On the second Tuesday of Boo’s first September, Mom and Dad were flying to Chicago from Florida to see Chuck for what they believed was probably going to be one of his last birthdays, on the 13th. (Halloween will always, for me, be associated with bringing Boo home, and September 13 will always be my brother’s birthday.) I was working from home, awaiting the arrival of the bug man. The autumn always called for a full spray of the outside of the house for spiders, ants and other opportunistic critters that might try to move into our warm home as the outside temperatures began to drop.
Boo was closing in on his first full year on this planet. His service-dog training for Chuck had come to a grinding halt, and his potty-training was still stalled at unreliable, with intermittent successes, but at least now I had a reason.
When the bug man showed up, I put down my coffee and took advantage of his arrival for puppy socialization exercises. As the morning news played in the background, I asked him to pet the dogs, especially the puppy in training (no matter what Boo did with his life, he still needed to be a social dog). The bug man was happy to comply and pet the dogs before descending into the dark and icky crawl space. Nothing could have been more mundane that second Tuesday in Boo’s first September than the scene of the bug man and me standing in my kitchen, reviewing the disclaimer for the toxins he was going to be spraying on the outside of the house.
“You know this one. We used it last time,” he said. “It’ll take about two hours to dry, so keep the dogs inside until then.”
“Will do,” I said, as I signed the form.
“And this paper is just to remind you to keep the pets away from the bait. I always put it where they can’t get it, but—”
“This just in,” said the anchor on the TV. “You are looking at obviously a very disturbing, live shot. That is the World Trade Center there, and we have unconfirmed reports that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.”
Sucked into the television images, the bug man and I couldn’t speak. We simply stood there, open-mouthed, making noises of horror and disbelief, watching the live footage of the devastation. I have no idea how long he lingered there watching the news with me, but at some point, he remembered he was working. He reminded me about the spray, and I nodded as if I heard him. I tried to call Lawrence, but the phone lines were already making the fast busy signal that meant they were down or overloaded.
I worried about my parents on their early morning flight from Florida to Chicago. It wasn’t long before the news released the origination cities of the hijacked planes, so at least that worry was off the table. My second worry was did they get to Chicago before all air travel was suspended, or were they downed somewhere between Tampa and O’Hare? I tried to call, but those lines were down, too.
As I watched the towers fall in real time and then in slow motion over and over again, I was reminded of Pearl Harbor, Kristallnacht, the London Blitz and every other major event of the Second World War that began with a bang and issued in months of devastation and the march of millions to the death camps. My mind raced ahead to worst-case scenarios. Things were already shutting down—phones, airlines. What would be next? I knew there would be retaliation, but when? And would there be interruption of other services? Gas shortages? Food shortages?
I decided that working with Dante would focus my head on something more soothing and constructive, and perhaps other people whom we met as we did our normal training routine around the strip mall would appreciate the opportunity to pet the friendly dog and take a break from the insanity of the day. Before I could leave, Boo had to go out because he would most certainly have to go again before I got back from my errands. So out we went, forgetting all about the toxins on the deck and in the grass. As Boo peed, I suddenly remembered the bug man’s warnings and grabbed Boo in a panic, running back into the house with him still streaming the last of his pee as we went. I wiped his paws and even up his legs very thoroughly to be sure he wouldn’t lick any of the toxins off and poison himself.
Once we were on the road, Dante was happily riding along in his usual spot in the cab of the truck, with his unusually long tongue dangling out to one side. About ten minutes into the ride, I started feeling uncomfortable. My heart started racing, and I was sweating profusely. Then I realized I couldn’t remember where I was taking Dante. I have enough trouble with directions in general that Lawrence painted markers on the trees on our property so I could find my way home when out on walks with the dogs, but this time my confusion was intense. Even looking back, I’m still not sure where I got off the highway or how I ended up driving into the parking lot of the Croton Falls Fire Department. The emergency workers, desperate to put their skills to use, descended on me like stretched-out rubber bands suddenly let loose as I stumbled my way out of the truck. I couldn’t answer simple questions like my name or where I was going. On any other afternoon, I would have been asked who they could call, and that would have been that. On this day, they needed to help someone, and there I was, in need of some help.
