembers Stringfellow. “So I prepared my three kids and said, ‘The dog may not make it through the night.’ My daughter said, ‘Can we make sure the time she has it as good as possible?’ and I said we could.”

  That turned out to be underoptimistic: At six weeks old, Faith was sitting up on her haunches. When she was three months old, annoyed by another dog in the house teasing her by nipping at her, Faith stood tall on her back legs and took off after him, running as a person would. “She was like a kangaroo, leaping over chairs and sometimes clearing them and sometimes not,” Stringfellow remembers. “She had to learn her boundaries, and how strong her back legs were.”

  Laura Stringfellow plays with Faith (far right) and their other family dog. (illustration credit 18.2)

  TWO LEGS? NO PROBLEM!

  A fall out of a third-story window shattered the front legs of a six-month-old pit bull named London. The legs had to be amputated, and it was determined he would be fitted with a front wheelchair. While waiting for his wheelchair, London has learned to walk on his two back legs.

  Chihuahua siblings Moose and Maverick were born without their front legs and abandoned at a young age. Adopted by a veterinarian, the brothers work on two legs as therapy dogs at shelters and assisted living centers, showing that it is all right to be different.

  With Faith off and running, Stringfellow began taking her to nursing homes and hospitals. When a family member of a patient in a hospital suggested that disabled members of the military might love to meet Faith, Stringfellow began taking her to local veterans hospitals. They then traveled to Washington, D.C., and Virginia, and to bases around the world. Faith, who has been made an honorary sergeant in the U.S. Army for her work, has provided joy as well as healing to those she visited. “When she’s there, the veterans will talk about what happened t
o them,” Stringfellow says, “And sometimes, they can’t put it into words and just sit there and cry. Faith knows how to help; sometimes she just sits and listens, and sometimes she crawls into their laps.”

  Faith isn’t the only member of the family who has found her calling: Stringfellow has given motivational speeches about the many lessons that Faith has to teach, and has also written the book Faith Walks, with a percentage of the proceeds going to charity. “Faith is what it looks like to be positive and persevere, and no matter how many times someone comes up to pet her, she acts like she’s never been petted before.” Her generosity has been contagious, especially for those closest to her. “I wasn’t necessarily compassionate before I got her, and I didn’t necessarily go out of my way to help people,” says Stringfellow. “Now I do.”

  HOW IS IT POSSIBLE FOR A DOG TO WALK ON TWO LEGS? Dogs that are born with only two legs quickly adapt to their disability. Dogs who unfortunately lose their legs later in life can still learn to compensate for their lost limbs. The inner ear helps them balance and the muscles in the other legs gain additional strength as they help the dog move.

  Effie successfully sniffed out the breast cancer of her owner, Lisa Hulber. (illustration credit 19.1)

  Effie

  SNIFFING AWAY DISEASE MIXED BREED MICHIGAN

  Save a life and have yours saved in return. It’s not often that the universe offers up such literal recompense, but it did in the case of three women whose rescue dogs detected their cancer.

  Effie, a large, stray brown-and-white mixed breed, didn’t seem especially promising. “She had every parasite known to dogdom, she dug holes in the yard, she cowered when men came around, and she growled at children,” says Lisa Hulber, who lives in Port Huron, Michigan. “She was really unadoptable.” But Hulber fell in love with her anyway and rescued her. The favor was soon returned. Four months after Hulber had a routine mammogram with normal results, Effie began persistently sticking her nose into Hulber’s breast. “I would push her away and she’d keep doing it,” Hulber remembers, “and I knew it wasn’t right.” Concerned, Hulber went back for another mammogram; again, it came back normal. Still convinced something was not right, she went for an ultrasound, and her family doctor found an aggressively growing, large carcinoma of a type that rarely shows up on mammograms.

  Hulber scheduled a double mastectomy for a month later, during which time Effie began sniffing under her arm. Hulber showed the doctor the precise spot Effie had fixated on, and when she awoke from surgery she was informed that Effie had been right. “Of 27 lymph nodes, that was the only node it had spread to,” she says. “The nurse, head surgeon, and I were all bawling our eyes out about this stupid dog. A lot of women cry about losing their breasts, but what makes me cry is the gift this dog gave me.”

  A LIFE-SAVING SENSE OF SMELL

  The medical journal The Lancet was the first to report a cancer-sniffing dog. In 1989 the journal recounted the story of a woman whose border collie-Doberman mix persistently sniffed at a mole that was later diagnosed as a malignant melanoma.

  In 2002, Tangle, a brown cocker spaniel, became one of the first dogs in the world to take part in cancer-sniffing research.

  Dogs’ noses have as many as 300 million olfactory receptors; humans possess about 6 million. In addition, their noses separate smelling and breathing. Our noses only allow us to breathe and smell in the same inhalation.

  Dogs’ ability to sniff out cancer is being studied by researchers who are training them to identify specific forms of the disease. Dr. Michael McCulloch is research director of the Pine Street Foundation, a northern California clinic that published a study asserting that it had trained five dogs to detect lung cancer in people’s breath with 99 percent accuracy. When it came to breast cancer, with respect to which the researchers had a smaller number of samples, the dogs were right approximately 88 percent of the time with no false positives. McCulloch is now studying dogs’ ability to sniff out ovarian cancer. “Dogs’ sense of smell is quite acute, and when tumors develop in the body, odors emanating may be exuded locally or regionally via diffusion across the skin or in perspiration,” he explains.

