With Compassion & Soul

Supporting Animals & Humans Globally

Index:

 

1) Faith the 2 legged Dog

2) Unhealthy dog snacck equal FAT Dogs

3) Mad Cows & Livid Lambs (Animlas Fight Back)

4) Molly the 3 legged Horse

5) Freedom The Bald Eagle

1) FAITH THE 2 LEGGED DOG

 

FAITH is an incredible dog. She was born just before Christmas in 2002, and we were lucky enough to have her in our family just 3 short weeks later. She was born to a mother dog, believed to be nearly full blooded Chinese Chow Chow, along with several other siblings. Faith wasn't the only puppy born with deformities, but because "Princess", her mother, was not our dog, we are not sure of the exact number of puppies she gave birth to. It is certain, however, that Faith was the only puppy with deformities to live.

Faith was rescued by my son Reuben on January 21, 2003, when he and his friend Johnny, the owner of Princess, jumped over the fence of the flea market area that Princess was raised to guard. Princess isn't exactly the mothering kind. She was literally terminating Faith's life because she knew instinctively that Faith was unable to battle the other puppies for a place to feed. Faith was weak, small, runtish, and mostly she was nearly dead. Reuben grabbed Faith out from under Princess and smuggled her under his jersey. He wore #63 for the Putnam City Pirates football team.

 

When Reuben brought Faith to us she had 3 actual legs

 but the left front leg was badly deformed, placed backward, upside down, and it had more toes on it than normal dog legs. The leg was removed when she was 7 months old when it began to atrophy. People ask me if it was easy to teach Faith to walk upright...the answer is NO! It was not easy, and it was not natural. It was SUPER natural, and therefore, we have to give all of the credit to Jesus. Of course, it took a little....Faith as well. 

 

What you may or may not realize is that Faith was given an Honorary Commission as an E5 SGT in the U.S. Army in June 2006.  She was commissioned out of Ft. Lewis near Seattle, WA.  There were many soldiers and civilians in attendance who cheered her on as she accepted her Commission. It was just suppose to be for an hour, but you know, when you're in the Army you're IN the Army. She proudly holds her head up - wearing her custom made ACU jacket (Thanks Jason) with the American flag and the Department of Defence patch as well. She is a therapy dog, and that is also reflected on the ACU jacket.  She actually out ranks my son who is at this time an E4 Specialist.  Faith can not be deployed and she enjoys no official benefits...but she gives a lot of love and encouragement to the men and women of our Armed Forces - all branchs.  Hooah!

 

 

2) Unhealthy Dog Snacks equal FAT Dogs

Some of the info below you may already know, but for those of you who don't, read on.

What unhealthy snacks mean to your dog

Dog:                                                                                   Human:

1 small plain biscuit                      =                                   1 hamburger

1 slice of buttered toast                =                                   1 hamburger

30g cheddar cheese                     =                                 75g chocolate

1 sausage                                     =                                    6 donuts

Why not cut up some small pieces of apple, carrot, banana or seaweed crackers, and use these instead? If you absolutely have to give a snack, here is a recipe for low fat dog biscuits:

Ingredients:

1/2 cup margarine
1/2 cup vegetable broth
1/2 cup dry soy milk
1/4 tsp. salt
2 tsp. sugar
1 egg or egg substitute and

2 cups rice flour and 1 cup soy flour

Directions:

Combine all ingredients except flour in a large bowl and mix well. Blend in the flour one-half cup at a time, mixing well until dough is formed. Knead the dough and roll out nice and thin. Cut out dog bones in whatever size you want.
Bake in a preheated 325-degree oven for 50 minutes. Turn the oven off, but leave dog biscuits in for three more hours so they can get nice and crunchy

for more recipes on dog biscuit variations go to http://www.geocities.com/heartland/ranch/1011/dog.htm

3) Mad Cows & Livid Lambs (animals fight back)

Marauding elephants, aggressive sea lions, snap-happy crocodiles... As animal attacks on humans reach frightening levels, scientists are beginning to understand exactly what the beasts are thinking. And it's not good. Will Storr reports

In a tiny village in rural Assam, two terrified children will tonight sleep in a tree house. It doesn't matter how much their mother scolds them; there's no way they're going to bed down there. Not after what happened. They can still remember that night, of course - being picked up by their mother, and how hard she covered their mouths with her hands to stop them screaming. They can remember the other sounds too.The elephants had come in from the forest again. Then they saw one, a vast dark hulk looming out of the black towards their door. Their Dad tried to push it away. That's when the elephant carried him round the side of the house and killed him.

