What they bring to us every single day is something very special.

Right now David is showing us a fabulous DVD of dogs, including James and Uno, visiting children at hospitals.

The images say it all, David says. You walk into the room with the animal and the energy changes immediately. We visit at the Women’s HEalth Unit at Sloan Kettering every week; we visit the ROnald McDonald House; the reaction is the same. The parents will say to us, ‘that’s the first time she’s smiled since she’s been here.’

Telling about visiting a man with dementia, an angry man who feels dumped by his family. As often happens with a boy and his dog, i’m an experimental case to see if we can make something happen. This guy looked up and he looked angry, and then he saw Belle, and he lights up and starts slapping his knee and says “Come here, you knucklehead,” and Belle goes and breaks the rules and jumps in his lap. I’m fighting back tears and the administrator is fighting back tears. Turns out the man had had Brittanys all his life and thought Belle was his dog.

When we’re dealing with kids, we say when a child is sick, the parents are sick too. when you’re making that child smile, you look over and see mom and dad and they’re smiling too.

You can walk into that room with a dog and talk to them about their dog at home or just get them to smile.

Tells about a girl with a spinal tumor who asks to walk Belle; she was fired up and ready to go. THe physical therapist told me, you just got her to do something I’ve been trying to get her to do for weeks.

David telling about his wife just starting to volunteer with their Brittany Tighe and how she decided to get a master’s in theology instead of an MBA and wrote her thesis on animal-assisted therapy and is now director of spiritual care for Ronald McDonald House. Our dogs were the first dogs ever allowed into bone marrow stem cell transplant center. When they start letting dogs in there it’s because they’ve pretty much decided they’re not going to make it. David is choking up telling a story about a girl they visited there who passed away. Her friends came over and told us that she loved the dogs and they loved the dogs for what they had done for her. I like working in the dog so nobody can see when I tear up.

Ron McD house gives us an adventure every week. there’s a kid who’s been there five years from Australia. He came there after his parents had been told he had only six months to live.

Telling about two young men at Mt. Sinai who see them with the dogs on a visit and one of them whistles at Tighe. Tighe rolls over for one of them. I think there’s a little food motivation going on there, David says, because the boys are being fed. The other one drops his arm off the chair and Tighe runs over and gives him five. By this time, they’re all crying and laughing, and Tighe thinks he’s the greatest thing ever.

I’m not changing the world; I’m just the guy on the other end of the leash. Now is telling about a woman who is paraplegic and gets a visit from Tighe. He gets up on her bed and lays there like a rock for 20 minutes–this is a dog who runs crazy in Central Park and chases squirrels, other crazy behavior, etc.

What we go through is nothing compared to what these kids go through every day. here’s another thing we often don’t talk about is the staff, what they go through. The staff breaks out from what they’re doing and they’re smiling to when they have an opportunity to interact with a dog.

Delta certifies rabbits. Rabbits are good for working in burn units, David says.

I think anybody who has a pet knows intuitively that when you go home and interact with them you feel better.

Now the science is starting to show it: your blood pressure goes down, your heart rate goes down; we need to do more research, but the medical profession is saying that this is good for patients.

Now I’m trying not to cry as he tells a touching story about the death of Belle and the relationship he had developed with a homeless veteran because of her.

We created Angel on a Leash as a charitable entity for the WKC four years ago and now it is a separate organization. We’re in 12 different facilities around the county…

Uno’s been a wonderful dog for us and I know many of you are dog writers as well and are familiar with Uno. Getting ready to show us another DVD. Telling us about Uno visiting Walter Reed after going to the White House. Uno met a double amputee marine there, who is now on the board of Angel on a Leash. We’re seeing Uno and this young man, Joshua Bleill, interact with kids at the Ronald McDonald House.

Just like when I saw this 18 months ago, people are blowing their noses, wiping away tears. Amy Shojai is pointing out that show cats would be good at this because they’re used to being handled.

Time to break for lunch; David is heading home to deal with a dog problem. Uh, oh!

Cavalier laugh for the day: I have a Mardi Gras mask, one of those half masks on a stick with feathers on it. I picked it up the other day to put it away–it had been out for Halloween–and on a whim I put it up to my face and turned toward Harper. Imagine a happy dog face immediately changing to horrified. Then she started barking at me. Too funny!

To accomplish the goal this weekend (I hope), I put an ad on Craiglist this morning:

‘98 Plymouth Voyager SE — one owner, low miles – $950

The good: Incredibly low mileage for a 12-year-old van — 90K — dark green exterior, gray cloth interior. Great AC, power windows, nice sound system, newish tires. 20ish mpg. Should be a good transportation car for years. One owner, regular servicing.

