Читать книгу Endal: How one extraordinary dog brought a family back from the brink - Sandra Parton - Страница 6

During the summer of 1999, a News of the World reporter in Havant, Hampshire, saw something he’d never seen before: a dog using a cashpoint machine. Right in front of him, a yellow Labrador inserted a card into the slot, waited while its owner, a sandy-haired man in a wheelchair, keyed in the PIN number, and then it carefully removed the card and the cash. The reporter blinked hard, wondering if he was hallucinating.

When he spoke to the man, a disabled ex-serviceman called Allen Parton, he found out that the dog’s name was Endal and that using a cashpoint machine was just one of his many amazing skills. The News of the World article that followed seemed to fire the readers’ imagination and soon many other newspapers, magazines, TV and radio shows were vying to find out about this exceptional dog.

They only learned a small part of the story, though. They thought they had found a performing dog, while in fact Endal was a one-off phenomenon, an unsung hero who had a profound talent for helping people in need. It would be a few more years before the full story emerged.