The ambulance took me and Dante—he was happy to ride with me, sporting his goofy grin—to the emergency room nearby, and somebody got through to Lawrence. The emergency room was strangely empty that afternoon, and every emergency worker we ran into was frustrated by not being able to go directly to the fallen towers. They all badly needed to do something for someone, and in my confused, dazed way, I provided them with an outlet, at least for a moment in time. It turned out that when I’d wiped Boo’s feet and legs clean of the bug man’s poisons, I’d completely forgotten to wipe my own.
The hospital treated the toxins in my poisoned system with intravenous fluids and some juice. Dante, meanwhile, was the hit of the emergency room. Once the staff realized I was going to recover my senses, they started paying attention to him—sick people they saw every day, but Dante was something special. I had known he was going to do good work that day, but I just hadn’t realized how. As I have come to expect from Boo, he set into motion that day—in his almost Gump-esque way—the chain of events that provided these folks with what they needed most: someone to save while they waited to be dispatched to Ground Zero. By the time Lawrence got to the emergency room, my head had cleared, my heart was back to normal and I felt like an idiot. Embarrassment was a small price to pay for the chance to offer those emergency workers—frustrated and anxious that they couldn’t be of more help where they were really needed—the relief that comes from the smile of a goofy dog and the tranquility that comes from petting the deep, inviting fur of an engaging animal.
I continued to think about our misadventure for the rest of the day and what a big stress reliever Dante had been for the emergency workers, and by that evening, Diane Pennington and I were talking about getting H.A.R.T. teams involved in some kind of therapeutic activity for the survivors, relief workers and families of the victims of 9/11. We didn’t know yet what we would be doing, but like just about everyone else on the face of the planet, we knew we had to do something. We had trained dogs and teams that could provide relief, distraction and compassion, and I had seen firsthand how effectively Dante filled a need when he brightened the mood in the emergency room. We could only guess at what else our teams could bring to people trying to overcome this devastation, slogging their way through the nightmare that had just turned them emotionally inside out.
Just three years before, Pet Partners’ teams were called in to assist the National Organization for Victim Assistance after the May 1998 Thurston High School shooting in Springfield, Oregon, that left four dead and two dozen injured. Cindy Ehlers (with her dog Bear) and Sandi Arrington (with her dog Garth) of Animal Assisted Crisis Response (AACR) broke ground by offering comfort and support to students, teachers and families in the wake of that tragedy. But AACR on the scale we were all considering was uncharted territory, so we figured our only option was to chart it.
Every year, more experts accept the effectiveness of visiting animals in therapeutic settings to ease emotional trauma. Animals can work with kids who are getting ready to testify against their parents in child abuse cases, calm college students under the pressures of finals, comfort cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and act as assistants and sounding boards for clinical therapists treating patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. A 2008 study found that after patients with psychiatric disorders were teamed up with dogs, 84% reported that their symptoms improved, and 66% needed less medication. But in 2001, we had only the groundbreaking work of Cindy Ehlers and a few others to support our belief that we could help the families of 9/11 victims and the relief workers on site.
Within days, we partnered with neighboring visiting organizations, such as Hudson Valley Visiting Pet Program in Rockland County, Paw Prints on our Hearts in Putnam County, the Good Dog Foundation, the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), Dogs in Service in New Jersey and individuals like Liz Teal (my initial evaluator and mentor to many). All of us knew what our dogs could do in times of grief and other major emotional tumult in our own lives, and we had seen what they did on our regular visits to nursing homes, hospitals, psychiatric facilities, pediatric oncology wards and other similar venues. We scrambled into action like a hodgepodge of knitting circle/fighter pilots on red alert.
As soon as the city announced the formation of the Family Assistance Center at Pier 94, we had a place to go. At the center, the Red Cross, along with other private and governmental organizations, was going to provide disaster relief for the families and loved ones of people lost in the Twin Towers and the planes. It was a brilliant, if macabre, way of bringing together all the support the survivors would need. Families could go there for help with searching for loved ones. If that search proved fruitless—as it unfortunately did for so many—they would then need help with requesting death certificates, insurance benefits and other social services. Along with these practical services, families would also need emotional support—maybe someone to talk to, maybe someone for their kids to talk to or maybe someone for ongoing assistance. We suspected this would turn into a psychic black hole of epic size, but we were also certain our dogs could help keep some of these folks from spiraling into a vortex of depression as they adjusted to their new world.