The bad: Sagging left front bumper (bolt broke, doesn’t impede driving), electrical short in door, neither interior nor exterior very pretty. This was my “dog car.” The rear bench seats have been stored since 1999 in the garage, so they’re like new. But the rest … well … allergies may be a problem and the fastidious dog-hater will not like this vehicle, possibly even after detailing.

The good or bad: Obama sticker, under which is an anti-Bush sticker. If you’re a Rush-Beck person, the karma on my dogma may be very wrong for you.

Price is $950 dollars firm, cash or registered check . I’m giving a good break off low private sale Edmunds book for you to pay for detailing and to deal with the electrical short.

Seems there are a few potential buyers already, and my brother will be dealing with them this weekend. But I knew I would get a nastygram,  and I was not disappointed. Paraphrasing over the f-bombs, removing the caps and hyper-exclamation pointing, here’s the meat of it:

I wouldn’t sit where your fat ass has been and I wouldn’t let my kids sit where your shitty mutts have been, either. Obama? It figures. Another clueless socialist, but I don’t expect YOU to care about the future of this country. You’re another dog freak who hates children.

Yeah, well … that’s why I put all the details in the ad. To save everyone some time. You’re welcome!

Actually, I’m surprised I got only one such response, but the day is young …

She has a thoughtful little piece on the Guideposts Web site, on being thankful for what our pets give us:

I’m thankful for the way my dog Kelly greets me at the door, as if my return is the best thing that happened to her all day.

I’m thankful for her soft reddish fur, and I’m especially thankful that she loves me every day.

Although we express our gratitude for our pets by feeding them, loving them and playing with them, Thanksgiving is the perfect time to remind ourselves just how lucky we are.

Rest the rest, and tell us what you’re thankful for about your pets.

And speaking of Thanksgiving, check out the recipe for Turkey and Cranberry Savories from Lucy Postins, the top dog and nutritionist behind The Honest Kitchen pet food company. Several of the PetConnection bloggers use Honest Kitchen, which is why I invited the company on as an advertiser, figuring they’d be a good match with our readers, too. (Lucy was also a fantastic source of “industry insider” information during the pet-food recall.) Visit  their YouTube channel.

So he was when we reached out and begged him to be the lead photographer on our “The Ultimate Dog-Lover” and “The Ultimate Cat-Lover” (Equine photographer Sarah K. Andrew, whose RockandRacehorses blog is on the left rail, is the lead photographer on our “The Ultimate Horse-Lover.”)

The photography was just about my favorite part of the books — full-color glories that celebrate what our Dr. Becker calls “The Bond,” that special connection we have with animals.

Troy is drawn to the less fortunate of our animals. He has spent countless hours on the streets of post-Katrina New Orleans, caring for and documenting the animals struggling alongside the people there.  The warm weather and boom of rodent populations in the months following the disaster triggered geometric growth in the feral cat population, some kittens born to cats already wild, some to pets left behind when the neighborhoods were washed away.

This morning’s mail brought a note from Troy. He is again using his camera to help animals, this time with modest project: “CATS: Feral Felines by Troy Snow,” a calendar for 2010 with proceeds to benefit the work of Alley Cat Allies.

He apologizes for it being a tad expensive ($17.49), which is also so very Troy. He lives on a shoestring, and is well aware of how many others do, too.

But he needn’t apologize: Having a year of Troy Snow images to enjoy and knowing that the calendar meant a donation for a really good group, well, that’s a bargain at prices far higher than this.

Buy. Buy. Buy.

Yes, I realize that swearing is not part of a formal obedience command, and saying it to my dog means I will never get the human equivalent of a Canine Good Citizen title.

I realize that it’s my fault when he has something in his mouth that he shouldn’t.

I realize that I am not a tidy person or a good trainer, and that this is a bad combination since he is the only dog I’ve ever had who was tall enough to get stuff off the kitchen counter. Unlike my beloved food hound Fred, Dodger doesn’t need to hop on the kitchen chairs to get onto the table. He just stretches out. For a 42-pound runt, he can stretch pretty darn far.

But damn it, last night he ate a 2-ounce container of walnut oil cream. He ate almost all of it before I managed to wrestle away his prize. He grabbed it off the kitchen table while I was showing a friend my new stash of organic oils, stearic acid, shea butter, witch hazel and beeswax, all of which I am using to make personal care items for holiday gifts this year. Items like walnut oil cream.

