Ron Luethe and Jack work with Emmanuel Alcantar.
By KAREN PARKER | County Line Publisher
The average senior citizen might find more than a dozen high-energy kids a bit unnerving. But 10-year-old Jack (70 in human years) was unruffled by the children who mobbed him last week at the Norwalk park shelter.
Jack belongs to Ron Luethe, a Norwalk native who retired from government service in North Dakota and moved back the area with his wife a few years ago.
He and his wife adopted Jack from a shelter in Bismarck, N.D., when the Lab/Springer spaniel was 18 months old. It was the couple’s first dog, although Ron recalls having dogs when he was growing up on his parent’s farm.
Ron said Jack has always been an easygoing, friendly dog but it wasn’t until they heard a program on Wisconsin Public Radio this spring that he realized Jack might have the makings of a good therapy dog.
A therapy dog is a dog trained to provide affection and comfort to people in hospitals, retirement homes, nursing homes, schools, hospices and disaster areas and to people with learning difficulties. Although the use of therapy dogs to comfort wounded soldiers was discovered during World War II, it wasn’t until 1976 that Elaine Smith, a registered nurse, published a study on their therapeutic use with hospital patients and then started a program to train the dogs.
Training, in Luethe’s estimation, is primarily “getting the dog to pay attention.” That’s certainly a challenge, as any dog owner can testify,
As it turned out, Jack was good at paying attention, “unless a squirrel ran past,” joked Luethe.
His gentle nature and ease with strangers made him a good candidate to be a therapy dog, according to Ruby Donovan of Elroy, who evaluated the dog and helped Luethe through the process of registering the animal.
Since then, Jack has made a number of calls to the Morrow Home and Rolling Hills in Sparta, including visiting with Ron’s uncle Fritz Luethe prior to his recent death.
Last week, Jack sat patiently as the children in the Norwalk summer library program read their books to him. If he was bored with the content, he was too polite to say so. Amazingly, only a few children in the group raised their hands when asked if they had a dog at home.
Luethe said the next stop for Jack would be the Wilton library summer reading program. One can expect that by the end of the summer, Jack will be a literary genius and a lot of kids will have had an opportunity to get to know and enjoy a gentle and loving dog.