The Family Assistance Center was going to be a place filled with such sorrow, anger, loss and confusion that we knew we needed specialized help to prepare the visiting teams. Few of us had ever prepared our dogs for anything like the huge emotions that they would face at the center. It was going to be vital for handlers to know their own emotional limitations to avoid burnout and also be able to support their dogs through the emotions they would be absorbing. Visiting dogs are like emotional sponges, and handlers needed a way to navigate these deep waters of grief so we could provide our animals for help and whatever assistance the actual trained therapists needed.
We asked Liz Teal and Maureen Fredrickson to help us all understand what our dogs might experience on this kind of visit and how we handlers could help and support them. Both Liz and Maureen were involved with Pet Partners from almost the very beginning; they were pioneers in shaping policies and the art of therapeutic visiting. By the Sunday after September 11, with Maureen and Liz in place, we had a room filled with eager handlers all chomping at the bit to go do something in the wake of the tragedy. We covered grieving, caregiver burnout, active listening and more. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when Liz told a story to drive home the point that it was the dogs themselves who often knew better than any of us humans what suffering people needed in the face of overwhelming emotions.
On the morning of September 11, Liz was out walking her dog in a lovely, manicured park in northern Manhattan when the towers were struck. On that blissfully sun-filled, early fall walk with her lovely Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Annie, Liz knew nothing about the events happening several miles south of her. Passing an older man on a park bench, she noticed he was bent over what looked like an old transistor radio. Not thinking too much of this, she continued on her walk, but Annie had other ideas. The little fourteen-pound dog pulled insistently toward the man on the bench. Liz wondered what could make an otherwise good, loose-leash-walking dog like Annie behave in such an anomalous manner, but she knew, from years of working with various animals in a visiting setting, to trust the animal, so she let her dog lead her to the man. The sweet little Cavalier jumped with fluid motion onto the bench, and the older man’s arms, with an equally fluid motion, wrapped themselves automatically around the petite dog. As he huddled with her, he began weeping. Still unaware of what was happening, Liz sat down with the stranger as he snuggled Annie and continued crying into the silken fur of this patient little creature.
Liz’s understanding came in horrible pieces. First, she noticed the tattooed numbers on his arm, and she wondered what could make this man, a Nazi death camp survivor, weep with such ferocity. She wondered, Has he lost someone? Was it an anniversary that only he knew, the birthday of a lost loved one, or the day he was liberated? Liz couldn’t ask for details; she could only wait until he seemed more composed. As if in response to her unspoken questions, he turned up the radio and held it out so she could hear the explanation that was muffled in his coat and Annie’s fur. The two of them sat together, weeping for the current tragedy and the tragedies of the past, while Annie did her best to keep them both grounded in what is good and joyful in the human–animal bond.
Listening to Liz tell this story, I wondered if Dante was the right dog for the Family Assistance Center. I was torn between knowing that as a bounding, ebullient tongue bandito who licked first and asked questions later, this whirling dervish of a dog might do wonders for many at the center; but maybe a quieter dog was better suited for this venue. Regardless of his aptitude for this work, he was almost six and was showing signs that his hip dysplasia was starting to affect him. The sixty-plus-mile drive to the Family Assistance Center was something he would do if I asked him to, but for dogs with joint issues, driving can be painful, as the act of balancing when the car turns, stops and starts puts a lot of pressure on the joints. Since I had already discovered Dante’s hip dysplasia when he began to falter on his favorite Scooby Doo trick, I didn’t want him to endure that kind of pain and discomfort on the way to the pier. I couldn’t sign him up for these visits.
Dogs are infamous for their lack of display when they are in minor to moderate pain, so it’s often hard to tell whether they are. We’ve all seen our dogs run headfirst into a coffee table or other solid object, only to walk it off. A similar situation for humans would result in much howling and cursing, or at the very least a pause in activity. Some people take dogs’ stoic reaction to pain as permission to use harsh training methods—if they don’t feel it, then it can’t hurt, right? The reality, though, is that they do feel it. There are measurable and fairly standard chemical responses to pain, both in dogs and humans. Dogs are probably more stoic than humans when it comes to pain simply because it’s not advantageous for them to display pain as radically as humans do. A dog who is injured while hunting for dinner and stops to say, “Owie!” will lose her dinner. If she wants to eat, she has to keep moving and check her pain until later. Our dogs’ ethology (animal behavior) is altogether different from ours: a quiet dog isn’t necessarily a pain-free dog, and a growling, snarling, barking dog might be responding to pain rather than displaying territorial or other types of aggression. In the end, no dog in unmanaged or undetermined pain should be working. This is a setup for mistakes as minor as simply blowing off a client or as major as growling, snapping or biting.
