Therapy dogs are providing their comfort to victims of Monday’s deadly shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison.
MADISON (WKOW) — Therapy dogs are providing their comfort to victims of Monday’s deadly shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison.
Tami Rotar and six-year-old bernedoodle Darby are a therapy team. Rotar said she didn’t know if he’d become a therapy dog but always thought it was cool to do.
“To see if you can get a dog that has the right temperament to be a therapy dog is always questionable. So two years ago, I took the test and the evaluation, and Darby passed, and the rest is history,” Rotar said.
She said most of their care visits are “normal.” This includes the hospital, airport and sometimes even UW-Madison’s campus. Rotar and Darby also do “book buddy reading.”
But that wasn’t the case on Monday. Rotar said the St. Mary’s volunteer center was calling all of its therapy dogs.
“We were the first to be called, and we were actually in the middle of a bath because we were going to do a UW College Library visit. This was way more important. So we finished Darby’s bath and came over to the east side here,” she said.
She said they were made aware of what they were responding to prior to arriving to the SSM Health Dean Medical Group on the city’s east side. They were going to be stationed there for the families who were reuniting after the shooting at a nearby school.
“It was kind of surreal. You don’t really think that it’s going to happen in Madison,” Rotar said. “You don’t know what you’re going to walk into, what the feeling is going to be, how your dog’s going to react, how you’re going to react. So it was different.”
She said Darby behaved as he normally would.
“He just let the kids pet him. Some kids petted him for a long time. Some it was a short time,” she said.
Rotar and Darby are typically limited to two hours at visits. But as she said earlier, this moment was different.
“I thought he was needed there, so I overstayed our limit, and we were there exactly four hours,” she said.
She said the kids were able to make themselves busy and take their mind off of what was happening by playing with the therapy dog’s trading cards.
“Most of the therapy dogs have trading cards, and that was something that the kids focused on,” she said. “A kid would come up and say, ‘can I have his trading card? I didn’t get it yet.'” So it gave him something different to focus on than what was happening to them.”
Darby and several other therapy dogs were at a candlelight vigil Tuesday night.
“When you pet a dog, it just kind of makes you calm. It brings down your stress levels,” she said.
If you are interested in becoming a therapy dog handler or would like to request comfort from a therapy dog, you can visit this link to get started.
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