Elephants haven't always behaved like this. But in recent years, in India and all over Africa, too, some menacing change has come over them. And not just elephants - it's almost any species. This disquieting pattern has only recently been detected, in part because it is so disparate and weird. But it's now widely accepted that the relationship between humans and animals is changing. One of the world's leading ethologists (specialists in animal behaviour) believes that a critical point has been crossed and animals are beginning to snap back. After centuries of being eaten, evicted, subjected to vivisection, killed for fun, worn as hats and made to ride bicycles in circuses, something is causing them to turn on us. And it is being taken seriously enough by scientists that it has earned its own acronym: HAC - 'human-animal conflict'.

It's happening everywhere. Authorities in America and Canada are alarmed at the increase in attacks on humans by mountain lions, cougars, foxes and wolves.

Romania and Colombia have seen a rise in bear maulings. In Mexico, in just the past few months, there's been a spate of deadly shark attacks with The LA Times reporting that, 'the worldwide rate in recent years is double the average of the previous 50'. America and Sierra Leone have witnessed assaults and killings by chimps who, according to New Scientist, 'almost never attack people'. In Uganda, they have started killing children by biting off their limbs then disembowelling them.

There has been a surge in wolf attacks in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Russia and France. In Australia, there has been a run of dingo killings, and crocodile violence is up. In Beijing, injuries from cats and dogs have swelled by 34 per cent, year-on-year. In America, the number of humans killed by pet dogs has increased sharply since 2000. In Australia, dog attacks are up 20 per cent. In Britain, nearly 4,000 people needed hospital treatment for dog bites in 2007, a figure that has doubled in the past four years. In Bombay, petrified residents are being slaughtered in ever-increasing numbers by leopards, leading J. C. Daniel, a leopard specialist, to comment, 'We have to study why the animal is coming out. It never came out before.' In Edinburgh, in June, there was a string of bizarre fox attacks - a pensioner was among the victims. In Singapore, residents have been being terrorised by packs of macaques. Sharon Chan, a national parks official, told reporters, 'It's a very weird situation.'

The numbers are disturbing enough, but the menacing changes in behaviour are especially worrying to scientists. In Australia, the biologist Dr Scoresby Shepherd - who pointed out that in areas where shark attacks used to happen every three or four decades, they are now taking place at least once a year - has suggested that sharks are switching their prey to humans. In Los Angeles, Prof Lee Fitzhugh has come to the same conclusion about mountain lions. In San Francisco, a spate of sea lion assaults lead one local to comment, 'I've been swimming here for 70 years and nothing like this has happened before.' In Cameroon, for the first time, gorillas have been throwing bits of tree at humans. They're using weapons against us.

It's easy to see why some suspect revenge. The theory that the animals of the three elements are conspiring against us gained popularity in 2006, when the Australian television presenter Steve Irwin was speared through the heart by a stingray off the north Queensland coast. In the aftermath, the phrase 'freak accident' was used in news reports. When, just six weeks later, the same thing happened to James Bertakis, of Miami (he lived only because, unlike Irwin, he didn't pull the barbed sting out), people started wondering. Then, in March this year, Judy Kay Zagorski was boating on the Florida Keys when a stingray leapt from the water and fatally struck her in the face.

Any sane person might decide that his theory, which posits that beasts are working in concert to take revenge on humans, is insane. But in the regions where the most research into HAC is being carried out, scientists have concluded that revenge for our myriad barbarities could indeed be a motive.

