 |
PAGE 2 OF 2
Shirleen Roeder
At first, though, she chafed at sitting through all-day agility trials just to see Toby run two 60-second obstacle courses. Roeder remembers thinking: “This is not an efficient use of time!” She'd been a long-time “workaholic,” she says, but for years she'd reassured herself: “I'll have time to get a life when this course is over, when this paper is accepted, when this grant is submitted. But the time never came.” Now, making friends with fellow dog trainers, she stumbled upon an identity separate from that of scientist. She enjoyed “not being anybody to them except Toby's owner.” Work could wait. “It made me a happier person,” she says.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Java and Keegan
Photos of Roeder with her dogs at a test hunt.
 
Photos:
Jeremy Kezer
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Toby earned so many distinctions he was inducted into the Flat-Coated Retriever Society of America's Hall of Fame for 2005. He died of cancer a few weeks before the ceremony. At nine-and-a-half, he'd outlived the average Flat-Coat by a year and a half. The breed is prone to devastating cancers, partly because the gene pool is quite small—only 800 Flat-Coat puppies are registered annually in the United States. “So when you get something bad in there,” says Roeder, “you're stuck with it.” She heads the cancer subcommittee for the Flat-Coated Retriever Society of America, raising money and gathering blood and tissue samples to help researchers find markers for the genes that make the breed vulnerable. Markers would allow breeders to avoid mating two carriers.
Roeder has two dogs now, Java and Keegan. One Saturday afternoon, the Zinger Winger flings a dead duck (left over from a hunt test) into the woods beside her house in Cheshire, north of New Haven. Keegan waits until he's told to go then zips into the brush and speedily returns to Roeder's side, mallard in mouth. Next, Roeder runs beside Java as she races through the agility course. Java flies over hurdles, up and down a teeter-totter, through a chute. And then, unaccountably, she stops short and gazes into the distance.
“She saw a butterfly!” Roeder calls out breathlessly, and she laughs. 
Photo: Paul Fetters
|
|
|
Back
