14 December

Bingo Night: Red’s Professionalism

by Jon Katz

I think Red is a great animal in many ways, but I am always struck by his professionalism, his ability to use and trust his instincts apart from what I have taught him and encouraged him to do.

On most Bingo nights – Friday is our bingo night –  I am the caller, spinning the numbers in a wheel and calling them out one by one for an hour or so. The residents take the game seriously, and focus on it.

At the end of the hour,  there is a prize card with prizes for the residents to choose.

During the course of the hour, Red goes and visits with each one of the residents in the room, offering himself for petting or talk or comfort. He spends three-to-five minutes with each person.

He has his own clock, and he decides who and when to visit, and when to move on to the next person. Towards the end of the hours, he has visited everyone at least once, and comes to me and lies down.

If he is in any pain tonight, he is hiding it. He has the most remarkable instincts for this work, and I think this is true of all of the great therapy dogs I have met.

Training and reinforcement is important for these or any other dogs, but tonight, watching Red do his work in so professional and thorough and intuitive a way, I see the power of dogs to heal and ground us.

Professional is the word that keeps coming to my mind. He is appropriate with everyone, he approaches softly, demands nothing, and offers himself in ways that people choose. Above, he is visiting Matt, our reigning Bingo champion.

I am fortunate to have such a dog, and grateful he will be able to do his work, perhaps even for years. One request tonight: one of the Mansion men needs new and wide velcro sneakers, his old ones are falling apart. I’ll trawl some online shoe stores, they will not be available up here.

2 Comments

  1. We got New Balance brand extra wide velcro sneakers for our autistic, now 25 yr old son, for many years. More recently, a shoe salea clerk steered us to a Merril brand hiking shoe that had laces, then showed us the elastic laces that pull closed that we could replace the regular laces with. We have been happy with those. The velcro is probably easier for older hands, though.

  2. I am always nicely surprised by the calm and focused dogs that I meet, rather than the ebullient, jumpy, licky dogs. They remind me of calm and centered people, who go about quietly doing their work, without any direction; they just seem to know what to do. I love that your dogs have their work.

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