| NAME: | Dakota |
| SPECIES: | Golden retriever |
| DATE: | 1995 to 2001 |
| LOCATION: | Texas |
| SITUATION: | Man suffering unstable angina and depression |
| WHO WAS SAVED: | Fifty-four-year-old Mike Lingenfelter |
| LEGACY: | First dog to detect heart attacks, internationally renowned, won numerous awards |
The last thing Mike Lingenfelter wanted was a therapy dog.
He said that when doctors first suggested he get one, “I laughed, ‘You gotta be kidding,’ I told them. ‘There’s no way.’”
In 1992, Mike had had two heart attacks only a week apart, which required open-heart surgery. Afterward, the heart damage this caused led him to suffer unstable angina—extremely painful, unpredictable episodes when the blood to the heart is temporarily restricted. The angina attacks “felt as if my chest was being squeezed in a vise,” he said.
Mike had to quit his job as a public transit engineer, and over the next two years, he became depressed and suicidal. He knew he was making life miserable for his wife, Nancy, but that only increased his desire to be gone.
“I was fifty-four years old,” Mike said, “and I felt like my life was over. I was sitting around waiting to die.”
BAD HEARTS AND SECOND CHANCES
His doctors kept insisting: A therapy dog would provide comfort and give him something to focus on besides himself. After all, caring for another is excellent medicine.
Angry at the world, Mike stubbornly refused.
Then, in 1994, his doctors threatened to hospitalize Mike if he didn’t get a therapy dog, so he relented. Local connections hooked Mike up with a rescued golden retriever named Dakota, who had only failed service dog training because of heartworm disease and an old hip injury.
Dakota didn’t make a good first impression. On the first night, “he’d pick things up, haul them around,” Mike said. “You know, all retriever. The next morning I was ready to take him back.”
Dakota had a favorite toy, a stuffed green frog, which he kept offering to Mike over and over, insisting that he take it. Mike told Nancy, “This is the most obnoxious animal I’ve ever been around.”
Nancy wasn’t having it. “He’s just like you,” she retorted. Both of them had bad hearts and were getting second chances.
That got to Mike. When he took Dakota for a morning walk, he saw the animal with new eyes. Dakota had an intelligent, inviting face; there was, Mike had to admit, something special about him. By walk’s end, Mike’s resistance had melted, and he agreed to keep Dakota.
ONE ALERT CANINE
As it turned out, the doctors were right. Within weeks, Mike was, in his own words, “too busy tending to Dakota to spend any time feeling sorry for myself or thinking about suicide.”
Within six months, he no longer needed his anxiety medication, and he’d become a true believer in animal-assisted therapy—so much so that in spring 1995, Mike decided to share Dakota. They visited hospitals and care centers, where Dakota would interact with sick kids and the elderly.
A little more than a year later, in fall 1996, Mike was giving a school presentation on therapy dogs, when Dakota began acting funny. He pawed and nosed at Mike as if he wanted something. Mike took Dakota into the hallway and was immediately laid low by an angina attack.
Mike had at least one to two attacks a week, and by then Dakota had seen hundreds of episodes. Mike wondered, had Dakota’s odd behavior signaled this one? He didn’t believe it. But sure enough, the next time one occurred, Dakota did the same thing, performing the classic signaling of a seizure-alert dog.
From that moment on, Dakota alerted Mike every single time an angina attack was imminent, usually two to five minutes ahead. This allowed Mike to find a safe place to lie down and take preventive medication that eased the symptoms. Further, Dakota soon joined Mike during the episodes, providing him physical comfort.
“I just plain hold on to him until the pain passes,” Mike said. “He has taught me to pick up his breathing rate to prevent me from hyperventilating when the pain is beyond my ability to tolerate.”
Dakota was the first dog to demonstrate the ability to recognize heart problems.
“No one taught Dakota this behavior—he learned it himself,” Mike said. “And I, of course, had no idea that he could ever do such a thing.”
Mike registered Dakota as an official service dog, allowing Dakota to accompany Mike everywhere he went.
SAVING MORE LIVES
No one knows exactly what a dog senses prior to a seizure or heart attack. The animal may smell a chemical change or enzyme or notice a subtle physical tremor. Yet dogs who have this ability can now be trained to signal or “alert” when an attack is coming.