  As for the untrained dogs’ ability to alert their owners to cancer, McCulloch points to the need of pack animals to assess each other’s health through scent in order to survive. “There is a modern example with wolves and sled dogs,” he says. “The dogs have to be fit in order to run with the pack, so they are probably using the same skills with their human companions. When they smell other dogs, they are asking, ‘How healthy are you?’ ”

  In a similar story, Carol Witcher’s boxer rescue, Floyd Henry, alerted her by nipping at her nose and then pawing her right breast. “I thought, ‘Oh boy, we’ve got a problem,’ ” remembers Witcher, who lives outside Atlanta, Georgia. She was found to have breast cancer, for which she had a lumpectomy. And Linda Botwinick’s rescued beagle-Lab mix began nosing and pawing her owner’s left breast less than six months after a routine mammogram. “Like most women, I thought I had a free pass for a year,” says Botwinick, who lives in Boca Raton, Florida. She immediately returned to the doctor, who found a tumor so aggressive it had developed into a menacing mass in less than two months. Botwinick had a lumpectomy, followed by chemotherapy and radiation. “I’m so grateful to my dog, and to the fact that I listened to her,” she says. “She really is my angel. I saved her life, and then she saved mine.”

  Floyd Henry and Carol Witcher share a hug. (illustration credit 19.2)

  TEACHING OLD DOGS NEW TRICKS. A 2006 study by the Pine Street Foundation indicated that dogs could sniff out breast cancers with 88 percent accuracy even in the earliest stages of the disease. A 2011 study described a Belgian shepherd dog who was able to detect prostate cancer in human urine with a 91 percent success rate.

  Pearl, a Labrador retriever, is a search-and-rescue dog who helps after natural and man-made disasters. (illustration credit 20.1)

  Pearl

  A WORLDWIDE HELPER LABRADOR RETRIEVER CALIFORNIA

  Shortly after Pearl was surrendered to a California shelter by her owner, the black Lab was rescued by an organization that trains service dogs for the blind. “Halfway through testing her, the rescue said, ‘This dog is way too hyper to be a Seeing Eye dog,’ ” recounts Pearl’s handler, Los Angeles firefighter Captain Ron Horetski.

  That was music to the ears of the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation, which needs dogs for search-and-rescue missions requiring around-the-clock work and a “Wait—I’m just getting going!” attitude. Founded in 1996, the Ojai, California–based organization trains and then pairs dogs with firefighters and other first responders to aid in disasters like the 9/11 attacks. Thirteen SDF-trained dogs were deployed to work in the rubble of the World Trade Center.

  Before being assigned to Horetski, Pearl underwent a battery of tests and training. All dogs have a sense of smell tens of thousands of times more sensitive than humans’, but search dogs need more than just a sense of smell. For Pearl, there were x-rays to make sure that her hips and shoulders could withstand walking on rubble; tests to make sure she was willing to traverse shaky surfaces, which dogs generally avoid; and encounters to ensure she was at ease with unfamiliar people and dogs. “Search dogs are completely different than working dogs like the ones who sniff for drugs in the airport, or bomb-sniffing dogs who are by their handlers’ sides at all times,” says Janet Reineck, Ph.D., an executive at the organization. “Search dogs are off the leash, and they need to be directed from a long way away, and also to be able make their own decisions. It’s an incredibly complex set of skills.”

  LABRADOR RETRIEVER

  GENERAL APPEARANCE: Strongly built, athletic, well-balanced, medium-sized dog

  COAT: Short, straight, and very dense

  AVERAGE SIZE: 55 to 75 pounds

  POPULARITY: The Labrador retriever is one of the most popular breeds in the United States.

  After seven months of training, Pearl was assigned to Horetski, and
the two began an arduous year of training together. The FEMA certification test requires the dog to search a 6,000- and a 15,000-square-foot rubble pile with four to six “victims” hidden in the two piles; other items such as food and clothing are also hidden as distractions. The dogs have 20 minutes to search each pile, and the dog can’t miss more than one of the “victims”; if the dog alerts to any object other than the human, the dog fails. Thanks to her go-go attitude and intense focus, Pearl aced the test.

  But there was little time to celebrate: On January 12, 2010, 17 days after Pearl’s graduation, an enormous earthquake hit Haiti, and Pearl and Horetski were deployed as part of a canine search-and-rescue team. “It was like a war zone. Everywhere there were crushed buildings. I remember looking around and thinking, ‘Where do we even start?’ ” says Horetski. “You find someone buried five floors below, and it takes 12 to 38 hours to get them out. Pearl had to climb over dead bodies and human remains. And because it was so hot, I had to give her IVs of fluid just to keep her hydrated.”

  Hard at work in Haiti, Pearl looks for survivors of the earthquake in the rubble. (illustration credit 20.2)

  Pearl and Horetski, along with other teammates, recovered 12 survivors during their mission. Dogs can detect the presence of a body where people can’t, thanks to their stunning olfactory skills; James Walker, the former director of the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University, found that dogs’ sense of smell is thousands of times more powerful than that of humans, allowing rescue dogs like Pearl to go where no man can (at least in a sensory way). At first, Haitians, who are generally unaccustomed to dogs as pets, had been terrified by Pearl and her canine colleagues. But by the end of the team’s stay in Haiti, says Horetski, “they were walking up and giving us hugs. Watching Pearl do what she was trained to do—it was just awesome.”