Why we like dogs

This is my day to write about dogs.  I noted earlier today that the Islamic horror over dogs isn’t even a religious proscription, it’s a cultural one.  This is also my day to write about sacrifice, since I posted on the death of Michael Mansoor, who threw himself on a grenade to save his fellow SEALs.  And I get to end the day with a story that combines both my musings on dogs and on sacrifice (although I want to assure you that I consider Mansoor’s death a far greater sacrifice, no matter how wonderful the dog was):

After a disabled woman’s cat started a house fire, her specially trained dog came to the rescue, then died trying to help the cat still in the house. Jamie Hanson said the 13-year-old dog named Jesse brought the phone so she could call 911 and also brought her artificial leg.

“She got me outside and then she heard the cat upstairs and she went up there to get the cat and she wouldn’t come back to me,” Hanson, 49, said at a news conference Monday at Aurora Sheboygan Memorial Medical Center where she was being treated for her injuries.

She received third-degree burns to an arm in the fire Sunday night at her home in the town of Rhine south of Elkhart Lake, the Sheboygan County Sheriff’s Department said, adding that both pets died in the fire.

Hanson, who lost a leg in a car accident three years ago, said she was on the couch watching television when the cat ran over the back of the couch.

“And he jumped onto a table that had a candle on it and tipped it over and lighted the artificial plants on fire,” she said.

Hanson said she fell off the couch and was unable to get her artificial leg from the table, “so my dog got my leg for me and went and got the phone and brought the phone to me so I could call 911.”

She said she tried to put the prosthetic leg on, but it was too hot, and the dog, a golden retriever-German shepherd mix, came to her aid again before going back inside for the cat.

In my house, my dog is my current favorite resident because, 99% of the time, she’s the only one who listens to me and follows my instructions!