Angel on a Leash. David Frei
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or unhealthy, or if the dog is not properly insured or not appropriate for visiting, then all of us involved in therapy work are going to pay for it, no matter what with which organization we are registered.
If you want to become part of a therapy dog team, please do something for me, for the facilities that our teams visit, for the people who volunteer, for the people who benefit from our visits, and for the medical professionals who believe in us and support our work—do us all a favor. And do yourself a favor. Maintain and protect the integrity of the work by dealing with therapy dog organizations that do it right, as described above.
For Angel On A Leash facilities, we ask that our teams be registered through Delta Society. That way, we know how they have been trained and evaluated, that they are being provided with $1,000,000 in liability insurance coverage by their registering organization, that their health status is continuously monitored, and that they are subject to timely reevaluations. Recognizing that you may face geographic challenges in finding an organization, you should know that there may be other registering bodies that do this, too, but keep these key points in mind as you move forward with your dog.
While the American Kennel Club does not certify therapy dogs, it now works with over fifty-five organizations that register therapy dogs, including Bright and Beautiful Therapy Dogs, Delta Society Pet Partners Program, Love on a Leash, Therapy Dogs Incorporated (TD Inc.), and Therapy Dogs International (TDI), to recognize the great work that dogs do in this area. In addition to the AKC’s recognition of one outstanding therapy dog as part of its annual AKC Humane Fund Awards for Canine Excellence (ACE), in 2011 the club began offering the AKC Therapy Dog title (THD). The criteria for the title require that a registered therapy dog be either registered or listed with the AKC (this includes purebred and mixed-breed dogs) and perform no fewer than fifty community service visits. For more information, visit www.akc.org/akctherapydog.
Just Whistle if You Need Me
When I first moved to New York, my friend Karen LeFrak suggested that I bring my dogs to join her and her Standard Poodles, Jewel and Diamond, in visiting at Mount Sinai Medical Center, and we jumped right in. When I first started there, we could only visit patients in the recreational therapy room; no in-room visits were allowed. The physical therapists would bring the patients to us, and that could create some special moments.
One night, Teigh and I had just completed a quiet visit with a patient. I looked across the room and saw two boys, maybe in their late teens, sitting in high-backed wheelchairs. In front of them were a man and a woman, each of them feeding one of the boys. I guessed that the boys were brothers and that the man and woman were their parents. They seemed a little grim, so I also surmised that the boys were quadriplegic. I had no way of knowing, but perhaps the best guess was that they had been in some kind of an auto accident.
Teigh looked over at them and apparently caught the eye of one of the boys. The boy whistled. Teigh’s ears went up, and he stood and started to wag his tail. The mother looked at me and smiled. I asked, “Can we come over and visit?” Mom looked to Dad, and I surmised a little more—that they and may not speak English. She said something to him in Spanish, and he looked at us and waved us over.
We walked across the room, and I said to the group, “Hi, my name is David, and this is Teigh, my therapy dog.” I got a smiling, wordless response. OK, so they don’t speak English. Try again. “Hola, soy David y este es mi perro, Teigh.” Smiles from all. Please no more Spanish, I thought. That’s all I got.
The father pointed: “Miguel … Juanito.” I pointed to him and his wife: “Padre y madre?” “Si.”
The boys were smiling but not too active, as one might imagine. Teigh went to the whistler—Miguel—first, and sat down in front of him, looking up at him. Miguel whistled again, and it became very evident to me that he couldn’t move his arms. Teigh tilted his head from side to side and stood up. One more whistle. Teigh lay down and rolled over. Laughter all around.
I was thrilled with this, and he had done it without any prompting from me. Good boy, Teigh. He stood there, wagging his little stub of a tail, soaking up the excitement. He found a scrap of food on the floor, probably something that had fallen off the tray. I’m not really supposed to encourage him to do that, but I saw that it was a piece of bread, so I pretended not to notice that he had found some contraband.
Next, I directed Teigh over in front of the other boy. Juanito was still smiling, but apparently he couldn’t whistle like his brother. That was OK, because what he could do was move his right arm. He slid his arm over to the side and dropped it off the tray so that his hand landed palm open and facing Teigh.
Teigh, God love him, ran right over there and high-fived him, slapping his paw into Juanito’s open palm. Madre was crying; Padre was fighting back the tears; the boys were laughing it up. I knew that they hadn’t had a moment like this for a while. Teigh found another scrap of food on the floor and seemed to know that it was put there for him.
Madre and Padre reached down and petted Teigh in a most loving way; I know that they were saying thanks for the moment. Teigh’s exit move, this time with a little direction from the guy on the other end of his leash, was another rollover. Lots of smiles and wide eyes.
It was a great walk home for us that night.
Mount Sinai was several blocks from our apartment, and most nights I would want to take a cab so that Teigh or Belle wouldn’t get too dirty walking there. It often could be tough to get a cab to stop for a dog, as the law says that cab drivers have to pick up a service dog, but picking up any other dog is up to them. So there were some things that I would do to help get us a cab.
Most of the time, I would set out for the hospital and just hide the dog behind a garbage can or a mailbox while I flagged down the cab. I would have to be quick enough so that the driver couldn’t just drive off upon seeing the dog (which some occasionally did), tossing the dog in the back and then jumping in. I sometimes would have the dogs wearing their therapy vests in the hope that it would let the cab driver know that these were clean, special dogs. That didn’t always help, and I usually did not have them in their vests for visits anyway. In any case, finding a cab was often a challenge, and I would sometimes find myself either arguing with drivers who had stopped or shouting something as they drove off.
Once we were in the cab, I would do whatever I could to help future considerations. To begin, the dog would ride on the floor in the back seat, something that I would happily point out. I would also tell drivers that we were going to the hospital to visit people in need, and that the dog had just had a bath. Sometimes that struck a chord with the drivers, sometimes not. In any case, I would always tip a little extra and be sure to thank the drivers for taking the dog.
Are these drivers going to pick up the next dog that they see? Maybe not—but then again, maybe.
One night, a driver picked up Belle and me for the trip to Mount Sinai.
“Hey, thanks for taking the dog,” I said as I put her on the floor and told him where we were going.
“Dogs are better than a lot of my passengers,” he said. We laughed together. “She looks very nice.”
“Thank you from us both,” I said, “She just had a bath. I’m glad someone appreciates my hard work. She’s a therapy dog on her way to the hospital to visit patients.”
“They let her in the hospital?”
(One of the great things about New York City—especially with cab drivers—is the great range of cultures. For many of them, who come from countries and cultures in which dogs are afterthoughts at best and pariahs at worst, having a dog in a hospital is unimaginable. This is something else that