Getting By with a Little Help from Our Canine Friends by Pat Dunnigan, Thumbies S tarbucks, which recently filed a trademark application for its popular “puppaccino,” is not the only one to have noticed the way we feel about our dogs. Everywhere you turn, hotels, restaurants and retailers are putting out the welcome mat – along with the bowl of complimentary dog treats – for the furry companions who accompany us almost everywhere these days. To say that they are “part of the family” does not really begin to capture the way we feel about our canine BFFs. And while the role that dogs play in human lives has never been a trivial thing, it’s a role that has been growing like a well-fed puppy in recent years. The coronavirus played a part, as millions of people seem to have discovered a dog-shaped hole in their 18 www.ogr.org | Summer 2021 lives in 2020. From the stress and tedium of sheltering in place during a pandemic to many other varieties of emotional hardship, dogs are well suited to the job of soothing our worries, our loneliness – and our grief. Numerous studies, in fact, bear out the effect of pets on our sense of well-being, including changes to brain chemistry associated with reduction of stress and anxiety. So it’s not as groundbreaking as it may seem to learn that dogs are increasingly found in the role of grief support at funeral homes across the country – or that their own lives are increasingly memorialized with the same care and rituals once reserved for human losses. At Lakeside Memorial Funeral Home in West Seneca, New York, Willow is an SPCA-certified therapy
19 Publizr Home