Therapy dog shares smiles with local hospitals

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Published on Thursday, July 21, 2016

Photo by Tony Eu. Mark Saler, with his therapy dog Grizzly. Saler and Grizzly volunteer at local hospitals, including Neepawa. The pair visit patients in the hospital to help cheer them up.

By Tony Eu

Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press

Patients in the Brandon Regional Health Centre, and now the Neepawa Health Centre, may have seen a large St. Bernard walking around the hospitals accompanied by a man.  The dog’s name is Grizzly and along with his owner and handler Mark Saler, he’s been spending his time cheering up patients in hospitals.

For the past four, going on five, months, Saler and ‘Grizz’ have been volunteering at the Brandon hospital as handler and therapy dog. Now, they’re coming to Neepawa as well. Contacted by the Neepawa Health Centre last week, his first visit to the hospital was on July 15. Asked to come as often as he’s able to, Saler says, “It more or less just boils down to the volunteer time I can make room for.” He’s been contacted by several other hospitals as well, including one in Winnipeg, but he’s been unable to find time to make those visits. Saler lives just outside Minnedosa and he was very recently contacted by the hospital there and asked if he could find some time to volunteer there as well.

Saler works for the Canadian Pacific Railway moving trains, volunteering his time whenever he has a day off, about once a week. “This world is in need of more kindness, caring and compassion. I’m just here to do my part,” Saler said about his volunteer work. When he first started volunteering in Brandon, he planned to spend an hour or two whenever he volunteered. After four months, he’s never spent less than four hours at a time volunteering and he and Grizzly once spent seven hours at the hospital.  “We just go to the hospital. More than anything, people in the hospital are usually having a sad time in their lives, and Grizzly’s job is to make people smile, more than anything,” Saler said.

Saler got Grizzly when he was eight weeks old, with the intention of training him to be a therapy dog. “The personality of the dog is what makes a real good therapy dog. He shows the signs of compassion and caring towards people,” Saler said about Grizzly. He continued, saying, “St. Bernards are a more content, loving dog, but it doesn’t matter what breed it is out there, they’re all good, they’re all good animals.”

Saler and Grizzly spend time in all the wards, visiting “anybody that’s in need of a smile,” as he said it, but the ward that Saler feels most passionate about helping is the cancer ward. “Those people are going through the hardest times,” Saler said about the patients he and Grizzly visit. “They wait all week to see Grizzly. One of their high points in bad times is to see Grizzly.” He shared one story about a woman who told him that she never complained about her weekly visits because she got to see Grizzly.

As a final comment, Saler said this, “I want to give Grizzly all the credit of how good of a dog he is and how he changes people’s lives. I hope this encourages more people to volunteer time in life. Like I say, the world is in need of more kindness, caring and compassion.”