Author teaches kids about how dogs communicate
Jeannie Kerr, who leads a districtwide effort to advance wellness and resiliency in education at Nash County Public Schools, was on hand for the presentations and explained the purpose of Fuego’s visit.
“Fuego is Ms. Muller’s dog, and he helps students understand feelings, different moods and how to identify feelings through body cues,” Kerr said.
This was an opportunity to promote mental wellness.”
Kerr is the director of Project AWARE, which is part of the school system’s student services department and supports the promotion, prevention and intervention of mental health wellness in the district.
Except for repeated requests to pet Fuego, the youngsters hearing Muller’s presentation were attentive and engaged in the conversation. At the end of the visit, they also got to lavish affection on the amiable, calm lab.
Muller said it was Fuego’s mellowness that caused him to be a washout as scent detection dog, and his love of food made him a poor candidate to be a trusted service dog.
“He was found to be slightly too food-motivated to be a good service dog,” Muller noted. “This is a nice way of saying that if he sees someone drop a BBQ sandwich on the ground halfway across a restaurant, he’s on it in a flash, regardless of who his leash is attached to!”
Since service dogs have public access privileges, they need to be well-behaved in any situation, Muller pointed out, and Fuego’s never met a piece of food he could ignore for long. So, he moved from being trained as a service dog at Freedom Service Dogs of Englewood, Colo., to being trained as a therapy dog and being placed with Muller.
“Therapy dogs are trained to help their handler help other people, who might have disabilities or challenges, and do not have public access — so they are only allowed to go places a pet dog could go, plus their place of work, where they have had to get special permission to visit,” Muller said. “An example of this is that Fuego worked with me to help students, in the school setting, who had anxiety and needed some extra help identifying what that felt like in their body. Fuego does much better as a therapy dog than he would’ve done as a service dog.”
For four years, Fuego has been a part of Muller’s life and her work. She wrote “Fuego’s Feelings” to help better explain to children how dogs communicate how they’re feeling.
“I was having a hard time helping children younger than 8 or 9 really understand Fuego’s body language and what it was telling us,” Muller recalled of her time working in an elementary school in Denver. “One of the best tools therapists can use are books, so I looked to see if there was a book made for children that could help them understand dog body language. I couldn’t find one that effectively portrayed dog body language in a realistic way. So, I decided to write one.”
Muller added that the book’s illustrator, Anna Kochanek, was the sister of a close friend from college.
“We’ve spent the last two years or so writing, illustrating and tweaking the book together to get it where it is today,” Muller said.
Muller, since moving to back to her home state of North Carolina from Colorado last year, said her work has transitioned to more of a “macro-level” social work role with public schools in the state, which means that Fuego is currently semi-retired from his work with children.
“He loves chances to get to interact with kids,” she said.