Giving Dante a break, I went on the Family Assistance Center visits as a team leader with the teams from H.A.R.T. Programs and worked to help Diane as a co–program leader. As a team leader, I was in a unique position to observe what these dogs were doing for the people inside the center. My job was to accompany a team made up of one handler and one dog as their support. If they needed to get through a crowd, it was my job to part the waters. If clients were monopolizing the team, it was my job to interrupt and say the dog was needed elsewhere but would be back later. If something was happening with a client that could not be interrupted, it was my job to let others know that the team would be delayed. I was also on lookout—it’s amazing what people will sometimes do to a dog, especially in a very stressful situation.
There was plenty for me to look out for at the Family Assistance Center as we were met by folks in need as soon as teams arrived at the entrance. Every Red Cross worker who had to leave a dog at home needed the affection of one of our visiting dogs. Even the typically stoic military police at the entrances and checkpoints got into the dogs.
“Ooh, what a nice dog,” one remarked.
“I had one just like that!” exclaimed another. “Can I pet your dog?”
The officers’ high-pitched, talking-to-dog voices were positively gooey.
Clearly, these support personnel were in as much need as the family members who had lost someone. I couldn’t help smiling when I remembered how my accidental poisoning had helped inspire my being there. It was almost as if Boo, the piddling puppy, sent Dante and me in a predetermined direction that day.
Because I knew firsthand just how important these dogs could be for the workers as well as the families, when the support personnel asked if they could pet the dogs, I always answered with a resounding yes. Our teams knew they would be working from the moment they entered the facility because each person they encountered would probably need the kind touch of a visiting dog. Everyone who was in proximity to the events of 9/11 has stories. Some are horrible remembrances of unspeakable trauma, but for us, visiting with our dogs at the Family Assistance Center, the stories are about the palpable emotions that people wore like heavy, wet clothing and how the interactions with our dogs seemed to lighten that burden a little. The unconditional love that dogs give us allows us to see them as pure in the face of our tragedies and sorrows and allows us to use them like a sponge to soak up those emotions. Although they don’t fix the problem, they can give us a moment of Zen. We remove ourselves from the tumult to ease our blood pressures and our souls as we feel the warm fur of a friendly, comforting animal against our fingers.
Diane and I also collected post-visit reports from the teams. Probably one of the greatest follow-up reports came from Diane herself and her wonderful golden, Hunter.
Two weeks after the Twin Towers fell, Diane and Hunter were in the kids’ corner at the Family Assistance Center with Bobbie, a little boy who still hadn’t spoken a word about the loss of his father. Bobbie’s mother and the staff were reasonably worried about him. Busy drawing when Hunter entered with Diane, Bobbie saw them and put down his crayons to go see the lovely eighty-plus pounds of smiling, golden-coated fringe.
“What’s his name?” Bobbie asked.
“Hunter,” said Diane.
“How old is he?”
“Just about three,” she answered.
“What kind of dog is he?” Bobbie kept on asking question after question.
Diane realized Bobbie was probably going to exhaust even her knowledge of Hunter, so she suggested, “Would you like to take Hunter for a walk?”
Bobbie was up and ready for his walk as he said yes, then remembered to check in with his mother.
Diane said to them both, “We can all go together.”
When we do a “stranger” walk with our dogs on a visit, the client takes the handle of the leash while the handler maintains control over the dog by holding the center of the leash. This allows the handler to be a buffer to prevent any unwanted tension on the dog’s collar or harness and keeps the dog from tripping or pulling the client. It was impossible for Bobbie and his mom to walk around the Family Assistance Center with a big, beautiful, friendly dog without being stopped. As folks asked about the gorgeous dog, Diane directed their questions to Bobbie, who by this time knew quite a bit about Hunter and could tell them where he liked to be petted (“just here on the side of his neck”) and how he liked his treats (“slobbery”).
Finally, after Bobbie introduced Hunter to all his adoring fans, Bobbie turned to Diane. “Can I take him to the wall of bears?” he asked.
Diane encouraged him by replying, “You’re in charge. Take us where you’d like to go.”
“It’s over there,” he said as he guided the team to the wall.
The wall of bears was one of the most heartrending things I have ever seen: a wall almost a city block long of teddy bears for loved ones, pictures of the missing and notes of love and remembrances. Once there, Bobbie walked directly to the picture of his father and said to Hunter, “That’s a picture of my dad. That’s my dad.”
