Читать книгу Man's Best Friends - True Stories of the World's Most Heroic Dogs - John McShane - Страница 7

Dogs have many fine qualities that are plain for all to see but there are others no one could expect them to possess. Who, for example, expects a dog to come to the medical aid of a human in distress or even in danger of dying? Of course dogs can transport medicines or equipment, perhaps inadvertently tell humans of someone in distress by attracting their attention through barking or a sense of agitation, but to actually intercede with some form of aid of their own volition – surely not? Well, there are some instances of such action crossing the barrier from the expected to the unexpected, the predictable to the realms of almost disbelief.

Take Toby the Retriever, for example. His path had never crossed with that of Dr Henry Jay Heimlich, the American physician accredited with prescribing the abdominal thrusts used to help victims of choking clear their air passages. Dogs and the now-famous ‘Heimlich Manoeuvre’ didn’t seem natural companions. Not, that is, until early in 2007 when a remarkable event occurred and Toby, a two-year-old Golden Retriever, became the first dog in history to save a life by performing the respiratory rescue technique.

Debbie Parkhurst, 45, was eating an apple at her home in Calvert, Maryland, when she failed to swallow a bite. Worse than that, a chunk of the fruit became trapped in her throat and within seconds a harmless, completely natural act placed her life in jeopardy. She began to beat on her chest, frantically pounding away with her fists, and even leant over a chair to perform the Heimlich Manoeuvre on herself, all without success. Then Toby came to the rescue.

Mrs Parkhurst described what then ensued: ‘The next thing I know, Toby’s up on his hind feet and he’s got his front paws on my shoulders. He pushed me to the ground and once I was on my back, he began jumping up and down on my chest.’ The chunk of apple was dislodged and she escaped death – ‘As soon as I started breathing, he stopped and began licking my face, as if to keep me from passing out.’ A friend arrived in time to witness the dog’s amazing act and drove her to a doctor.

After her brush with death she admitted: ‘I literally have paw-print shaped bruises on my chest! I’m still a little hoarse but otherwise I’m OK. They say dogs leave a paw print on your heart – he left a paw print on my heart, that’s for sure. The doctor said I probably wouldn’t be here without Toby. I keep looking at him and saying, “You’re amazing!” Of all the dogs in the world, I never would have expected this goofy one here to know the Heimlich.’

Toby’s rescue procedure was performed in exactly the way suggested at that time by the American Red Cross: ‘a series of five back blows and five abdominal thrusts’. Veterinarian Dr Douglas Foreman was equally baffled by the expert response. ‘Toby isn’t what you would call the most trained of dogs,’ he mused. ‘I have no idea where he learned it from.’

If that rescue was unusual, across the Atlantic an even more remarkable act was taking place at roughly the same time. In this instance it wasn’t just a case of a dog reacting to an obvious physical event, such as a human choking, but intervening after medically diagnosing a potentially critical illness.

Noel Hanley had lost consciousness in bed and although his wife Rita thought he was sleeping, Beauty – the couple’s King Charles Spaniel – realised something was seriously amiss. Seventy-four-year-old Noel was suffering hypoglycaemia, literally ‘under-sweet blood’, an abnormally diminished content of glucose in the blood.

‘I didn’t take much notice because Noel never suffered from hypoglycaemia before,’ explained Rita. ‘He was snoring and it looked like he was just sleeping. The dog sensed something and jumped on top of the bed, freaking out, licking him and tearing off the bedclothes – that’s what got my notice. I tried to wake him up then but couldn’t, so I phoned for the ambulance. He was in a deep coma but I didn’t know it. Apparently Beauty had sniffed him and sensed that something was wrong – she definitely saved him.’

Since she was a pup, Beauty had lived with the couple in the Cork suburb of Togher in Ireland. A normally placid creature, she had sensed something was wrong and began to behave completely out of character: barking and running in and out of the bedroom.

Rita said the family pet continued to monitor her husband’s condition after his escape from death and often sniffed him – ‘She’s Noel’s minder,’ was how she put it.

On another occasion when Noel’s blood-sugar level dropped again, the dog began acting in an unusual and agitated way once more. ‘She keeps an eye on my sugar level,’ said Noel. He explained that Beauty kept a close watch on his condition by regularly licking his wrists and ankles as if to check on his blood-sugar levels. Doctors ran a series of tests but were unable to determine what had caused the condition (for the past 50 years, Noel had smoked 30 cigarettes a day). He had no recollection of the hours leading up to his hospital admission nor his time in the hospital’s A&E unit.

