Sharon Sakson - Paws & Effect: The Healing Power of Dogs

Dogs are assisting people in all kinds of amazing ways. I am highly impressed by this well-written book. Paws & Effect is a great book for all dog lovers!

Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation

The reader will find much that is fascinating and much that is deeply moving in Paws & Effect. There is abundant evidence herein on the marvel of our relationship with dogs.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs

In a series of interesting, informative, and often poignant stories about real people, Sharon Sakson tells you about how dogs help to heal the mind and the body. After reading this book you may well start feeling that having a dog in home is like having a special kind of doctor in your house.

Stanley Coren, author of How Dogs Think and The Intelligence of Dogs

So meaningful and straight to the heart, Paws & Effect sheds a whole new light on our communication with animals of which many people are unaware. You may listen more closely the next time your dog tries to tell you something!

Betty White, actress and author

Astonishing, informative, and heartwarming stories of how dogs detect illness, mend our disabilities, and console our fears.

Ted Kerasote, author of Merles Door

This gem of a book confirms what I already feel: that my bond with my dog is deep, and aids the collective health of my family. Paws & Effect is a must-read!

David Mizejewski, host of Backyard Habitat on Animal Planet

What I loved was that the book showed you the all-stars of the canine world, and then ordinary dogs who do extraordinary things every day, like my dogs. Arent they amazing? This book by Sharon Sakson certainly proves that once and for all.

Sue Simmons, NBC News

Inspiring and warmly told.

Library Journal

by David Frei
COHOST, WESTMINSTER KENNEL CLUB DOG SHOW, USA NETWORK

In my work as the national spokesperson for Delta Society and as president of Angel On A Leash (a charity of the Westminster Kennel Club), I have personally seen thousands of very special people living wonderful stories every day as a result of their direct contact with the healing power of dogs.

Through agencies such as Delta Society, the Good Dog Foundation, Therapy Dogs International, and, recently, Angel On A Leash, the numbers of active service and therapy dogs continue to rise in an expanding variety of settings. Their missions-in-common, about which their leaders and volunteers are passionate, are improving human health and quality of life through the human-animal bond.

As Sharon Sakson shows us in Paws & Effect, the roles of therapy and service dogs often overlap as both helpers and healers of their human charges, and the results can be amazing!

I saw this for myself through witnessing the experience of a man named Mike Lingenfelter, a type-A personality, who had been left with extensive heart damage and unstable angina after emergency open-heart surgery. I first met Mike ten years ago when he was chosen as a Beyond Limits Delta Society Award winner. Years earlier, he had been talked into getting a therapy dog by his psychiatrist and his cardiologist to help him deal with his suicidal depression and make him get much-needed exercise. Reluctant at first, Mike eventually got into animal-assisted therapy in a serious way with a Golden Retriever named Dakota (the dog was himself a rescue with a heart problem). Within months, Mike found life worth living again, even though he was dealing with crippling angina attacks every few weeks.

Then, amazingly, Dakota learned to sense when Mike was about to have a heart crisis. He would alert Mike that the crisis was coming before Mike could feel it himself, and this allowed Mike to take his medication early enough to head off the worst of the effects. As Mikes protector, Dakota saved his life many times with this alerting behavior, and this allowed Mike to return to the workforce, with Dakota acting as his service dog. (Thats just part of the incredible story, which became the subject of a book Mike and I co-wrote: The Angel by My Side, named Book of the Year in 2003 by the Dog Writers Association of America.)

Sharons research for Paws & Effect took her to academic institutions, veterinarians offices, dog breeders, charitable organizations, and even the military, wherein she discovered documentation for what so many of us understand (and what Delta Society has been telling everyone for the last thirty years!): that the loving presence of a dog can avert, and transport us through, grave illness, whether physical or psychological.

But even more important, Sharons investigation took her deep into the hearts and lives of dogs and their owners.

My friend and colleague Mike Lingenfelter said of his beloved Dakota: He didnt just help meI know many people who met Dakota and were blessed by him and had their lives changed forever Dakota has presented to the world the power of the human-animal bond and the lesson that Gods four-legged creatures have special powersif wed just take the time to listen and try to understand them.

As author Sharon Sakson makes clear in Paws & Effect, dogs are not only faithful and intuitive companions, but also, on a deeper level, spiritual guides, who, in their resilience, intelligence, affability, courage, and perseverance, both model and support healthy living.

For thousands of years, dogs were bred to do specific jobs for their humansguarding the flocks, moving livestock from one place to another, helping hunters bring home dinner for the family, pulling carts, ridding the home and farm of pests and vermin, or even serving as a foot warmer in bed.

The Industrial Revolution eliminated a lot of those jobs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as machinery was created to do those tasks. Suddenly, the dogs were out of work. But that was okay; they were now being bred mostly for companionship instead of performance.

But what made it even more okay was when we humans figured out that we could provide them with another job: taking care of us.

In the end, here is what it comes down to: We should worry less about what we teach our dogs, and more about what we learn from them.

SEPTEMBER 2007