The Possibility Dogs

by Susannah Charleson

  So now that I was perpetually cranky and too well informed about crime in the neighborhood, it was a very short step to obsess over locked doors. I never worried about the house when I was in it. I never worried about anything anywhere else. But I was suddenly afraid that something would happen to my own dogs when I was gone. I began a meticulous leaving procedure. I would carefully put the small dogs behind two internal doors and Puzzle, my new golden retriever search-and-rescue partner, in her crate behind another door. Surely, I thought, burglars would leave the crated puppy where she was and avoid the big bathroom where a rabble of Pomeranians yapped and slavered. Burglars would strip the house of valuables and leave the dogs alone.

  Or would they?

  I got to feeling a little desperate. The dogs were all that mattered to me. There were wry moments when I wanted to paint a big sign for the living room that read:

  DEAR BURGLAR

  THE DOGS ARE ALL I CARE ABOUT

  TAKE WHAT YOU WANT OTHERWISE

  (THE TV IS OLD, BUT THE LAPTOP IS NEW!)

  I imagined it like an old-school, hand-drawn grocery-store sign. With spangles.

  Then dognappings for ransom started to occur half a mile from where I lived, and I was really screwed.

  It got more and more difficult to leave the house. I would lock the door, take three steps away from it, turn around to double-check that it was locked, take three steps away again, turn around to check that it was locked again, and . . . you get the idea. Over and over, my thoughts raced ahead the moment I touched the doorknob, so when I got a few steps away, I couldn’t be sure I’d really checked it. Even while I was caught in the loop of this, I knew it wasn’t healthy. I’d scold myself—aloud—for the ridiculous behavior, then turn back to the doorknob a tenth time. Maybe the door really had come unlocked! Somehow I managed to get out of the house, but the compulsion was so profound that I started leaving for work twenty minutes earlier than I needed to, building in time for doorknob spasms if they should occur. (There was no rational logic here. I weirdly rejoiced in rotten weather, because surely burglars didn’t break into houses in the rain?)

  I needed help. I knew I needed help and didn’t seek it, which wasn’t wise. And it went on too long, that sense of loss and agitation and the compulsive lock-checking. It might have gone on longer, but, ironically, as I obsessed about keeping my dogs safe, one of them saved me.

  Pretty Puzzle, the search-and-rescue puppy in training, was at her least patient and most willful in those days. I was a novice handler. Her obedience training demanded that we wrestle each other up the street twice daily on her walks, leash wars that pitted her youth and strength against every training technique I thought I knew. To walk the dog, I had to leave the house. Leaving the house with Puzzle required a whole series of obedience commands she deeply resented, and leaving the house with Puzzle while checking and rechecking the locked front door was a maneuver worthy of the Keystone Kops.

  If anything productive came from that period, it was that, with all the lock-twiddling, I had to give Puz the Sit and Wait commands at least half a dozen times before we ever left. So she learned both pretty quickly. It went something like this:

  “Puzzle, sit. Puzzle, wait!”

  Lock the door.

  Three steps forward.

  Moment of panic.

  “Puzzle, sit. Puzzle, wait!”

  Three steps back.

  Check the door.

  Three steps forward.

  Moment of panic.

  “Puzzle, wait!”

  Three steps back.

  Check the door.

  Moment of panic.

  “Puzzle, wait!”

  And so on.

  This totally frustrated the dog. Initially she strained at the lead, refused the Sit, fought the Wait, and sawed through the garden on the end of the leash, trampling pansies and stomping columbine. Eventually she’d sit on command for a moment, then pop up like a jack-in-the-box, fight the Wait, and slice through the garden again. After a time, Puzzle sat and waited in a posture of great drama, her fuzzy backside on the ground but every muscle tensed forward at the end of the lead. And she’d sigh, big sighs that shook a little dog, like she was being good But It Was Time to Go Already. Youthful, cheerful, high-drive Puzzle was the very model of let’s-get-on-with-it, the antithesis of my unspoken fears.

