Who Is The Master Here?
When a new addition to the family comes along, it can take some creativity to make room, especially in the tight spaces of a big- city apartment. Caroline Biggs of Manhattan found that room in a walk-in closet — three square meters now furnished with a miniature bed, plenty of toys, and plenty of warmth.
What more could a bunny hope for?
“The moment I laid eyes on Daffodil, I vowed I would give her a good home,” Ms. Biggs wrote in The Times. Giving the Silver rabbit her own space “felt like the obvious thing to do for any loved one under my roof, four-legged or not.”
Ms. Biggs, who would soon adopt another rabbit, Daisy, to keep Daffodil company, started wondering what people with more money — and bigger homes — might be doing to accommodate their pets. She found people like Lucy Swift Weber, whose Yorkie, Chauncey, is recovering from cancer. To comfort him, Ms. Weber turned the guest bedroom in her two-bedroom apartment into Chauncey’s room. It includes customized pet stairs and a floor-pillow lounge.
“It’s become this warm, comfortable world where Chauncey can relax and rehabilitate,” she said. And Ms. Weber and her boyfriend just moved into a three-bedroom apartment in the same building, so Chauncey will still have his own room when her boyfriend’s college-age sons visit.
Thomas Panek could understand that sort of interspecies devotion. Mr. Panek, 47, lost his sight more than 20 years ago but did not lose his love for running. That long meant being tethered to a human guide, but two years ago that started to change. Mr. Panek is the head of Guiding Eyes for the Blind, a school outside New York City that trains guide dogs. Starting with his own dog, Gus, he began a program to train dogs to lead runners.
“Gus sets the pace,” Mr. Panek told The Times.
The pace Gus sets is a nine-minute mile, but the priority for him and other dogs is to keep their handlers safe by stopping for dangerous situations and ignoring commands that seem risky. More than 20 dogs have passed the program; the waiting list is long.
Mr. Panek thinks a dog-guided marathon might be possible someday, though it would likely require a five- dog relay. But Gus still helps him prepare for the longer races.
“He’s my training partner,” Mr. Panek said.
Sometimes in relationships between humans and animals, it’s less clear who is training and who is the partner. At a prison-run ranch in Nevada, wild horses are trained for adoption — a process called gentling — and it is the inmates who do the work. They have little or no experience, so a real cowboy, Hank Curry, keeps watch on them too.
John Harris, a 38-year- old inmate, said that when he started in the program two years ago, “I was a lot more aggressive with my training. I wanted something done now. That don’t work. You have to take your time.” He credited Mr. Curry: “Hank had to kind of gentle me.”
Steven Kurutz, reporting in The Times, wrote of the symbolism that is apparent to everyone involved in the program: “The way the horses and the inmates are both penned up and how through the training process they rehabilitate one another.”
As Mr. Harris said, “I look at them like us: I helped the horse become a better person so he can make parole.”