Doctors at South Infirmary-Victoria University Hospital in Cork who treated Hanley said the dog’s intervention was critical. ‘His dog saved his life, without a shadow of a doubt,’ said Mortimer O’Connor, a non-consultant hospital doctor who subsequently reported the incident in the Irish Journal of Medical Science. ‘We were taken aback by the case,’ he added. ‘When someone’s blood-sugar level goes below a certain value, the body starts shutting down to preserve the main organs. Eventually your brain starts to shut down and you tend to go into a comatose state. The level of sugar in your blood is not enough for normal cell activity to happen. Normally there are symptoms such as sweating and palpitations but Noel Hanley didn’t seem to have these.’

Doctor O’Connor wasn’t sure how a dog could detect low blood-sugar levels. ‘There is a train of thought that it is by the taste of somebody’s sweat,’ he said.

It is well documented that having pets brings a number of health benefits as dog owners tend to have lower blood pressure and cholesterol because their animals act as a buffer to stress, a factor in ill-health. Direct interventions by these creatures when their owners become dangerously ill, such as in this case, are not fully understood, though.

Hypoglycaemia, or low blood sugar, is one of the life-threatening complications of diabetes. Times of greatest risk are before meals and during the night. In Noel Hanley’s case the doctors could not find a cause since he does not have diabetes. Deborah Wells, a psychologist at Queen’s University Belfast, carried out a study (funded by Diabetes UK) of people with Type 1 diabetes who have dogs. More than 200 people contacted her to say their dogs have detected when they experience episodes of hypoglycaemia. ‘Some untrained dogs seem to have this ability,’ she said. ‘The most obvious explanation is an odour cue.’ In fact, dogs have a sense of smell 10,000 to 100,000 times more sensitive than humans.

‘A lot of diabetics say their dog has woken them up in the middle of the night. The dog has maybe been downstairs and comes up and scratches at the closed door and perhaps barks,’ she continues. ‘Whenever the person has checked their sugar levels, they’ve discovered they’ve been very low. Because some of these animals are reacting from different rooms we feel they can’t be picking up on visual cues. That’s not to say all animals are using the same mechanism. Some dogs might be picking up visual signals, as maybe there is some behavioural or mood change that the owners are giving off when their sugar levels are dropping and the dogs are sensitive to these changes.’

Beauty may not have been trained to save lives (it was happy coincidence that she was near when the emergency occurred), but the same could not be said of Belle the Beagle. She had been trained to act in an astonishing fashion, should danger ever threaten her master, and that’s exactly what she did on the morning of 7 February 2006.

Owner Kevin Weaver remembers walking outside his home in Ocoee, Orange County, Florida, with Belle and then waking up in hospital, his dog still by his side but he could recall nothing of the events in between. What happened was simple: a diabetic seizure had caused him to fall and hit his head on a table at home. Fortunately, a mobile phone was on the coffee table and Belle sprang into action and deliberately bit into the number 9 keypad programmed to ring the emergency number of 911. The operator at the end of the line could hear nothing apart from a dog’s bark but that was enough to send medics round to rescue the stricken man.

‘There is no doubt in my mind that I’d be dead if I didn’t have Belle,’ said Weaver, 34, whose blood sugar had dropped dangerously low.

Belle had been actually been trained to summon help in those circumstances as she was a ‘service dog’ – the type of animal who helps patients with physical disabilities, hearing loss, diabetes and other conditions. The dog might turn on lights, alert people to sounds and generally provide extra assistance for the disabled or chronically ill.

‘The change in [the patients’] lives is just amazing in terms of the freedom it offers and the level of security it provides,’ said Al Peters, executive director of Hearing and Service Dogs of Minnesota. His group was one of dozens across the country to train dogs and place them in homes. Training takes up to two years and the dogs are ultimately given away to patients who have gone through an application process. Some wait many months or years for such an animal.

Weaver first heard about service dogs while working as a flight attendant when he befriended a female frequent passenger who taught dogs to help diabetic patients by detecting, as we have already learned, abnormalities in a person’s blood-sugar levels. The cost of such training could be as high as £10,000 or more, he said but his friend offered to take on Belle for just over £5,000. It was under her guidance and tutelage that the Beagle learned how to help her owner monitor his blood-sugar levels, alerting him whenever she detected a problem and calling for help if ever he collapsed, thereby giving rise to the risk of seizures potentially fatal without medical attention.

