Doctor Dog

This is Asta. You might think she's asleep but she actually on duty. She's always on duty. She's a medical detection dog who accompanies her owner (or patient, you could say) when she comes to work as a volunteer at our cafe.

E. is an unstable diabetic who has lost the ability to tell when her blood sugar is getting dangerously low, or high. Asta can tell, and she alerts her so that E. can take measures to prevent a crisis.

Normally, the patient and the dog are given an introductory week together to see if they hit it off and if so the dog is returned to the organisation for training, using samples of the patient's body odour. Asta has never completed her training in this way because during the initial 'getting to know you' week she alerted E. eight times. No one knows how she did this. She's been with her charge for about a year and has alerted her on hundreds of occasions. The only problem was she was getting a piece of sausage as a reward every time and in consequence started to put on weight. Now she's on a low fat diet and her rewards come in the form of dried fish skins from Fish4Dogs - something else I never knew about.

Medical detection dogs (some of which are rescue dogs - they are not bred for the purpose) are also being trained to sniff out cancer while other types of support dogs can predict seizures and assist autistic children.

This is an example of positive news and the way that we don't need to look far to find examples of something amazing, encouraging and genuinely inspiring.