  Puzzle badgered me free of that excessive caution. With her, I learned to leave the house more easily. I had to. I’d lock the door once, say “Locked! Locked!” aloud, and off we’d go. After a few months, I was able to leave cleanly with or without her—I was less anxious, more assured. In time, I learned to lock the door once and leave without a glance back. Was this a natural passage through the condition or did Puzzle’s bright distraction ground me? I’ll never really know. But I give her credit for the nudge toward healing, which began the moment I paid attention and stopped pissing off my dog.

  3

  THREE YEARS LATER, I am running after a full-grown golden retriever, my jog to Puzzle’s easy canter as we thrash out of a search-and-rescue training sector at the edge of unfamiliar wilderness. It’s a beautiful morning after a rain shower has washed the world clean—the air crisp, the kind of day that makes you feel like you could run forever. Puzzle and I are muddy and happy and unkempt, covered in wet leaves. Today’s volunteer missing person thought to make things difficult. She cleverly hid in a tangled ravine where air currents could be tricky, but Puzzle found her in the way a search dog will, head up, oingy-boinging through the brush as easily as we humans could if the victim sent up a column of thick, pink smoke.

  Having left our volunteer behind for another dog-and-handler team, we stop to radio in sector finished and share a bottle of water. I flex my right foot, tingling in my boot. Puzzle and I have come out of the search area opposite where we entered, and because the sector we’ve been working is not square, or even rectangular, the route back through curving bands of woods will take some unfamiliar turns. I could pull out the GPS and tap a Go To command for the home-base coordinates, but I don’t.

  Next to searching, Puzzle most enjoys orientation work. “Take Us Back, Puz,” I say to her, a command she understands. Depending on the circumstance, the back in Take Us Back means “back to base,” “back to the car,” or “back to where we started.” Sometimes Take Us Back means going back the way we came. Sometimes Take Us Back means “Find the place we began but get there by a new route.” This time we can’t go out the way we came in, since it would disrupt the incoming dog team, so I’ll let her make a new way back to base. I like to watch Puzzle pathfinding. I’ve come to trust her. Head up, tail waving, even though she’s off-lead, she’ll stay in my sightline. Puzzle’s a field dog born to be a partner. A happy, independent creature that loves her work, she’s glad to have this say in things and to show me the way.

  It has been years since Puzzle’s insistence that I walk away from doors I had already locked, and that compulsion seems so foreign now that it’s difficult to believe it was ever my own. My young golden had made what mental health professionals might call a “behavioral intervention.” It sounds brilliant and purposeful on the dog’s part, but I’d call that intervention more a happy accident—the collision of her early disobedience and my willingness to give up my own stuff in order to train her. Whatever the motivation, the result was good. These are healthier days. I’m not only less anxious but also maybe a little wiser about myself—and I am curious and challenged by Puzzle, emotions that for me sit so close to happiness that I cannot tell them apart.

  Can a dog really lead someone out of his own despair? If someone asked me now, I’d have to say yes. But much depends on the dog, and much depends on the human who follows him.

  Puzzle’s cheerful, “boldly go” nature still influences me in other ways. After one break-in too many in my old neighborhood and after years of thinking about leaving Dallas, I have decided not to sit and wait for a second round of fearfulness. I am ready to pack up dogs, cats, beds, and
end tables. I’m ready to go. It’s not a move made in any kind of panic. I’m simply ready to live somewhere else.

  Flipping randomly through real estate listings outside the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex, I find a historic property for sale that I recognize. I’ve known and loved that house for almost two decades, have watched it change hands several times. Wistful with each new restoration, I’ve imagined myself living in the modest Victorian cottage on the fringes of a once small prairie town. Boldly go—I put in an offer within forty-eight hours and move from the big city to my new/old house within a month, leaving behind the Dallas neighborhood, the crime map, and the cloud of worry that had once surrounded both.

  That move brings air into everything. My dogs are excited—new view! New smells! New neighbors passing—some of them with strange dogs! I am happy too. In this place, old points of tension are no longer issues. Now a door is just a door. I have to lock it only once.