All over Africa, India and parts of south-east Asia, elephants have started attacking humans in unprecedented numbers. Not just killing - they're rampaging through villages and stomping crops, terrorising local populations in any way they can. 'What's happening today is extraordinary,' Dr Gay Bradshaw, a world authority on elephants, told reporters in 2006. 'Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful co-existence, there is now hostility and violence.' Bradshaw is the director of the Kerulos Centre for Animal Psychology and Trauma Recovery, in Oregon. 'When you see reports of elephants running into crops or attacking people, they're highly stressed,' she tells me. 'And there are multiple stressors - violence, lack of food, lack of water; their families are being broken up; their society is collapsing. All of these things are human-derived.'Bradshaw describes the elephants as being 'under siege' from the locals. But the violence against humans has increased so suddenly, and reached such levels, that these traditional factors aren't thought to be sufficient to explain it. Bradshaw and her colleagues now think that there's been a massive, pan-species psychological collapse throughout the world's pachyderms. In essence, we're witnessing the dysfunctional shenanigans of a generation of depraved elephants. These are individuals who have become psychologically fractured after being orphaned at a developmentally delicate age or are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after watching their families being slaughtered.

'You could make a parallel between elephants and people who are undergoing genocide and war,' Bradshaw says. 'They've gone through massive killings and many have sustained culls or severe poaching, so they've witnessed the violence and they're traumatised. It's critical to understand that when you have an experience at a young age, or through adolescence or even as an adult, it

enters into the brain. In other cases, the normal rearing process is disrupted or conducted by distressed parents, so you're creating individuals who are mentally challenged.'

Such claims might be dismissed as so much Disneyfied anthropomorphism if Bradshaw did not have the observational, psychological and neuroscientific evidence to back them up. And, she says, it might not be just in elephants that this critical point has been breached. 'I think we're well past the critical point,' she says. 'Well past. People are starting to notice these atypical behaviours in an array of species.'

Of the question of elephant revenge, though, she is more cautious. 'Put yourself in an elephant's shoes. What's it like living in Africa or Asia when you're surrounded by an active threat, not just to you but to your family? Let's take, for example, one of the things that's happening in Africa. Females are starting to charge lorries. Why? It's hard to understand the motive. Perhaps she's traumatised. Perhaps it's pre-emptive - they may have a gun. It may be self?defence. And other times it may well be revenge. It's not that I don't think elephants have the capacity.' Dr Marc Bekoff, a leading ethologist, agrees. 'We need to be careful when using that sort of language,' he says. 'But I don't think there's any doubt that, in certain situations, animals show revenge.'

At first he thought it was a dream; that shuffling, that banging that bulged out of the darkness around him. By the time Michael Fitzgerald had roused himself and put on his slippers, he decided it was burglars. They were in the garage. He crept forward, readying himself for what awaited behind the electric door that was slowly, noisily rising. He peered in. It was a badger. Just a badger! He'd never seen one so close before. The badger looked up, then slowly, calmly walked up to him. 'Pam!' he called to his wife. 'Get a camera!' Two minutes later, blood from his arm was spattered over his front door.'It was some kind of hell,' Fitzgerald, from Evesham, told the BBC, in 2003. 'His razor-blade teeth were around my arm.' Even after he had shaken if off, it gave chase, biting his legs and arms. 'I never envisaged I would be seeing my own insides,' he said. The badger then embarked on an 18-hour rampage around the town.

Stories like these remind us that there are millions of beasts armed with teeth and stingers, who can out-sniff, out-run, out-fly, out-fight and out-bite every one of us. The eerie truth is that, right now, we're surrounded. As a species, we've been at the top of the food chain for so long, we've forgotten that 'humans' are mere anthropoid apes and, in distant millennia, we had to fight the feral armies to get here. In our hubris, we imagine we're an animal apart. For centuries, we've been told by priests and scientists that animals are not much more than unfeeling, unthinking, unselfconscious automatons. They're a gift from God, and their purpose is to have paracetamol rubbed into their eyes, to be turned into fancy trousers to be stuffed with nuts on His birthday. Many mainstream

scientists still warn against anthropomorphism. But it doesn't stop the many people who are secretly wondering what's really going on behind those inscrutable black eyes? Are the birds talking about us? Do lobsters sulk? Can one moose love another? The more scientists have discovered about the inner lives of animals, the more troubling and strange things have become. 'Things are really changing,' acknowledges Bekoff. 'There's a lot of new behavioural research, a lot of new neuroscience research that demonstrates they are far more complex than was thought. We're not inserting into animals something they don't have.'

