Well-Being Matters is an on-going series highlighting different members of our community and how they impact their well-being. Texas Health Community Hope engages in a broad range of innovative programs, investments, and collaborations outside hospital walls to promote a lifetime of holistic health and well-being. This month we meet Mark Bober and Vicki Carter who help create health and wholeness by training and deploying therapy dogs for our neighbors in need. Since 2007, the couple’s dogs Martini, Phizz, and now Layla have brought comfort and empathy to people all over Tarrant County. The couple, who are both athletes, have clocked 500 miles along the Trinity Trails with Layla in tow this year.

 

Q: Neither of you are from Fort Worth. What brought you to Texas?

Mark: Vicki was born in West Virginia and I was born on an Air Force base in the Philippines. My father retired here when I was 10, and Vicki’s stepfather retired here when Vicki was 19.

Q: How did you meet?

Mark: We met at the Cox Trinity 5000, an annual series of weekly 5K summer races, and we’ve been married 26 years.

Q: You have a cute story about how you as a couple became interested in training therapy dogs.

Mark: We were given a whippet as a wedding gift! Whippets are actually difficult to train – they think and evaluate, and they’re overly smart.

Q: So you had to find something challenging for the dogs to do fairly quickly?

Vicki: Whippets are traditionally very agile and obedient, and they make good therapy dogs. Martini and Phizz did a lot of work together. They were two of the best therapy dogs and were Therapy Dog International-certified.

Q: Why is training and certification important for therapy dogs?

Vicki: To get certified as a therapy dog, the dog and owner must pass a test and then have observed visits to see how well the people and dogs work together. Therapy dogs carry liability insurance. The animal has to understand what you’re asking of it and what you want it to do. You have to learn to read your dog.

Q: Until COVID closed the program, both of you, along with Martini and Phizz, spent a lot of time at the Fort Worth Public Library reading with children.

Vicki: We made 400-500 visits with our dogs. We were the first family to have two whippets awarded the American Whippet Club Willow Award, given annually to the top therapy whippet of the year

Q: But Martini and Phizz also comforted our neighbors in some difficult situations.

Mark: Martini and Phizz spent three weeks in West, Texas, after the explosion at the fertilizer plat, and they spent time in Granbury when the tornado leveled a community.

Q: Did you ever feel the dogs were getting sad or stressed?

Mark: Martini and Phizz may have gotten a little sad. People had lost everything.

Q: After raising nine very smart whippets, you changed course a little. You found Layla, an abandoned, now 8-year-old Bluetick Coonhound.

Mark: Layla (named after the “acoustic” version, not the rock version) was rescued from the North Carolina-Virginia border. She was a hunting dog who had apparently served her usefulness, and she was rescued from a Bedford County, Virginia, shelter. She’d been dumped in the Shenandoah Mountains; she has a fear of fireworks, thunderstorms, gunfire, and flying bugs.

Q: You had a friend who rescued and fostered her initially, and when you decided to adopt her, a group of Coonhound aficionados rallied for her.

Mark: Volunteers from the American Black and Tan Coonhound rescue did a relay – 11 people got her from North Carolina to Texarkana and we picked her up from there.

Q: What makes her so special?

Mark: Her eyes go right through you. Layla looks into your soul. She was incredibly good with people once she was trained, and we got her certified. I thought “We got her, now what do we do?” We weren’t having any success training her. She’s a 65-pound girl. We found a trainer who could work with a Coonhound. It took the trainer longer to train me than it did to train Layla!

Q: Layla found her calling almost by accident, while doing something you and Vicki do regularly.

Mark: When you convert a hunting dog to a family dog you have to take them out walking. People are drawn to her because Coonhounds are pretty rare here. Being on the trails with a Coonhound twice a day, we’ve met people all over the neighborhood. People know her before they know us.

Q: She’s kind of a local celebrity, but she’s also a hard worker.

Mark: While we were on a walk, we met an art therapist who has an office called Heart Works within walking distance from our house. They do art therapy and walk-and-talks on the Trinity Trail.

Q: What’s your favorite story about Layla’s work with Heart Works?

Vicki: A young lady was visiting with the therapist and didn’t want to talk about anything. I said, “Layla is really good at listening to stories and she won’t tell.” The child went over and raised one of Layla’s droopy ears and told Layla her story.

Q: But back to her celebrity: Layla was voted Top Dog by Fort Worth Magazine last year – and she had a little help from her friends in the Coonhound community?

Mark: We did a little outreach to the American Black and Tan Coonhound rescuers. People from Australia and all over the country heard about the contest. People voted early and often!

Learn more about Texas Health Community Hope.