OHIO – A man who was told to leave a retail store in Chillicothe earlier this week has been offered an apology for refusing to admit his service dog.
NBC 4 told you about Joe Lucas and Harley on Thursday.
That was after Joe had been told he couldn’t bring his service dog with him into the Sack And Save on Main Street in Chillicothe.
Police were called and although they agreed that Joe had the right to bring his dog into the store with him, Joe was embarrassed and didn’t want the confrontation to befall anyone else who uses a service dog.
Joe suffers seizures that Harley is trained to anticipate and alert Joe to go to a safe place.
Walking with Faith. It’s not an easy thing to do, especially when Faith is a two-legged dog.
The 8-year-old Labrador-Chow mix inspires hugs, smiles and even tears, hobnobs with celebrities, jet sets around the world and has even been made an honorary sergeant in the U.S. Army.
“She’s an inspiration,” Faith’s owner, Jude Stringfellow, told FoxNews.com.
Born without front legs in 2002, Faith was rescued by Stringfellow and her husband, who taught her to walk by luring her with spoons of peanut butter.
Since then, Faith has been on “The Oprah Show” and has rubbed paws with celebrities including Lindsay Lohan, Samuel L. Jackson and Ozzy Osbourne.
Man’s best friend can do a lot more than fetch and roll over. Research now suggests that dogs can actually help children learn to read.
For young kids, one of the big challenges in learning to read is the embarrassment of making mistakes. Reading to dogs provides a simple solution — a non-judgmental, comforting furry friend who “listens” and takes the pressure off a child as he stumbles.
“Kids have to practice, practice, practice to be good readers,” said Francine Alexander, the chief academic officer at Scholastic, the children’s book publisher. “And yet when you’re practicing, if you make a mistake, it can feel risky and uncomfortable. But if you’re practicing with a dog, you don’t mind making the mistake.”
A study this year by researchers at the University of California, Davis confirmed that children who read to Fido really do perform better. Young students who read out loud to dogs improved their reading skills by 12 percent over the course of a 10-week program, while children in the same program who didn’t read to dogs showed no improvement.
MEMPHIS – Wherever 15-year-old Blac Hughes goes, his dog Snap is right by his side.
Snap is more than just Blac’s new best friend; he is a lifesaver for the teen, who pronounces his name “Blake.”
Snap, a boxer-golden-retriever mix, is a medic-alert dog bought by Blac’s family in June to monitor the diabetic teen’s blood-sugar level.
The family has had no trouble adapting to Snap, but the same cannot be said of some area restaurants and stores that have not been as welcoming to the service dog.
“We were told by one restaurant that unless he was a seeing-eye dog, he could not come into the business,” said Blac’s mother, Delores Church. “After I told them they were violating state and federal laws, they let us in, but they made us come through the back door and put us in a separate part of the restaurant.”
Delta police department’s latest canine recruit is more likely to lick than growl.
The two-year-old male yellow Lab, the first police therapy dog in Canada, started six weeks of on-the-job training Monday, said Delta police spokeswoman Sgt. Sharlene Brooks.
Adding a dog to the department’s victim services team is a new approach to helping people in traumatic situations, Brooks said.
The four-legged therapist will offer support and reassurance for “excessively emotional” people, she said.
A dog’s presence can help children and people with disabilities calm down and communicate, Brooks added.
KABUL — In the struggle to bring peace to Afghanistan, few can claim a more dangerous job than the one Betty and Jimmy are preparing for.
Friendly and eager young German shepherd dogs, they are being trained to search for the remnants of war — hidden land mines and unexploded bombs.
Not only do unseen explosives kill military troops, they take a heavy toll on the innocent. More than 700 civilians are killed or maimed annually in Afghanistan, over half of them children, says the International Committee to Ban Landmines.
NATO and U.S. forces fighting the Taliban jihadist movement do not use mines. But the Taliban does, and so did former occupiers of Afghanistan such as the Soviet Union.
Joseph Lucas is used to going places and getting comments about his German shepherd, Harley. Although docile, her size and breed can be intimidating for some and bring about questions for many who see her inside area stores, businesses and restaurants.
While Lucas, 56, expects Harley to attract attention, he’s become increasingly frustrated by the lack of understanding people have for service dogs.
“A service dog is not for blind people. A service dog is for disabled people,” Lucas said.
Because Lucas is mobile and can see, the questions generally continue as people probe for a disability. That’s where he gets a little uncomfortable –imagine strangers constantly asking for what is “wrong” with you, wanting you to divulge such intimate information.
She spent two days lost at the busy Calgary International Airport and took a bath in a de-icing pond but now 10-month-old Ayumi is on her way home.
The Shiba Inu puppy got loose Monday night on a tarmac after the two halves of her kennel split apart while it was being unloaded from a plane.
The purebred, which weighs about seven kilograms, led ground crew on a chase for several hours before the search was called off on account of darkness.
The dog’s owner, Margaret Yee, who saw the escape unfold, was “very, very relieved” Wednesday to learn of Ayumi’s capture.
Behind the scenes at the nation’s most horrific tragedies, a small group of volunteers, two- and four-legged, unseen and unsung, work quietly to break trauma’s grip on the survivors.
Because they know that a few minutes with a sensitive dog can bring a smile or vanquish the pain for a moment, one or several of the 92 therapy dog handlers and their dogs that make up HOPE Animal-Assisted Crisis Response will journey (often hundreds of miles) when asked, to provide comfort after tragedy strikes.
They were on the scene after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and the shootings at Virginia Tech. And they’ve been at scores of horrors that may not have grabbed national headlines but that slammed a community to its knees.
“People in crisis often feel very isolated,” says Amy Rideout, president of the non-profit that has specially trained HOPE teams from coast to coast. “Just reaching out and petting a dog can be the first step in breaking through that.”
United Kingdom – Like most children, Rebecca Farrar adores her family’s dog – but the six-year-old diabetic has a particularly special reason.
Her young pet Shirley is one of the country’s only ‘hypo-alert’ hounds who SMELLS when Rebecca’s blood sugar reaches dangerously low levels.
The youngster says her life is ‘saved’ by the Labrador-golden retriever cross four times a week as she provides early of potential diabetic attacks.
The three-year-old dog can detect a change in scent when Rebecca’s blood sugar levels drop dangerously low or high and licks her owner’s hand to alert her.
A cancer survivor who owns a medically prescribed service dog says her rights were violated when a landlord refused to rent an apartment in Secaucus because of a “no-pets” rule, and now the state Division of Civil Rights is allowing the case to move forward.
The Division on Civil Rights announced today it has issued a finding of probable cause against a Hudson County apartment building owner and a real estate agency that listed his rental units for allegedly refusing housing to a Khalill and Jackie Smart of Secaucus.
Khalill and Jackie Smart, a breast cancer patient also diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her illness and treatment, were denied when they sought to rent an apartment advertised in December, their complaint says.
Landlord Ray Saoud, who owns the nine-unit apartment building on Maple Street in Secaucus, and Peterson Real Estate, also of Secaucus, which handled the property, were named by the Attorney General’s Office in the complaint.