Most of the time Weaver kept his condition under control with close monitoring and by downing a glass of orange juice, should his blood-sugar numbers become low, but Belle also carried out her own health-checks. Periodically she would lick his nose and if something seemed wrong, she would paw and whine at him, not stopping until he responded.

‘Every time she paws at me like that I grab my meter and test myself – she’s never been wrong,’ said Weaver. On the day of his attack Belle had woken him by clawing at his chest. He felt ill and sluggish, but thought the dog wanted to go out. It was about 9.30am and Weaver – now completely out of sorts – groggily decided his pet must need to go outside. He took her out but on returning home, he collapsed in the kitchen. His blood-sugar level had been at 25, well below the normal range of 80–120.

‘She started scratching at me and whining,’ he recalled. ‘I thought maybe she had to go to the bathroom, not hitting on what was going on. I took her outside and brought her back in, and that’s when I had the seizure. I don’t know how long I would have lasted if Belle wasn’t there. Twenty-five is not conducive to life – I would have died. I would have slipped into a coma and died.’ On recovery, he visited a steakhouse for dinner, sharing the meal with his faithful pet.

It was the first seizure Weaver had experienced since Belle completed her training about eight months earlier and he had wondered if any dog could be relied on to do a job that might cause even some adults to be too panicked to cope in a crisis. And it was only by a remarkable chance that Belle and Kevin got together in the first place. Little Belle had twice been returned to the pet store where she was on sale as a puppy and it was only when a friend mentioned her to Kevin that he went to see her, about two years before she saved his life: ‘I felt sorry for her. I went in and said, “She’s mine!”’ he recalled.

The training for diabetic-alert dogs is similar to the education provided to guide dogs for the visually impaired but instead of learning to act as someone’s guide, the animals are schooled to sense when their handlers’ blood-sugar is too high or too low. During training, Belle was taught to lick her owner’s nostrils to smell his breath, reading his ketone level (acidic substances in the body). If something isn’t right then Belle, with her amazing sense of smell, knows to start scratching Weaver’s leg, warning him to adjust his sugar levels before a seizure comes on. Crucially, for real emergencies she was taught to bite down on his mobile phone – specifically, the number 9, which was programmed to dial 911.

Unfortunately not all dogs excel at ‘medical service’ and different breeds, with their varying qualities, are more suited to certain types of work. According to Mark Ruefenacht, founder of Dogs4Diabetics in California and a diabetic with his own service dog, breeds with exceptional smelling capabilities including Beagles and Labradors are best at diabetes training. ‘Our clients tell us that they not only have this amazing dog but for the first time in their lives, they have a companion to help them deal with a chronic lifetime disease,’ he adds.

The Beagle’s suitability stems from breeding: they are scent hounds developed for tracking hare, rabbit and other game. Their sense of smell is one of the best developed of all dogs. In more recent times they have also been used to detect prohibited foodstuffs and other contraband. But the most famous Beagle of all doesn’t actually exist – he is Snoopy (the dog in the ‘Peanuts’ cartoon) – though Belle had her own brush with fame.

Her miraculous intervention attracted widespread publicity and later in the year she was flown to Washington – in the cabin of the plane, not the hold – to receive an award alongside several human beings who had also saved lives by their quick intuitive use of a mobile phone. Of course they all deserved credit, though none so much as Belle. Her remarkable behaviour was preceded by another dog who also used a mobile phone to help its owner – not perhaps in the same sophisticated way as Belle, but it also managed to save a life and that’s what really counts.

Fireman Lorenzo Abundiz was trudging up the side of Mount Baldy in Southern California on his day off when one of his two Rottweilers, four-year-old Cinder, began to behave strangely and refused to budge one more inch. He did not know what to make of the dog’s behaviour but decided it would be best to return home. As it turned out, his pet’s stubbornness undoubtedly saved his life.

‘Usually my two dogs, Reeno and Cinder, like to walk up the trail and try to beat each other,’ said Abundiz, from Rancho Cucamonga, California. ‘But Reeno was on my side and Cinder didn’t want to go farther. I looked back at her and she wanted to turn around.’

Sitting on the couch back home, the fire fighter kept an eye on his pet, thinking she had fallen ill. Cinder was a special dog, given to him by a Santa Ana fireman saved by him in 1991. Within the hour, Abundiz was the one who became sick, however. He felt tightness in his chest and his heart began to beat rapidly. After attempting to walk to the telephone to call for help, he passed out. Reeno licked his face to wake him up, but Cinder did even more: he pushed the portable phone towards his owner, enabling Abundiz to dial 911. Meanwhile, his wife Roxane returned to the house and walked into the living room to find her husband gasping for air.