Bekoff describes the sound Darwinian logic beneath this gigantic paradigm shift. Simply, if our brains have developed the capacity for a rich emotional inner-life over the millions of years they've been evolving, then why not theirs? 'If you believe in biological continuity then, if we have emotions, they have emotions. If we have a heart, they have a heart.'

But there are still many people, such as Prof Peter Carruthers, of the University of Sheffield, who would consider this to be misguided sentimentality. In his book The Animals Issue, he insists that animals don't consciously feel pain, and therefore 'make no real claims on our sympathy'. When vets and vivisectionists anaesthetise their subjects, the argument runs, they're indulging in schmaltzy, greetings-card reasoning.

Dr Paul McDonald, of the Centre for the Integrative Study of Animal Behaviour, in Sydney, also warns against the sort of talk Bekoff persists in. 'There's a temptation to put human emotions into animal interactions, which I think is not the way to go,' he says. 'The danger is it'll shape your interpretations. Take noisy mynah birds, for example. They have a dominance hierarchy, so there's often aggressive interactions where one bird appears to beat the other up. Through human glasses that could be a punishment or something along those lines, where in reality it's about maintaining social rank.'

But McDonald's worldview and his observations seem at odds. 'Altruism remains a conundrum,' he says. 'Why do you have so many animals helping? Particularly animals that aren't related. If you're helping to raise a nephew, at least you're replicating part of your genome. But when you're raising a totally unrelated individual, that becomes much more difficult - and that happens quite commonly.' He points to bell mynah birds, which feed chicks in many nests at the same time, even though they may have chicks in their own nest. 'That seems very, very strange.'

Even stranger is the incident Gay Bradshaw reports, of a hero crow helping hungry kittens. 'The crow would go get worms and fly down and feed them to these starving kittens. Eventually, they became friends and played together.'

And altruism isn't the only documented animal behaviour that was once thought to have been purely human. Take empathy and Kuni, the bonobo. Kuni watched a starling fly into the glass wall of its enclosure and thud to the floor. He picked it up, climbed to the top of the tallest tree, stretched the bird's wings out and launched it back into the air. When it thudded back down again, the ape climbed back down and stood over it for a long time.

And here's another complex mental state - grief. Elephants, for example, stand vigil over the bodies of dead companions for a week, before gently covering the corpse with earth. They then visit the gravesite for years afterwards, taking turns to handle the bones. 'They lift the bones with incredible sensitivity,' says zoologist Dr Tammie Matson, the WWF's human-animal conflict specialist. 'It's as if they can somehow read something about the elephant that was once attached to them.'

Bekoff, meanwhile, has witnessed a magpie funeral. 'I saw a dead magpie on the road and stopped to look at what was happening. One magpie went in and touched the corpse and backed away, another magpie went in and backed away, then another flew off and brought grass back and laid it around the corpse, then another did the same.' And then there was the fox funeral. 'This fox had been killed by a mountain lion and the next day a female fox found the carcass. She covered it up with leaves and pine needles and dirt and branches. She stamped it down and stood over it.'

British neuroscientists have found that sheep can remember at least 50 ovine faces, even when they've been separated for years. Cows, meanwhile, get anxious. John Webster, professor of animal husbandry at Bristol university, has discovered that they have between two and four best friends. They also have enemies, bearing grudges for years.

Perhaps the evolutionary achievement humans are proudest of - and is thought by some to be the very seat of consciousness - is language. But even chickens talk to each other. 'If a hawk flies over a chicken, it gives a particular call,' says Dr McDonald. 'Whereas if it's a fox, it's a different call.' Indeed, according to Bekoff, many birds have regional dialects and wolves have, 'very complex communication systems. A wolf's tail has 13 to 15 positions which send different messages. And when you combine the tail position, ear position, gait, odour and sound, you've got a kaleidoscope of different modes of communication.'

