The Wonderful Work of Pet Therapy With Sage and Chipper

Dogs are often hailed as a human’s best friend and some say the best therapist has fur and four legs. For our hospital, I think we can say both are true and we are incredibly lucky to have an amazing pet therapy team on site every other Friday greeting our staff and patients with love and all the attention a dog could ever want.

Meet Chipper, our dog-tor, and his wonderful owner Sage Mountainfire. Sage, a long-time resident of Mendocino County and is known by many for her amazing work at the Ukiah Animal Shelter where she oversaw the adoption program there and then supervised at the facility before retiring after 14 years of service.

Chipper, her adorable dog, is known as a double doodle. One of his parents was a goldendoodle and the other a labradoodle. The sweetest of dogs, Chipper turned seven at the end of May and has been with Sage for nearly 6 years.

His story began with a family living in the Sacramento area. “He lived with them until he was 15 months old,” Sage said of Chipper’s beginnings. “They had him from the time he was a puppy, but their life had gotten busy, and he was in a crate many hours a day. They realized that was no life for him, so they gave him to a friend, whose cat then moved into the closet to get away. Once they could see the cat still would not come out after he was there for a while, they decided the cat was there first. So, they gave him to a rescue group called Homeward Bound Golden Retriever Rescue in Sacramento to be rehomed.”

Sage at that same time had begun looking for a new dog as hers had passed away just a few months prior and knew this team from the animal shelter as well as others and sent some email around to northern California animal rescues with info on a dog she was looking for. “I just so happened to get an email back from Homeward Bound saying they had the perfect dog coming in and asked me to come meet him.” And the rest is history! “He was the perfect dog.”

Getting Chipper trained to be able to utilize him in situations he recognizes now, Sage was able to spend a lot of time with him, getting him ready. “I did a lot of training with him at a young age and still do. He also does agility, tricks, basic obedience and more. We do a lot of different things together to keep his mind active.”

Now turning her sights to continue to help the community, Sage has been working to provide us and many others across our county with pet therapy. “He became an official therapy dog in the fall of 2019 before COVID-19 began. We were able to do a few visits, but then everything closed.”

This inevitably left a shortage in the way Chipper could visit with others for a while before our communities and the country learned how to find ways to do so that weren’t in-person. “There was an organization that went virtual, so we then started visiting nursing homes all over the country virtually, which was great to do. Then when things opened back up some, we started going to the preschools, we go to the library for the children’s reading program in Ukiah and then started doing things here at the hospital. We love doing it.”

We see it too in their visits during the week when everyone is so happy to see Chipper and thrilled to be able to visit with him and Sage as they round our hospital and clinic space.

Sage and Chipper aren’t stopping there though! Sage has hopes of taking Chipper on new journeys that would continue to benefit those around them for the better in times of hardship. “The next thing we are going to do is in the application process for a group called Hope, which does animal assisted crisis response work. If we can pass through that process, we can be deployed to different places for crisis work for things like school shootings, fires, and other natural disasters.”

It's safe to say Chipper and Sage are quite busy and all for the very best of reasons! “We love being involved in the community,” Sage said of her and Chipper’s schedule around Mendocino County. “We’re grateful to be here.”

We’re so thankful for all Sage and Chipper do on their visits with our team and patients. We thank them for their service as they turn bad days into good ones and good into even better, brightening our days with a smile and tail wag. If you see these two amazing friends of ours on our hospital campus, be sure to stop and say hi— they would love to meet you. Thank you Chipper and Sage for your warmth, love, and generous visits in the halls of our hospital!!