So even though I know that nothing in the walnut oil cream — which as I recall contains walnut oil, coconut oil, beeswax, and rosewater — will hurt him, it’s expensive stuff to metamorphose into midnight diarrhea. He also left toothmarks on the nifty little jars I bought online for all the stuff I plan to mix and cook and then smoosh onto people’s skin.

It was so tasty Dodger refused to give up the jar for quite a while. “Drop it” is not his strong point, although he has a mean sit. I won the jar, and the battle, but I feel like I’m losing the war. At least the dreaded midnight diarrhea did not show up.

It’s my fault he got into it, just as it is when I leave my underwear on the floor and he chews through the crotch. While I can’t seem to remember to buy a hamper with a lid, I have to keep remembering to buy new underwear. At least I am sporting new colors, and he hasn’t actually swallowed any lately.

Since he loves to shred paper, I am grateful he’s never touched a book, particularly library books. How humiliating would that be? “Hi, my dog ate these four books. How much do I owe you? No, he’s not a puppy. He’s 5. Oh, you know a good trainer?”

Last weekend I wanted to return something to the hardware store and held the shredded receipt in my hand. Was it worth even trying? I stood uneasily at the cash register and said I would understand if the receipt was unacceptable because my dog ate it. “Oh, your dog ate your homework, eh?” said the clerk. I smiled wanly while he returned my money.

If I was a teacher, I would definitely get one of those “The dog ate my lesson plan” t-shirts.  Maybe in view of my tearing around chasing him and his ill-begotten prizes, I should wear one of these “It’s all fun and games until someone ends up in a cone” t-shirts.  If I thought I could get him in a dog t-shirt, I’d put him in one that says “I love my mom” to remind me he’s not trying to destroy stuff but to either snack or engage me in play (that’s where most of my underwear goes). The food is about snacking; the socks and underwear are all about engaging my attention. I’m not sure what the coffee drinking is all about – he’s way too hyper enough to need caffeine – but one of these days he’s going to break a mug.

With Fred the food-obsessed Westie-Bichon mix, I used a series of escalating anti-Fred devices, i.e., trash cans with increasingly difficult levels of access. I finally had a winner when I bought a stand-alone wooden kitchen cabinet with a pull-out drawer for the trashy. Somehow, that’s just not going to change Dodger’s accessibility. What works for one dog won’t necessarily work for another.

Fred mostly stole food; Dodger is the only dog I’ve had who enjoys shredding paper. Needless to say all paper has the same lack of value to him whether or not it’s a check, a receipt, the phone number of a new business contact, or my ticket to the theater.

I don’t want to explain to a cop why I can’t find the car registration, and I don’t want to tell my friend my dog ate her wedding invitation, so you’d think I’d learn.

But I don’t.

Oh no no no no I know that noise…dear God, what does he have now?

Yesterday Mom had a knee replaced (her second) and will be in the hospital for a few more days so Ginger is in my house. Cosmo sleeps most of the time now so is still at Mom’s house — two streets from mine — and I will go over there to care for him.

But Ginger, oh poor Ginger. She’s in my house with three Aussies and cats. Cats!!!  Ginger has had no exposure to cats and these cats don’t run from dogs –  they are in charge of the dogs. So she’s already been swatted on the nose, batted on the butt and growled at in cat language — four letter words, I’m sure.

The Aussies don’t respect her, either, and when she’s in the way, they go right over the top of her. When she took her time chewing on her chewie, they took it away from her. When she got pushy and nosy, Bashir lifted a lip at her. Just one lip over one canine, but she got the message.

And then there’s me. I do not allow dogs to run away from me, and she did that twice yesterday. So, we had a training session yesterday and will have another one today. I used lots of praise and treats –  things my Mom will and can follow through with later –  but I also put a long leash on Ginger so she couldn’t run from me.  By last night she was running towards me when I called and didn’t run past me: She stopped in front of me. Good girl!

Ginger is good in the house. She would like to chew, but I have dog toys and chewies available. Her housetraining is good — no accidents — and she’s crate-trained.

There is one thing I am concerned about, though, that I will have to work on with her. Somehow my Mom has taught Ginger, or allowed her to become, helpless. She doesn’t try new things; she doesn’t get creative; and she doesn’t try to solve problems.

I like my dogs to solve problems. I want them to use their brains and think. And I’m not used to a dog in my home who doesn’t. Ginger’s response is to sit in place, not move, and then whine and cry. Perhaps my Mom has saved her every time something hard happens. Or somehow Ginger has learned not to try. I’m not quite sure what has caused this but I find it very sad.

