Health & Fitness
Abby Kennels Asks About Your Best Friend
Abby Kennels of Chelmsford (abbykennels.com) wants to know how your dog enriches your life. Follow us on Twitter @dogmankevin for more dog tips.
We’ve seen our share of tragic news stories lately: the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT; the Boston Marathon Bombing; the devastating tornado that destroyed Moore, Oklahoma. As each tragedy unfolded, we watched working dogs search for suspects or bombs or, sadly, bodies.
Working dogs were also called in to provide comfort. Shortly after both the Newtown shootings and the Marathon Bombing, the Lutheran Church K-9 Comfort Dog Unit was dispatched from their home base of Chicago to comfort the survivors. Trained service dogs also perform life altering tasks like alerting owners to dangerously low blood sugar levels or navigating busy streets for vision impaired handlers. Abby Kennels recently highlighted the work that one of our own dogs does as a service dog for a family of four.
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Thankfully, most of us will never need our dogs to open doors or manage our life on a such large scale. But dog lovers are adamant in their belief that they “need” their dogs. Dogs are messy, expensive, time consuming. Dogs are work. Why do we “need” them?
We posed that question to several Abby Kennels’ clients. We received many responses, some sad, some funny, all heartwarming. Many people mentioned the sheer joy a dog brings to their life. Some people talked about the gift of a friendly greeting at the end of a long, hard day. Several wrote about how their dog forced them to get out and exercise. One woman shared with us her story of how her dog helped her find her way back after a long illness because Lucy is “such a cutie, everyone wants to pet her and they end up talking to me. Those simple conversations were a reminder that my life would go back to normal.” One of our youngest clients summed it all up perfectly when she said, “Molly is my best friend.” Enough said.
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We at Abby Kennels are privileged to do the work we do. On a daily basis, we see the love and happiness dogs bring to their owners. Not to mention the fact that we’re greeted like heroes every time we walk through the door!
Tell us about your best friend. Share your story with us and we’ll publish it in a future blog.
Like us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/AbbyKennels) and follow us on Twitter (@dogmankevin).
