FurHeads.com Pack Leader Blog

From my Poodles:
“Rinds, Rinds, Cucumber Rinds.
They’re really just not sublime.
We leave them around
The house till they’re found!”

Thanksgiving is typically a time for humans to consider what they have and silently (or not-so-silently, if you have a blog) give thanks for that what ever it is being in our lives. Lots of people start off listing their family members, then they are thankful for jobs, cars, money, and things.

Then, when I ask them if they have an animal sharing their lives, they look at me and say something to the tune of, “Oh, yah. And my dog [or] cat. I like my dog [or] cat.” But it seems to me that, especially from the space of forgetfulness that their memory of their Animal Companion resides, they aren’t truly thankful for the animal in their life.

In fact, I wonder why the animal was invited into their lives in the first place, since they seem to have lost the message the animal had for them. Or, maybe they just couldn’t see the message, as it was too …something.

I decided to do a search to see just how helpful our Dogs are. I know there are dogs who help people who have physical difficulties like blindness and deafness. But did you know they can smell when a seizure is coming on? My Mom’s dog, our Lady Bug, used to alert us to the fact that my niece and nephew’s mom, SRHD, was going to go into an epileptic seizure when SRHD was pregnant with the two kids. We (Mom, Pa, and I) were able to get SRHD to a safe place and then, sure enough, she would experience a a full blown grande mal seizure. Moe was accurate within about 5 minutes of when one was going to happen, too!

Just go out to any search engine and type “dog saves” into the search and see what you come up with. For instance, Clusty.com lists things like dogs saving abandoned babies, rescuing a man from a fire (and losing their own life in the process), there’s even a story of a dog giving a modified Heimlich manuever!

Cats, too, are quite remarkable about saving their humans on a regular basis. One cat even saved it’s family from carbon monoxide poisoning!

Of course, there’s all the dogs who are “trained” to sniff out drugs, heart attacks, epileptic seizures, low blood sugar, high blood sugar, migraines and a host of other things that, in reality, the dog trained the humans to recognize that the dog already knew! Then the humans turned around and “trained” the dog by gifting them with treats each time they sniffed out the search item correctly.

So, I’d like to take a few moments and really THANK all the Animals for saving so many lives, for caring for their humans, for showing us how to love unconditionally, for being wonderful additions to each of our lives.

Happy Thanksgiving!