I’ll dig out my Nina Ottosson toys tonight and introduce her to those. They encourage the dog to think and try. And I’ll play some find it games and hide and seek games.  We’ll also do some trick training ==  I’ll have her train with the Aussies. I’ll get this little dog to use her brain!

Image: Ginger as a puppy, visiting with Archer.

Thanks to a liver transplant a couple of years ago, Linda Thompson is getting back to a fairly normal state of health after years of creeping towards becoming terminally ill. She uses a pump for her diabetes, and just recently began working full time again. This past August I saw Linda for the first time in years. She lives in a suburb of Vancouver. She has been too ill to travel, and I just hadn’t made it out there in a long time.

Emma, an 11-year old shepherd mix, woke Linda up around 3 a.m. to tell Linda she wanted to go out. Linda staggered out to the kitchen aiming for the room behind it, which has the door to the back yard. Emma simply stopped by the kitchen counter and refused to budge. Groggy as all get out, Linda thought Emma wanted food, but her dish was full. Emma kept looking at the kitchen counter and then at Linda, then back to the counter, then back to Linda.

I can just see Emma doing this. She is one smart cookie.

“Eventually, I realized that my vision was quite blotchy and what she was indicating was my glucometer,” said Linda in an e-mail to me. The glucometer was on the kitchen counter where Emma was staring. Linda checked her blood sugar and found it dangerously low at 25 when normal is 90 to 140 (or 1.5 from a normal range of 5.2 to 7.6).

“If it had dipped any lower I would have blacked out completely,” said Linda, whose new job is a patient advisor for diabetics. “I started eating Dex4 tablets and Emma went outside, where it was raining heavily.  Normally when it’s raining, she runs out and pees and then dashes back in the house.  Not this night.  She lay down in the grass for 15 minutes.  This is significant because I have been known, in a hypoglycemic stupor, to take a couple of Dex4 tablets and go back to bed without checking to make sure it’s coming up and have subsequently tanked.  After about 15 minutes, she came back in and again went to the counter where the glucometer was.  I tried to get her to go down the hall to the bedroom, but she wouldn’t go until I had taken my blood again and told her that it was okay.”

Linda’s pump had been sending out noisy beeping alarms, but that night both Linda and her husband slept through them. It’s impossible to know if Emma was responding to the alarm or to a scent indicating a problem, but she not only knew something needed to be done immediately, she also figured out how to do it.

It’s frightening to think that without Emma, Linda could have died from this one episode after nearly dying two years ago (she was the sickest person her transplant surgeon had ever seen who survived).  Linda’s health issues began almost 15 years ago, around the time I met her through an Internet dog list, and she is one hell of a survivor. I’ve never seen anyone that ill who had such an upbeat attitude every step of the way. In all the years I’ve known her, she’s only cried once that I know of, and not because she was sick or nearly dying: she cried because one of her dogs died in her arms while she was home alone and too sick to race the dog to the vet. Knowing that the dog wouldn’t have survived even if she’d been seen immediately never took away the pain.

At one point Emma was one of several rescued dogs in the house, but because of Linda’s health issues, Emma has been the only pet in the house for a while. Emma wasn’t there the last time I was, so this was the first time I met her. She’s an absolute doll. I took a lot of photos of them, and many of Emma, trying to show how happy she is despite the reasons for the scar around her snout. Linda and Emma have always had an emotional connection that went beyond the one she had with her other beloved dogs.  It’s no surprise to the people who know them that Emma would be the dog to save Linda from a dangerous glucose drop; it would have been Emma if there were ten dogs in the house.

Emma is clearly getting a bit stiff these days, and her gait isn’t quite what it used to be. She has been totally content for years, and is an easy-going, affectionate girl. Whoever cruelly left her to starve with wire wrapped around her snout so that she couldn’t eat will surely get what he or she deserves in this world. Thankfully, Linda and Emma have always deserved each other, and now they have saved each other.

Perhaps anyone who could have been a fly on the wall when I had to stop an interview in mid-stream yesterday to unwind all the Borzoi hair from the base of the keys on my keyboard. Two years of accumulation meant I’d hit critical mass and lost the “S” and the shift keys.

Fortunately I was interviewing someone who is as much a dog person as they come, Marthina McClay of Our Pack, the rescue group that turned ex-Vick dog Leo into a therapy dog.

I was interviewing her for my column on SFGate.com, but she made some great comments that won’t fit into that piece, so I thought I’d share them with you here. Believe me, they make better reading than the story of how I had to use a knitting needle to untangle Borzoi hair from my keyboard.