  Between experiencing search dog Puzzle’s lucky intervention and seeing assistance dog Haska’s gentle skill beside her partner a few years later, perhaps it was inevitable that I’d become interested in dogs that serve the human mind. Search work has led me partway there already. Mental illness is at the heart of so many of our call-outs: missing persons who wander off due to dementia; who flee because of impulses born of autism, delusion, or anxiety; or who become despondent and disappear, burdened by depression they cannot escape. Any disappearance may be steeped in psychological subtext. Our on-scene family interviews often cover that uneasy ground, with questions that explore the missing person’s recent state of mind. Obsessions, worries, memories relived, irrational fears, consuming grief, and expressed forms of guilt all come forward in many search situations, and often I enter a sector considering the terrain not only as I see it but also as the victim might have seen it, wondering what she might have been seeking there.

  In fact, I had troubled victims in mind when I first began looking for a puppy to become my search partner. I wanted a dog whose face was especially open, friendly, easy to read, and soft. Before Puzzle was even born, I had decided on a golden retriever, thinking forward to the fragile missing persons she might serve. Puzzle is a search dog; she’s not trained to intervene in psychiatric conditions, but she is trained to make her finds gently and not add to human distress. It’s Puzzle’s adult nature to be calm, to be kind.

  These are qualities I also remember in Haska.

  Puzzle and Haska serve at opposite points of a line I imagine: on one end, the search dog trained to find a missing human in crisis, and on the other, the psychiatric service dog whose work may help prevent that crisis. Despite the differences in the work they do, these dogs clearly share some attributes: intelligence, engagement, confidence, self-discipline, commitment, and—from what I know of Puzzle and remember of Haska—joy in their work. Psychiatric service dogs, emotional support dogs, therapy dogs—these are the dogs trained to answer human hurt. Similar to one another in some ways, markedly different in others, they tend all kinds of wounds. Just as I was drawn to partner a search dog more than a decade ago, I’m now spurred by the possibilities of service dogs too.

  It is a difficult concept for many, that an assistance dog might recognize, for instance, the first moments of someone’s panic attack and be able to intervene before it escalates, but to me it makes sense. If a search K9 can be trained to enter a crisis environment, make sound decisions, locate human scent, and communicate information to a handler, why can’t an assistance dog be trained to recognize psychological events—by sight, by hearing, by scent—make a choice, and tell what he knows, in his dog way, to the human he serves? Dogs have been trained to serve partners with seizure conditions or potentially dangerous changes in blood sugar and have been doing these kinds of things for some time. Why not, then, train dogs to assist their partners with trauma-based flashbacks, wandering impulses, repetitive behaviors, and the like?

  Plenty of people seem to agree. Working-dog experts, veterans’ advocates, psychiatric-health consumers, and counseling professionals in the field are actively engaged in the psychiatric service dog partnership and are writing thoughtfully about it. Dr. Joan Esnayra, founder of the Psychiatric Service Dog Society, has spent more than a decade advancing the cause, publishing, in the Journal of Psychiatric Services, the first clinical case study involving the use of a psychiatric service dog. From that initial period of deliberation on the therapeutic potential of psych dog assistance, widespread partnerships have emerged—good dogs who intervene in human depression, anxiety, PTSD, panic attacks, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorders, among other conditions.

  There are other needs of the human mind, and dogs that serve those too. Emotional support animals (ESAs) offer their partners steadfast companionship, usually in the home, and are not necessarily trained to perform specific service tasks. Though with medical documentation they are allowed to travel with their partners and to live in no-pet housing, emotional support dogs are not allowed in public spaces the way assistance dogs are. This difference sometimes tempts critics to write ESAs off as mere pets, but many emotional support dogs are something more than that. Through affectionate interaction, emotional support dogs may recognize and help lift their partners out of chronic depression; they alleviate loneliness. Often such dogs innately sense when to stay close, lessening a partner’s anxiety. There are emotional support dogs that help their agoraphobic partners find ways to step out of their own houses. One ESA partner tells me that when laughter seems as out of reach as the moon, somehow her dog finds a way to make her do it. That’s a common theme I hear from other partners: emotional support dogs often know how—and when—to be clowns.

