At Your Service

I know a few people with service dogs and have seen many others. The dogs provide various services from being the eyes of the owners,  to predicting seizures, to helping the person thru bouts of PTSD. Dogs are amazing, but you all know that.

In our house Tess has her very own service dog. Mackey acts as her translator. Tess isn't great at communication so Mackey has taken on the job of telling us when Tess needs something.

Mackey wakes the three Portie girls every morning and tells them when it's time to go out during the day. She notifies them when it's meal time, though that isn't really necessary. But recently Mackey has started to tell me when Tess is in distress.

Tess is terrified of thunder and fireworks. After the 4th of July it takes weeks before she'll go out after dark. We've had a lot of storms this summer so at our last outing each night Tess doesn't want to go out. When I insist, she glues herself to my leg and will only go a few feet from the door.

If there is a sudden clap of thunder during the night Tess may have an accident from fright.

Toward the end of Noah's life, Mackey woke me a couple times during the night. When she insisted that I get up, it was just in time to catch Noah vomiting.

Last night it was thundering at bedtime. It took Tess a long time to settle down. She paced around the bedroom. At 3:30 Mackey woke me up by standing at the side of the bed, pawing at my arm. I told her to go to sleep, but she wouldn't stop. I got up to see Tess standing at the door. It took me awhile to get a shoe on over my bandaged foot but we finally got outside. Tess just made it out before she pooped.

I praised both Tess and Mackey and we all went back to bed. Mackey has some special sense of when the others, especially Tess are in distress.

This isn't the first time  we've experienced this. Fudge had a sense about the others being sick. He saved Morgan's life by pointing out an infection in the back of her throat. He wouldn't leave her alone and kept sniffing her mouth. The vet watched him, then examined her throat and found it. As she aged Fudge also stayed close to Morgan when she was outside so that she didn't get lost and came in with the others.

Monty had a slightly different ability. He would let me know when someone was getting into trouble and saved some of the others from hurting themselves.

So it's pretty neat that dogs can be service animals for both humans and their own kind.