I asked her about Michael Vick talking to at-risk youth about dog fighting on behalf of HSUS. She responded by telling me about a visit Leo made to a school for youth who have been in trouble with the law in San Jose, Calif. — some of them with dog fighting in their backgrounds:

We heard the kids going, “Oh, that’s a bad ass pit bull,” when we walked in. It’s like a cool thing to have a pit bull.

When we got into the classroom, I just took off Leo’s leash and let him walk around and do his thing. I let Leo speak for himself. He just connected with everyone, these kids. They went from hard to soft within 20 minutes.

Then the teacher said, “By the way, would you guys like to know where this dog came from?”

The kids said, “Where?”

She told them, “This dog used to belong to Michael Vick.”

You could hear a pin drop. Their mouths were open, their eyes were riveted on this dog. They said, “What?” They couldn’t believe it.

I could hear one of the kids being interviewed by a reporter from the Washington Post, and he said he’d assumed a dog like this, a Vick dog, would be aggressive and mean. Instead, he said, he’s a nice, sweet, friendly dog. “I really like him,” he said.

We’re not a farming culture anymore. We have lost our connection with animals. We almost never work hand in hand with our dogs anymore. We go to work in an office or cubicle, or we go to school, but there’s nothing to give us that feeling of how we fit into the world of animals.

So you bring a dog into the classroom and say, “Would you really want something like that to happen to this dog?” Before Leo showed up, I don’t think they cared. The Vick dogs were distant and not connected to them. But after they met Leo, all that changed. It mattered to them.

So what I’m saying is, don’t bring Vick to talk to at risk kids. Bring his dogs. His dogs will do a lot more for people who need to see the light that these are sentient, feeling, loving beings, and that it’s our job to care for them, than Vick can ever do.

By the way, Marthina told me that Leo has found his forever home… with her. As if anyone thought it would end any differently.

I could once more dig into the pressing issues of pet food safety and how the regulatory agencies and industry are failing our animals, and us.

I could give you an overview of the interview I’ll be doing with HSUS head honcho Wayne Pacelle this evening, or my plans to liveblog his town hall here in San Francisco.

But instead, I’m going to share with you the single most important news story of the day, a critical development in the world of animal issues: My Borzoi Kyrie’s new raincoat. Enjoy.

And in case you’re wondering, I got it from HoundTogs.com and they couldn’t have been nicer and more helpful. And I’m just a regular customer — I don’t take freebies for review. (Well, I take them, but I don’t keep them after I’ve used them enough to review them.)

And that other stuff? Later. I promise.

What’s hilarious is that some commenters wrote that the reasons he dislikes pets are the very same reasons they love theirs.

While I feel sorry for Mr. Markely because he is missing out on the incredible experiences I’ve had with pets, it is a perfect reminder to those of us who spend much of our day and dreams thinking about our pets or even earning a living with them that not everyone feels this way. Just as we don’t all love football or Thai food, some people are not animal people, and they never will be. We may think of them as missing some important gene, but they are not genetically defective.

I often mention that the lives of people without pets must be terribly dull and unamusing, and I’m certain that parents of human children feel the same way about a childless person like me.

The other day I was reminded that not everyone loves dogs when a computer technician arrived. He clearly did not like dogs, and Dodger was doing his best to meet and greet, and make the technician fuss over him the way everyone else does. No such luck for my poor bouncing boy, who ended up in the back yard while the technician was here.

That guy was in direct contrast to the furnace guy who walked in and said “Wow, an English setter! I used to breed them!” and gave me “an English setter discount” (it was actually because he took so long to get here, but I loved it nonetheless).

Pet lovers, especially the hard-core among us (and you know who you are), need to be reminded once in a while that not all of our guests, service people or friends like animals. They don’t want a dog jumping on them, a cat shedding on their clothes, nor do they want to hold your gerbil or let your bird poop on their shoulder. Some folks are afraid of animals, and some simply aren’t attracted.

Even within animal lovers, not all of us like all animals. My sister’s horses are beautiful and I love feeding them treats, but after seeing my sister end up in the hospital twice after riding them there is no way I am getting ON one;  she stopped asking years ago if I wanted to ride. I like my bones where they are. Furthermore, while I love Melissa Kaplan’s hilarious photos of her huge iguana Mike, she knows darn well I don’t want to hold him, and I don’t want to touch any snake on the planet.

Feel sorry for those folks who are not animal lovers and about what they’re missing, but respect their wishes. I don’t want anyone to force me to sit down and watch a stupid football game, so I don’t force my pets on anyone. Life is all about variety and preferences; the good news is that I don’t have to spend time with those folks who just aren’t animal people.