And if there's any remaining doubt that animals have the capacity to feel anger at humans, take the case of traffic-jamming rhesus monkeys. When a baby monkey had its legs crushed by a car in Tezpur, India, 100 others encircled it and blocked the road. Onlookers described the monkeys as 'angry', while a shopkeeper said, 'It was very emotional. Some of them massaged its legs. Finally, they left the scene, carrying the injured baby with them.'

 

 

 

Are we committing the sin of anthropomorphism by calling the monkeys angry? 'Let the philosophers debate that if they want to,' says Bekoff. 'We've got too many other things we need to deal with without worrying about whether we're being anthropomorphic.'

If revenge is one possible motive behind the dramatic global rises in animal-on-human violence, it's surely a minor one. We shouldn't be surprised when animals play nasty. They're all at it. In 2002, scientists at Michigan State University discovered that even bacteria engage in chemical warfare. And even species that we believe to be benign turn out to be ruthless. Robins, for example, fight each other to the death. And in January, marine scientists released footage of gangs of dolphins repeatedly ramming baby porpoises, tossing them in the air and chasing them to their death. Researchers in Scotland described 'perhaps the worst example of inter-specific aggression any of us has ever seen. This young female had the life beaten out of her.' ?Worse, it has been discovered that they're fond of infanticide.

The rise in animal-on-human violence turns out to have several causes which initially appear separate but are all linked. Dr Matson is clear on the elephant problem; both its causes and its nature. When she arrived in Bushmanland, Namibia, 15 years ago, an elephant had just killed an elderly woman. 'That sort of thing happened pretty regularly,' she says. When Matson arrived in Assam, last year, she met a family who had suffered similarly. 'It all comes back to humans, ultimately. It's a competition for resources. You've got this clash between the world's most dominant primate and the world's largest terrestrial animal.'

Even pet dogs and their considerably less cuddly cousins, dingos, have been clashing with humans. Dr Paul McGreevy, a British veterinary scientist, uses the run of dingo attacks in Australia's Fraser Island as an example. In April 2001, a nine-year-old boy was killed and his seven-year-old brother injured after they were chased and pounced on by the dogs. It was said to be only the second attack in modern times. Then, just six days later, two British backpackers were bitten on the legs and buttocks.

'The first step is habituation, a loss of fear,' McGreevy says. 'Familiarity breeds a form of contempt. If the animals are no longer frightened of humans they begin to hang around instead of running away. In Fraser Island, tourists became a predictor of food. The second possibility is that animals learn to fear humans under certain circumstances. This means they're coming closer to humans, but are prepared to defend themselves. When they're primed by this arousal, they can have lowered thresholds for aggression and produce hair-trigger responses.'

When a wild animal is just about not-scared-enough to approach a human, but still has enough fear heating its blood to unleash a frenzy at the slightest provocation, it's in a uniquely dangerous state. It's not hard to see how 

McGreevy's dingo theory could be applied to cougars, mountain lions, boars, bears and wolves, all of whom are having their traditional habitats and feeding grounds annexed.

Scientists studying the increase in big-cat attacks in America have suggested that their growing familiarity with us is leading them to view humans as hotdogs in trousers. 'There has been a huge increase in the opportunities pumas have to observe people,' Lee Fitzhugh, of the University of California, told New Scientist. 'Cats have to learn what's prey and what's not - it's not instinctive. They spend time observing a strange creature before they decide how to classify it.'

Researchers think the same process might be responsible for the increase in shark attacks: the popularity of surfing and shark-watching dives give the fish more chance to see that we're basically harmless and possibly tasty.

Perversely, conservation may also have worsened the situation. Elephant numbers are up as is the crocodile population. In Australia, where croc-hunting was banned 30 years ago, numbers of the most deadly saltwater variety have risen from 5,000 in the early 1970s to more than 70,000.

