Man's Best Friends - True Stories of the World's Most Heroic Dogs. John McShane
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