It was Dakota who eventually put two and two together and decided to intervene with Mike. Once, the furry, auburn-haired guardian even woke up Mike and Nancy when Mike was having a full-blown heart attack in his sleep. If Dakota hadn’t, Mike surely would have died.
With Dakota next to him, Mike was able to return to work. He became an engineer for DART, the Dallas Area Rapid Transit, and Dakota soon expanded his life-saving efforts. In 1999, on three separate occasions, Dakota signaled on three of Mike’s coworkers. Though none had had previous heart issues, all three knew and trusted Dakota, and they immediately contacted their doctors. Each found they had unknown but critical heart problems, two of which required immediate surgery.
In his book The Angel by My Side, Mike also tells the story of a very different type of intervention. That year, when Mike was on a business trip, Dakota also alerted on a stranger, a young man who casually dismissed the dog’s legendary nose. However, Mike learned afterward that only days later the young man committed suicide.
“Maybe it wasn’t physical,” Mike said, “but his heart was definitely in some serious trouble.”
FAME, ADVOCACY, AND ILLNESS
In 1999, Dakota won the Delta Society’s Service Dog of the Year award, and as the media learned of Dakota’s remarkable ability to predict heart attacks, his story and fame spread across the country. People were amazed and disbelieving in equal measure.
In the meantime, Mike was also becoming an advocate for service dogs. In the late 1990s, restaurants and stores were often still unaware of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, which enshrined access for service animals as a legal right. They were also sometimes skeptical of Mike’s “invisible disability,” and they refused to let him enter with Dakota. Rather than suffer quietly, Mike educated those he met, gladly letting them call the police if necessary, since the police knew the law. Dakota’s service vest was his uniform, and it alone was all the proof Mike needed to show that Dakota was a medically necessary companion.
Then, in 2000, at the height of his celebrity, Dakota was diagnosed with lymphoma. In most cases, this would have been a death sentence, but Dakota was a rare individual. After getting state-of-the-art treatment, he miraculously recovered, becoming cancer-free.
Mike’s joy, however, was short-lived. In 2001, Dakota developed a debilitating lung illness that he could not overcome, and he died that summer. But Dakota lived long enough to help train his successor, another golden retriever named Ogilvie—who with no other teacher but Dakota learned to signal Mike’s impending angina attacks as well, but with far less accuracy and consistency.
Mike still has a hard time believing what Dakota was capable of and the love he displayed. He once said, “I never thought angels came with brown eyes and a furry tail, but this one did.”
Companion animals sometimes display an uncanny sixth sense, as if they know things they shouldn’t know. The cat mysteriously hides when it’s time for the vet. A lost pet returns home across a thousand unfamiliar miles. A dog, like Dakota or Cheyenne (see pages 114 and 141), senses someone’s intention to commit suicide and intervenes. A sense of smell doesn’t explain everything, so what’s going on?
Researcher and biologist Rupert Sheldrake wrote about this issue in Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. In it, he examines “three major categories of unexplained perceptiveness in animals: telepathy, the sense of direction, and premonitions.” Sometimes lumped together as “extrasensory perception,” or ESP, Sheldrake proposes these abilities are possible because of “morphic fields,” which are like invisible connections that social animals use to bond to their primary group. Because of these connections, a dog might know at a distance—without any sensory information or clues from routine—that their owner is coming home.
Traditional, mainstream scientists typically say that a “psychic” or supernatural explanation is no explanation at all. Sheldrake’s ideas are controversial. But even if his theories are wrong, he identifies animal behaviors that continue to defy conventional explanation.
For some, the explanation isn’t psychic but spiritual. They feel that companion animals, particularly dogs, have divine gifts to heal us. The Illinois-based Lutheran Church Charities believes that dogs intuitively express God’s love, and so they created their famous Comfort Dog Ministry, which brings trained therapy dogs to visit the bereaved after major tragedies, like the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
Mike Lingenfelter called Dakota an angel, and he didn’t mean metaphorically. Before Dakota, Mike would never have accepted that idea, but after his experiences he wrote: “There are powers at work here in our universe that we can never comprehend. I don’t understand, but I believe . . . because I’ve seen it all.”