What all these problems have in common is, of course, us. We're in their face a lot more these days. And that face is full of teeth. According to Gay Bradshaw, we shouldn't be asking why they're turning on us. A more reasonable question would be, why aren't they attacking us more?

'Animals have the same capacity that we do, in terms of emotions and what we consider to be high-mindedness and moral integrity. In fact, I'd argue they have more, because they haven't done to us what we've done to them. That's a sobering thought. It's amazing that all the animals are as benign as they are. It's amazing their restraint. Why aren't they picking up guns?'

 

 

 

 

4) Molly the 3 legged Horse

 

Meet Molly

 

 

 

She's a gray speckled pony who was abandoned by her owners in the wake of Katrina. She spent weeks on her own before finally being rescued and taken to a farm where abandoned animals were stockpiled. While there, she was attacked by a pit bull terrier, and almost died. Her gnawed right front leg became infected and her vet went to LSU for help. But LSU was overwhelmed, and this pony was a welfare case. You know how that goes.

But after surgeon Rustin Moore met Molly, he changed his mind. He saw how the pony was careful to lie down on different sides so she didn't seem to get sores, and how she allowed people to handle her. She protected her injured leg. She constantly shifted her weight, and didn't overload her good leg. She was a smart pony with a serious survival ethic.

Moore agreed to remove her leg below the knee and a temporary artificial limb was built. Molly walked out of the clinic and her story really begins there.

"This was the right horse and the right owner," Moore insists.
Molly happened to be a one-in-a-million patient. She's tough as nails, but sweet, and she was willing to cope with pain. She made it obvious she understood (that) she was in trouble. The other important factor, according to Moore , is having a truly committed and compliant owner who is dedicated to providing the daily care required over the lifetime of the horse.

Molly's story turns into a parable for life in post-Katrina Louisiana The little pony gained weight, her mane felt a comb. A human prosthesis designer built her a leg.

 



The prosthetic has given Molly a whole new life, Allison Barca DVM, Molly's regular vet, reports.

And she asks for it! She will put her little limb out, and come to you and let you know that she wants you to put it on. Sometimes she wants you to take it off too" And sometimes, Molly gets away from Barca. "It can be pretty bad when you can't catch a three-legged horse", she laughs.

Most important of all, Molly has a job now. Kay, the rescue farm owner, started taking Molly to shelters, hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers. Anywhere she thought that people needed hope. Wherever Molly went, she showed people her pluck. She inspired people. And she had a good time doing it.


"It's obvious to me that Molly had a bigger role to play in life", Moore said, "She survived the hurricane, she survived a horrible injury, and now she is giving hope to others."

"She's not back to normal," Barca concluded, "but she's going to be better. To me, she could be a symbol for New Orleans itself."

This is Molly's most recent prosthesis. The bottom photo shows the ground surface that she stands on, which has a smiley face embossed in it. Wherever Molly goes, she leaves a smiley hoof print behind!

 

 

Freedom The Bald Eagle

"The Circle of Healing" by Jeff Guidry

Every day at Sarvey Wildlife Center we witness first hand the incredible battle for life that our animal brothers and sisters go through. This is a story of one Bald Eagle's magnificent spirit and sheer will to live.

It was mid-summer when a call came in reporting a fledgling Bald Eagle had fallen out of a nest on a Seattle golf course. Our very own Crazy Bob went to the rescue and transported her to the Center. She arrived with two broken wings. When asked to take her to the vet, I jump at the chance.

 

When I load this hurt and terrified baby into the car, she neither whimpers nor fights; she can't even stand. This is not a good sign; she is obviously in very bad shape. As I drive to Sno-Wood Veterinary Hospital, I constantly look back to check on my very special passenger. She stares at me with big beautiful brown eyes, her mouth slightly agape. I drive a little faster—this Bald Eagle must live!

She is operated on and has both wings pinned; they are now immobile. Back at Sarvey we lay her in the bottom half of a huge carrier filled with shredded newspaper for support.

The fight for her life begins.