When paramedics arrived, Abundiz could barely breathe and almost had a heart attack. He was given oxygen and rushed to San Antonio Community Hospital in Rancho Cucamonga, where he stayed for two days and was treated for an erratic heartbeat.

‘I treat Cinder like my little boy,’ said Abundiz, 41. ‘I credit my dog for saving my life. If I would’ve been up on the hike and finished it, there would have been no one to help me – I would have died up there. I really strongly believe dogs can sense when your body chemistry is going haywire. That little Rotty saved my butt. She acted funny – that had never happened before. Cinder just sat in front of me, staring at me. I thought she was sick and I was going to take her to the vet. All of a sudden I felt palpitations in my heart.’ Paramedics had prevented heart failure with drug injections before taking him to a hospital, he added.

‘If I had finished that hike, there was no one around – no way would anyone have found me there! I would have died up there. I owe my life to my dog,’ he admitted.

Lorenzo Abundiz is not the only one to harbour such feelings. Maureen Burns was concerned when her normally full-of-beans pet Max began moping around the house. She was so concerned about his behaviour that she was convinced the dog was ill or at the very least coming down with something. But it was not the nine-year-old Collie-cross that had an illness but Burns herself. After Max began sniffing her breath and then gently nudging her right breast, the 64-year-old examined herself and discovered a small lump in the breast. A GP referred her to a hospital and a biopsy confirmed a cancerous tumour.

The 2008 case was another example showing that some breeds of dog appear to have an inherent ability to ‘sniff out’ diseases such as cancer. Mrs Burns, from Rugby, Warwickshire, said: ‘When the nurse told me I had breast cancer my first response was, “I know, my dog told me!” I expected her to laugh but instead she told me she had heard of similar cases. Max is usually such an excitable, loving animal but he became very sad and had stopped doing all the things he used to, such as sharing our bed or jumping on my lap for cuddles. Instead he would touch my breast and back off unhappily.’

Burns, who lived with her husband Roger (aged 66 and a retired engineer), went on to have the lump removed a few weeks later. Afterwards she revealed that she finally realised there was something wrong when Max watched as she examined herself in the mirror. ‘I felt a lump but I wasn’t unduly worried as I’d had a lump 20 years ago and it had proved to be benign. I’d also had a routine mammogram, which came back negative just 15 months earlier. As I felt it, I just happened to look over at Max, who was lying on my bed. Our eyes met and I just remember he looked so sad – I knew in that instant that something was badly wrong.’

The inch-wide lump was removed and doctors also took four lymph nodes from her underarm in case the cancer had spread.

Mrs Burns said that while their other pet – a retired greyhound called Grace – had behaved no differently throughout the health scare, when she returned home after having the operation in June, she was greeted by Max ‘acting like he was a puppy again.’ She added: ‘It was as though he knew I was OK again. He stopped sniffing me and became very playful again. I owe him so much. Max helped to save my life – he was right all along.’

So, how could Max have done this? It is of course known that a dog’s sense of smell is vastly superior to that of humans and in 2004, a study by Buckinghamshire Hospitals Trust and the charity Cancer and Bio-detection Dogs found that the pets could detect bladder cancer in urine samples. Cancer cells are known to produce chemicals called Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), which give off distinct odours that dogs are believed to react to.

On the other side of the Atlantic (but on approximately the same date) another remarkable act of medical ‘diagnosis’ by a dog was taking place. Alas on this occasion the hero, a two-pound black Yorkshire Terrier called Peggy Sue, suffered for her act of loyalty when she was attacked by another dog.

Dorothy Giddings, 77, and her husband Gary, 69, were sitting side by side in their pink and blue velour recliners watching afternoon television (Dorothy’s is pink and Gary’s is blue). After a while, Dorothy told Gary she thought she might take a nap. Gary picked up a book and then dozed off himself with Peggy Sue sitting in his lap. He was startled awake when Peggy Sue leapt into Dorothy’s lap and began barking in her face. He looked across and saw Dorothy had leant back in the chair and was shaking uncontrollably: ‘She had quit breathing and her lips were turning purple – I don’t know how long she’d been like that.’

