A Rocheport mechanic, hunter, and self-proclaimed “cat person,” Bill had spent enough time with his hunting dogs to know how he felt about the pets. Then his wife started doing dog therapy.

Sitting out on the front porch of their rustic home, Mary talks about after her horse died. “I started looking for something else to do. I didn’t want to get another horse right away. I just wasn’t ready for that. I thought well, the next thing would
be doing therapy with the dogs.”

With the time she used to spend with her horses, she started taking her dogs to Anne Gafke’s dog therapy classes in Columbia with Ellen Woolf, a friend she knew from her days at Hickman high school.

Woolf has been going to Gafke’s classes for years, but until a few years ago, Mary had never had enough time.  Her decision to finally get involved came from an act of dumb cruelty.

“I started with Gracie because someone had dumped her off at the end of (my) driveway in December,” Cockrell said. “She was only 12 weeks old, and I could tell she was going to be a big dog. So, I thought that until I could find some other place to be, I’d just start training her and taking her to dog class.”

Since then, Bill Cockrell has changed his mind about her dogs. “I used to despise even looking at ‘em, you know? I really like ‘em all now,” he said.

Therapy dogs and the owners who train them have been increasing in number since the first dog assisted therapy groups formed in the late 1970s. As of 2006, over 15,000 therapy dogs and 13,000 handlers belonged to Therapy Dogs International, the organization Cockrell and other trainee’s of Ann Gafke’s classes work under.

TDI coordinates with local hospitals and institutions like the Rusk Rehabilitation Center in Columbia to schedule regular visits for Mid-Missouri members. It and other national therapy groups provide the institutions with animals they know are safe, well trained and dependable.

Cockrell visits Rusk once a week with friends from Ann Gafke’s program. She credits Gafke for drawing her to therapy visits.

She doesn’t know if she would have even gone on visits if she hadn’t heard about them from Ann Gafke, done some reaching on the Internet about them and read stories about therapy work from patients about how much the visits meant to them.

After a few years of going on visits herself, she’s full of these little stories, short anecdotes about a patient who touched her or a moment from visiting a hospital she can’t forget. When she explains why she cares, her face lights up.

“There’s enough sadness in the world,” she said. “I think that’s part of it, I want to make it a little bit better. I’ve had enough. I don’t want to dwell on the sadness I have had in my life. The dogs and the cats bring a lot of pleasure to me, and if I can share that with someone else, that even makes it better.”

In the wake of losing her first husband, a son and her horse, Cockrell’s dog therapy provides some therapy for herself as it brings smiles to the people she and her three therapy dogs visit. That is something every husband can appreciate.