Twice a day a tube is pushed down her throat so that food and medicine can be pumped into her. A week goes by with no change; she still cannot stand up. At three weeks, there's a slight change, but it's for the worse. I'm getting scared for this young Bald Eagle.

Working at the Center, you begin to recognize a look, a look that indicates death is winning. This bruised and broken Bald Eagle was losing the battle but not her dignity. The struggle for her life was not over.

Every chance I get I talk softly to her, telling her to hold on, to fight, to live. Why I felt such a connection to this particular eagle, I do not know.

Four weeks go by and she is still on her belly. There is nothing so heartbreaking as seeing the life force of this majestic bird slowly slip away.

At five weeks we are approaching the end.

Sarvey Wildlife Center believes in giving every soul that comes in a chance to live; but when it is painfully clear that death is the only way out, the decision is made to let that particular spirit continue on its journey. We were at this juncture; this beautiful baby eagle was given one week to see if she could, or would, stand up. This was a crushing blow. Every day that next week I checked to see if she was up. The answer was always the same... "No."

On the following Thursday I could barely face going to the Center. As I walked in not a word was spoken but everyone wore a huge grin. I raced back to the young Bald Eagle's cage, and there she stood in all her glory!

She was standing! She had won. This girl had cheated death by a mere 24 hours. She was going to make it. She was going to get her second chance.

After another week the pins in her wings were removed. Her right wing was perfect, but her left was not. She couldn't fully extend it. We tried physical therapy and hoped a little time was all she needed, but there was no significant progress. Her wing was too badly damaged.

She would never fly, never soar the skies with her people. At least her life was saved, but for what? Was she doomed to live her life in a cage? Not exactly, for this was a special soul.

Bald Eagles normally want nothing to do with humans and will go to great lengths to get away from them. This girl liked people; she wanted to see what you were doing, to follow where you were going, and to see whom you were going with. She was very curious.

About this time our director suggested that I try to glove train her. She had the right temperament; maybe she could do educational programs. Wouldn't that be something? Very few eagles are able or willing to be handled, much less remain calm in front of large crowds. The work began.

I started getting her used to the glove, a little at a time. At first she was thinking, "OK, I'll step on your hand but only with one foot." Then, "OK, I'll use both feet but only for a second." Later, "Yeah you can take me part way out of my cage, then I'll jump right back in." And finally, "OK, I'll let you walk around with me on your arm. Hey, this is fun!"

At this point, every day a volunteer would take this Bald Eagle out for a cruise around the clinic. It was time for her final test—jesses, the leather straps that attach to the ankles of birds-of-prey to give control to the handler and to protect the bird from injury or escape. I put the jesses on her—a piece of cake. It was as if she were born with them on. This was certainly a very mellow Bald Eagle.

Now it was almost time for her first program, but she needed a name. None that we could come up with seemed right, and then Paula, a volunteer, said, "Hey, what about Freedom?" That was it; that was her spirit and her spirit was why grandfather sent her to us. She was ready.

Freedom is now four years old and one of Sarvey Wildlife Center's premier ambassadors. She clearly enjoys our programs and really knows how to turn on the charm. She is a star. Freedom has been on national television, on the front page of major newspapers, and is known across the country.

She is also one of the great loves of my life. She will touch her beak to the tip of my nose and stare into my eyes. At that moment our spirits are one.

I am the luckiest person on Earth.Thank you, Freedom.

(editor's note)...Jeff said, "Why I felt such a connection to this particular eagle, I do not know."

Now we all know why:

Freedom is alive because Jeff fought for her life, and there is no doubt that Freedom sensed his love and commitment. Jeff gave Freedom the support she needed to want to live.

When Jeff was later diagnosed with a serious illness requiring chemotherapy, he found himself turning to Freedom for support. Two or three times a week, whenever he felt well enough, he would drive from Bothell to Arlington to walk with Freedom around the grounds. Now it was Freedom's turn to give Jeff a reason to fight for his life.

Only a short time ago Jeff was informed there was no trace of the disease left in his body. He immediately left for the Center.

When he took Freedom out of her flight, she did something she had never done before: She extended her wings and wrapped them around him.

The circle of healing was now complete.