It’s good to be reminded sometimes that dogs seem to have a “sixth sense.”

Here’s a nice little article about Kutty, a Labrador Retriever that lives in Mumbai, a city in India. Kutty recently won the Top Dog award in the Delta Society’s Internet poll. The Delta Society is a Washington-based organization that publicizes the efforts and good outcomes of therapy dogs. (www.deltasociety.org).

My geography’s not that great, so I had to look at a map to see where Mumbai is. It’s on a peninsula on the western coast of India, on the Indian Ocean.

Kutty works with mentally challenged children. According to Kutty’s owner, Shyamsri Bhosale, “Kutty’s nose for healing has worked wonders for these children drawing them out of their silent and confused worlds. She has taught the art of communication.”

Here’s another article, from the Times of India, about Kutty (spelled Kutti here) and the healing work that dogs are doing in India. This article talks about how “Animal Assisted Therapy” is being used in a lot of countries. It turns out Kutti is just one of a number of docs that are employed to help mentally challenged children at the Jidd School in Thane, a nearby town.

There are lots of dimensions to having a close relationship with your dog. Understanding your dog’s communication is important. But it’s also important to ask questions like, “Just how smart is my dog, anyway?” And, “What does its senses allow it to know that I might not know?” And, “How can I tune into the special talents that my dog might have?”

Kudos to the people who recognize that dogs can have such healing power!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.