  Different from service dogs and emotional support dogs are therapy dogs, which serve a wide number of people. Therapy dog is a term in flux. It has evolved to include dogs used in actual therapeutic counseling scenarios and dogs who provide animal-assisted activities, engaging with the public at the sides of their trained handlers. Therapy dogs are frequent visitors to schools, nursing homes, hospitals, and other care facilities. Specially trained therapy dogs appear at recovery sites post-disaster. These dogs bring their own brand of good cheer to people in need, whether they are frail from illness, at risk in school, struggling to testify post-trauma, or coming to terms with the loss of home and family.

  As a search K9 handler, I’ve seen how much good trained therapy dogs can do in crisis. The affected public turns to them. Emergency responders need them too. In the absence of therapy dogs, people turn to the exhausted search dogs after a disaster, and because the dogs are kind and their handlers compassionate, it can be difficult to pull the search dogs away from a grieving community so the animals can rest. I’ve come to appreciate the disaster-trained therapy dogs and their partners who serve onsite beside relief agencies. They perform no small service. People gravitate to these dogs; they stand in line to pet them or stand in circles around them, sometimes simply extending their hands to dog noses in greeting, as if warming themselves before a fire.

  There is something special that gifted dogs can give to humans in distress. What is it beyond that solid core of good-dog presence? Perhaps it’s the service of deep, wordless affection, free of human judgment and human platitudes. Guide Dogs for the Mind, the Psychiatric Service Dog Society calls these canine allies. “Godsends,” says a SAR colleague who remembers therapy dogs among the grief-stricken in recovery areas after 9/11. That broad enthusiasm is motivating, but the more intimate stories are sobering. Service to humans in psychological crisis is no easier—and no rosier—than search-and-rescue. Stable, intuitive, compassionate, strong: at the heart of psychiatric service are some very rare dogs, so suited to this work they would choose it.

  4

  I BELIEVE THERE ARE dogs full of good intentions that want to serve the people they love but don’t know how. Certainly I’ve seen it often enough: the dog that rushes forward when his human trips and falls, the dog that lies close to a family member who’s doub
led over in sadness, the dog panting anxiously over a distress he shares but cannot understand. I think it must be difficult for these empathic dog souls, bound to us as they are through centuries of companionship. Like many of us, these dogs have an urge to comfort, perhaps even to fix. Like many of us, some dogs seem helplessly conflicted; they seem to grieve when whatever they have to offer isn’t enough. But how they try—and often keep trying.

  What is that caring about? Is it love? Plenty of dog enthusiasts say yes—dogs are capable of love in dog terms. Others scoff at the idea of canine love, suggesting that all that loyalty is really about a deeply ingrained sense of self-preservation (When a human prospers, I do too; when a human suffers, I may not get fed). Others might say it’s a compassion born of a long history beside humans: we and the dogs have forged a common language; a kindred, symbiotic spirit. Still others might claim that the sight, smell, and sound of human grief arouses a dog’s ancient stirrings—whether it’s to protect whimpering young or inspect a wounded beast for dinner. The answer may be any, all, or none of these. What we do have is evidence of compassion. Many dog owners have stories of their dogs’ obvious attempts to comfort them. Quite a few owners manage to shoot videos of these for YouTube.

  Smokey and Misty, rescued Pomeranians now a part of my family, are two such dogs. Both came to me after the death of their owner from cancer, a hard journey they chose to take as far as they could beside her. While some friends fled, and family struggled, and there were those who couldn’t bear to visit Erin as the disease progressed, these dogs elected to stay close to her when the crisis—physical, emotional, psychological—was at its worst.

  Misty was five when she arrived at my house; Smokey had just turned three. The two are polar opposites in appearance and temperament. Misty, whose back legs are severely crippled, is petite, mellow, and quite beautiful—black, tan, and white, with delicate front paws that make her look like she’s wearing gloves. Misty is a sunny dog. She’s self-possessed and confident, except when she’s nervous about being stomped by a larger housemate. She is protective of her frailties, and while she doesn’t seem to suffer pain from the condition, she doesn’t mind growling at other dogs that tumble wildly too close to her space, particularly when she’s lying down.