Dogs

Increasingly, young couples delay having a family or elect not to have children at all. For them a dog is often a child substitute, something that they can care for and nurture together. It can be taken on walks, outings to the beach or the park, or even to the cafe. It needs to be bathed and fed and can be bought toys and collars.

When a pet is lost through death by illness or accident, people go through a grieving process equivalent to that experienced by the loss of a human family member. Pets also grieve when they lose an owner or a companion pet. They often become very depressed, go off their food, and spend time sitting in areas that the pet or person frequented. They need a lot of love and attention and distractions to help them through their suffering.

In a strange way, seeing the pet grieve can help a bereaved partner get over her loss more rapidly. She wants to make the pet feel happier and thus makes the effort to do things for it, thereby taking her mind off her own grief.

DETECTING DISEASE BY DOGS

There are reports that dogs can detect cancer. As yet there is insufficient scientific data to verify this absolutely, but there are some interesting repot on the topic.

Once of the earliest reports as published in the 1989 edition of the lancet, an international journal of medical science and practice. A border Collie cross belonging to a British women repeatedly sniffed a mole on her owner’s leg. She even tired to bite it off. The women eventually decided to have the mole checked and it was diagnosed as a melanoma.

In another report a Labrador took excessive interest in a lesion on its owner’s leg. It turned out to be a basal cell carcinoma.

A dermatologist, Armand Congetta, was fascinated by this and worked with a police dog handler to train dogs to locate tissue samples containing melanomas. They achieved close to a 100 per cent detection rate. Other research are exploring the possibility of training dogs to detect prostate cancer by sniffing urine samples.