Gary yelled for the couple’s downstairs tenant at their home in Benton City, Washington to call the emergency 911 number and pounded on his wife’s chest to get her breathing again. With paramedics on the way, he let their other dog – a black Border Collie named Cassie – inside so she wouldn’t stop them on the steps leading up to the house. According to the Giddings, Cassie had always been protective of Dorothy and when she saw Peggy Sue yapping, she assumed the smaller dog was attacking their mistress.

Cassie lunged forward and seized Peggy Sue’s head in her jaws. She bit so hard that the Yorkie’s eyes bulged out from the pressure. ‘It was like “boom!”’ Gary explained. He prised Peggy Sue from the Collie’s mouth and locked her in a bathroom for protection, while noticing one of Peggy Sue’s eyes was dangling on her cheek after the attack. Dorothy was still in trouble and he had to make sure she survived before he could help the dog, though.

Paramedics got Dorothy to the hospital, where she learned the seizure had happened because of scar tissue left behind in her brain when a benign tumour was removed, two years earlier. While the couple were away, their downstairs tenant rushed Peggy Sue to an emergency veterinarian in Pasco. The vet sewed the Yorkie’s eyes shut and following this, Gary and Dorothy were informed that Peggy Sue would likely lose one eye and be at least partially blind in the other. Despite the expense and the dog’s condition, the couple never considered having their pet put down – ‘She’s our little lifesaver,’ said Gary. Nor did they attach any blame to Cassie for attacking the smaller dog. ‘She was trying to protect her mama, too – she just didn’t know how to go about it,’ he added.

‘Peggy Sue has always been more Daddy’s dog,’ said Dorothy. ‘When she sleeps on the bed, she sleeps right on top of him, but she’s always been trying to win me over.’

When it came to Orca, her Golden Retriever, university student Cheryl Smith did not need any winning over. Twenty-two-year-old Cheryl was enjoying an afternoon out near her home in Heslington, York, with Orca running alongside when her wheelchair hit a brick on a dirt track. The 3cwt machine plunged several feet down an embankment to land on top of Cheryl (who suffered Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, a disabling condition which prevented her from walking), pinning her flat in the water.

Orca – who finished specialist rescue training with the charity Canine Partners for Independence, CPI, a mere eight weeks earlier – immediately ran for help. The dog instinctively knew her owner was in need of medical attention. The first person he encountered mistook him for a stray and tried to take him back home before he slipped his lead. Incredibly, Orca ran back to check on Miss Smith – now increasingly distressed – before setting off again.

This time he attracted the attention of Peter Harrison, who was jogging through a nearby field, by leaping up and down then running to and from the scene. Harrison followed him to find Miss Smith before running to his nearby home to call the rescue services. He arranged to meet a fire crew half a mile away at the nearest road while his wife Julie and their daughter Rosie went to stay with Cheryl. Firemen lifted her out of the ditch and kept her warm until a paramedic vehicle arrived to take her to York Hospital, where she was treated for mild hypothermia.

‘He was only a baby of 17 months,’ said Cheryl. ‘I was walking him about a mile away from my home on a bridle path. I was in my big electric wheelchair and he was off the lead when one of the front wheels hit a rock or something. I plunged about 12 or 15 feet down the bank into a ditch filled with water.

‘To start with, Orca was crying because he wanted to come down the bank but I didn’t want him to, because he wouldn’t have got out of the ditch again. He was confused and didn’t know what to do. I had to convince him that I wanted him to help me by going away. After five minutes he ran off, then it started raining. I was initially up to my waist in water but the rain was threatening to fill the ditch even further.’

Orca returned, alone and collarless. ‘He’d gone to somebody but they tried to take him home to phone the number on his collar. As soon as the guy tried to take him in the wrong direction, he pulled out of his collar and ran back to me,’ Cheryl continued.

‘I told him to go and get help again and this time he didn’t hesitate. He ran straight off and found a jogger, and managed to get him to follow him from over a mile away by barking at him, running up to him and running away again. The man didn’t speak dog, but Orca wouldn’t leave him alone until they found me.’

Cheryl, a chemistry student at York University, said: ‘It frightens me to think what would have happened if Orca had not been there. It was pouring with rain and the chances of anyone passing that way were remote. Without him I might have died in that stream – I owe him everything.’

