A story on All Things Considered last Monday reported that U.S. soldiers are teaching Iraqi security forces how to use bomb-sniffer dogs. The NPR reporter interviewed Army Staff Sgt. Aaron Meier, an American adviser to the Iraqi National Canine Program.
“The greatest tool you have in your inventory when working with dogs is love. A lot of dogs, that’s what they work for, just your affection,” Meier says.
When I heard the story on the radio, I knew exactly what Sgt. Meier meant. I’ve seen – okay, felt—how affection motivates dogs to do a good job. Just like bomb-sniffer dogs, Seeing Eye dogs work for love, too.
Realizing this connection, I contacted Lisa, the blog moderator at The Bark to see if she’d be interested in having me write a guest post about the NPR story. She was!
Lisa is familiar with my writing — The Bark has published a few of my stories in their magazine. It’s a thrill to be connected with a magazine that also publishes stories by the likes of Ann Patchett and Augusten Burroughs. If you’ve never heard of The Bark, here’s a description of the four-color glossy magazine from their web site:
Taking the magazine’s slogan to heart—Dog Is My Co-Pilot—Bark became the first magazine to tap into the exploding phenomena of dog culture and lifestyle, focusing on the growing bond between individuals and their pet companions.
You can read my latest guest blog at The Bark’s site and link to other Bark stories there, too—if you like dogs, trust me, you’ll like The Bark.
Hi Beth
Thats really cool that you got to write a story for NPR 🙂 What did you write about?
sorry i meant that you got to write a story for “The Bark”
Hey, thanks for asking –your question made me open my “Bark” file so I could remember all I’d written for them. Turns out I’ve written more stories for The Bark than I thought! One story I wrote was about people faking disabilities in order to get their dogs on planes with them (they’d claim the dog was a service dog), one was about a concierge dog who works at the Fairmont Hotel in Boston, another about what happens to working dogs when they retire, another was about people with disabilities training their own dogs as service dogs. Lastly, I wrote a story about airports in the US that have dog parks right there in the airport — you know, so that dogs who are traveling have a nice spot to relieve themselves and get some exercise while in transit. After researching that article, Hanni and I happened to be traveling to Austin. We used the dog park at Bergstrom Airport there –nice!
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