Diane answered for Hunter, “I see—that’s your dad.” Bobbie’s mother began to cry, Diane gave up trying not to and soon everybody was crying.
“It’s okay, Mom,” said Bobbie, still holding Hunter’s leash. “It’ll be okay.”
Diane says she remembers thinking two things at that moment: When will it be okay? and What a great kid, comforting his mother like that! Bobbie continued to walk Hunter around the center, proudly answering any and all questions about the dog. For that hour, Bobbie’s job as the Hunter answer man allowed him to forget, a little bit, about his family’s loss.
No one can say whether Bobbie would have spoken about losing his dad that night without Hunter’s presence, but we know that Hunter made things a little easier for everyone in Bobbie’s family.
Once the AACR work at the Family Assistance Center was finished, many of the local groups began to work together to set down some solid protocols and procedures to keep AACR dogs safe and to offer training and resources for teams who wanted to be ready for the next crisis whose survivors might be well served by visiting-dog teams.
As the effort to codify crisis response went on, I spent as much time on it as I could, but I still had Boo, who needed potty-training and beyond. Meanwhile, Dante and I were visiting more and more—adults with developmental disabilities, seniors in a nursing home setting, adult clients in a day-care facility and the Westchester Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in Armonk. This particular BOCES facility taught kids who had multiple disabilities, ranging from toddlers to teenagers. It was a forty-five-minute drive, which was about as much as Dante and I could take before we were both in too much pain to work. The drive was worth it, though. The facility people there were terrific guides when we were interacting with the kids, so it was easy to see who needed what from the dogs, clear who was happy to see the dogs and who wasn’t, and in the end, possible to do actual therapeutic visiting under the direction of therapists.
It was at BOCES that I began to understand the extent of dogs’ power to reach even the seemingly most unreachable. On one visit, a physical therapist brought a beautiful two-year-old boy who was blind and deaf out to see Dante. She explained to me that children born deaf and blind are often reluctant to unclench their fists, and she wanted to see whether petting a dog would allow him to relax enough to open his hands. She cradled the child on her lap on the floor while I sat next to Dante, who was down in a one-hip-over position, flat on his side on the floor. The therapist held the little boy’s hands and gently stroked Dante’s belly. In the large recreation room where we were trying to have this calm, serene visit, zany time went on all around us as dozens of other children played on swings, rode tricycles, pushed and bounced big physioballs and sang music. It was a setting in which it was very hard for Dante to just lay down and not engage with any of the distractions, but he was taking this very seriously. Because it was hard for this little boy to demonstrate any emotion, all we could really look for was the unclenching of his fists, but this didn’t happen.
“Do you think…” said the therapist eventually, embarrassed, as if she were asking for money. “I mean, would Dante mind if Joey petted him with his feet?”
“Of course not,” I said. “He’s a dog. He loves that.”
Since Dante was already lying quietly on his side, I just moved a little closer to his head so the therapist would have more room to maneuver the boy’s feet and legs. She removed his shoes and rubbed his toes against the shepherd-mix’s deep chest and belly while I whispered into Dante’s ear that this was all good and he was doing a great job.
Little by little, the child’s tight, rigid muscles began to relax. Even Dante seemed to drift off for a little bit as the boy’s whole body became soft and tranquil. After a few minutes, the boy opened his hands and rested them on Dante, one on his hind legs and one on his shoulder. The therapist was thrilled. Nothing else she had ever tried had relaxed the child enough to unclench his hands, and Dante managed it in minutes. I was amazed. I also marveled at Dante’s ability to suppress all his natural instincts in a chaotic recreation room full of kids, bikes, swings, music, and as Dr. Seuss would say, noise, noise, noise, noise. He simply lay there quietly for the little boy who needed him. After such a touching moment, Dante just got up and engaged in zany antics with the other kids, as that’s what they needed of him.
It isn’t just the clients who receive a gift when an animal team visits. The caregivers, the handlers and probably even the dogs all feel a connection with other living beings who care and are there for just them at that moment. It is one of the greatest gifts of love we can give one another.
It had been ten years since Atticus had come into my life to show me what the human–animal bond could do to heal. Then, it was Dante’s turn to bring me further understanding of how dogs could heal by teaching me more about dogs, dog language and training skills. But what about Boo?