EXCERPTS FROM: Take One Dog and Call Me in the Morning:
This book highlights the transformational powers of the human-animal bond, from the narrator’s childhood longings for a puppy to her grown-up search for a companion dog that is destined to change many lives, including her own. It features Holly Go Lightly, Golden Retriever and certified therapy dog as she helps launch UCLA’s People-Animal Connection program and is the first canine permitted inside the confidential Neuro-psychiatric Hospital. Here Holly uses her instincts to identify and reach out to patients in distress.
Can every dog in every household become a therapy dog? A working team requires a calm and assertive human leader of a relaxed and confident canine. Holly’s ultimate success as a therapy dog evolves from this balanced relationship with her human partner who learns how to take charge of her dog and of her life.
Prologue
I suspect it all began the day I watched my mother push up the kitchen window and pour a scalding kettle of water two stories down to scatter the ‘alley cats.’ I felt sick to my stomach. I heard the painful yowls of alarm from the alley and I ran to the window to look, but the cats were gone. In that instant of horror, I knew that animals were vulnerable—they could feel terror–like me.
My mother considered all animals unclean, and cats particularly nasty, like vermin, and as abhorrent as the rodents my father caught in those springed death traps. The goal was to get rid of all pests.
My mother had a unique means of disciplining me. She used the telephone on the kitchen wall.“Hello? Is this the New York City Department of Correction?—I have a bad child— Can you come and take her?” She sounded calm.She would get rid of me too.I was seven years old and threw myself onto the floor screaming, “I’ll be good, I’ll be good…..don’t send me away.” I didn’t know what being good meant. But Mothers don’t lie and I was afraid for my life. I knew for sure I was a bad child, bad like the alley cats she drove away, bad like the squirming mice that I saw pinned to wooden traps and suffering a slow death in the kitchen in the early hours before my father got up and drowned them in the toilet.I lay screaming and writhing on the cold lineolum while on the stove the chicken soup simmered with the smells of home and mother mingling with the perspiration of my fear.
I would feel a kinship with animals again.
When I was twelve years old, I stood in front of the leopard cage at the Central Park Zoo in New York City.I watched the large cat pace back and forth on the cement floor. At first I thought of the fur coats that rich women wore, flashing large velvety black spots against an amber background. Then the animal turned and looked at me.I gazed into the depth of his golden eyes. There was someone in there.It shook me. A prisoner in a small concrete cage, he was left forever to pace without purpose or dignity simply because of the misfortune of his beauty and wildness.I saw in his haunted eyes the same look I had seen at the circus when I stared at the captive gorilla, and he stared back at me. I recognized the sorrow in those dark eyes.
This awareness foreshadowed the deep relationship I would have with animals throughout my life.As an adult, I rescued lost and abandoned dogs and cats on the streets of Los Angeles.Unable to tolerate abuse in any form; I couldn’t bear their suffering and their helplessness. I studied telepathic communication with an animal psychic in order to communicate with them, to find out who they were and what they thought and felt, and to learn how much like me they were.I swam with dolphins in pools inevitably too small for these wild creatures, and shuddered that they too were exploited for our entertainment and worst of all that I had participated in their captivity.I experienced hybrid wolves confined to a few acres surrounded by invisible electric wires and heard their screams at night as they ran through the boundaries, willing to tolerate electric shock rather than give up their freedom and wildness. I visited Kenya to see firsthand, the lions, giraffe, wildebeests, and other wildlife that lived in the Serengeti and was shocked to realize that they too were existing in man-made reserves and that they were attractions, and that I willingly came as a tourist.I studied animal behavior with the same compulsion that drove me to study human behavior, and to surround myself with vulnerable children as a teacher and School Psychologist.I wanted to understand how anyone could allow animal suffering.I wanted to know why I was wounded.
I became conscious of the interspecies connection and how we need it to be fully human.I awakened to the idea that animals are authentic living beings, that they are honest in the moment, and that we have a deep and primal relationship with them. I saw a nobility in animals—a purity. This passion transformed and inspired my life.
It led me to find the companion dog that was destined to provide powerful healing energy to the disabled, diseased, injured, and depressed.Through her I would witness the human-animal bond at its highest level.Through her I would find purpose and healing in my own life.