The passer-by told the emergency services that he had mistaken Orca for a stray and had tried to take him home. Cheryl adds: ‘When he came back without anyone I really began to give up hope – I thought he had just been chasing animals around in the woods or something. I was lying there for what must have been about two hours and it was pouring with rain and hailstones. There was a foot of water in the ditch and I was being pushed down into the thick mud below it. I was really scared, I was freezing and I knew no one would find me by chance – it seemed like an eternity before Orca arrived back with a man right behind him.’ Jogger Peter Harrison said: ‘Orca really persevered to attract my attention. It’s lucky he found me because the weather was so bad – Orca is a very intelligent dog.’

After the rescue, Orca was rewarded with a steady supply of carrots (his favourite treat) and bones. Cheryl told how he was able to obey 105 commands, including unloading the washing machine and pressing buttons at pedestrian crossings. She said: ‘He is still only a puppy but he is so intelligent – I don’t know what I would do without him. People have described it as like a scene from the old Lassie movies.’

Fire sub-officer Carl Vinand said: ‘The dog is the real star. Cheryl is extremely lucky to be alive – the fall alone could have killed her as the wheelchair is very heavy.’ Aside from hypothermia, she was unhurt, though. Orca’s rescue led to him receiving the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals’ gold medal – the animal world’s George Cross – for gallantry and devotion to duty. More importantly, it sealed the relationship between dog and owner.

‘That’s it, mate – it’s you and me now. We’re a team,’ thought Cheryl, on arriving home from hospital. Orca went on to complete his training with the CPI, having learnt the 100-plus commands, including ‘take off the jacket’ (unzip it and pull both sleeves off) and ‘foot’ (lift the owner’s foot and put it on a wheelchair footplate). Cheryl then taught him another 44 commands, including hand signals. As she explained: ‘When I was a student in lectures, I needed to be able to communicate with him without talking.’

Years later Orca could open and unload the washing machine, operate the light switch with his paw and open the front door to visitors. Cheryl said: ‘If I’m in a chair, it’s hard for me to reach things on the floor – he picks things up. In the supermarket, he can take things off shelves for me. He can go and get the mobile or landline phone. He even used to be able to put a video in with his nose but that skill doesn’t really transfer to DVDs.’

Sam Good was also a sufferer from Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD), affecting the nerves and muscles in her body and sparking a series of painful seizures through her body. ‘It’s like Restless Legs Syndrome times 100 and it’s through your spine,’ she explained.

She was getting ready for bed and in her pyjamas when she decided to turn out the lights on her unheated back porch in the American state of Utah. The sub-zero temperature caused another seizure, however, and she fell onto the porch seat. ‘I was in a ball and I got in a ball because I knew I was going to freeze. I thought I was going to freeze to death because I couldn’t get words out,’ she recalled.

From the seat, in intense pain, Good says she was finally able to softly call out the name of her dog Maddie (also a Golden Retriever), whose acute hearing enabled her to hear the distress cries: ‘She kept picking my arm up and picking my arm up, and I’m like, “Maddie, I can’t!” And she just put her back under my belly, and kept lifting and lifting.’ At that point, Good says she could barely get her arms round the dog’s neck: ‘She had to keep lifting me onto her back to get the rest of me because I was numb – my spine, I didn’t feel anything.’

Eventually, the 104lb Retriever carried her owner (who was on her back by this time) to her bed inside. She was still hurting but was warm and eventually the seizure subsided. ‘If it wasn’t for Maddie’s rescue, I’d have been frozen,’ she said. ‘Maddie isn’t just my best friend – she’s the best dog ever!’

Similar sentiments might have been expressed about Reona, the 109lb Rottweiler who leapt over three fences into a neighbour’s garden in 1989 when an earthquake tremor struck California. The giant dog then sauntered through the back door and sat beside five-year-old Vivian Cooper. Soon, the frightened girl –who was susceptible to life-threatening seizures when excited – calmed down.

Her mother, Karen Cooper, suffered leg cuts and a broken foot when hit by jars shaken out of a refrigerator by the ’quake: ‘I got to the door once and the earthquake moved me back – that’s when I thought we were going to die. I looked out the back and there was this big brown face. Reona looked at me as if to say, “What’s the matter with you?” She walked over to my daughter, sat on her feet and held her against the wall.’ Reona gently positioned the little girl against the kitchen cabinets and calmly kept her there, even when a heavy microwave was shaken off the work-surface and crashed to the floor in exactly the same spot as the young girl had been. Throughout the ordeal, Vivian held on tightly to the dog, burying her head in its dark coat.

‘When I finally got over to Reona, I said, “Can I have my baby, please”’ Karen recalled. ‘And Reona looked at me like, “Well, if you’re calm enough.” Then she walked out the door.’

Job done!