Exceptionally Unexceptional: Praising Crunchy the Therapy Dog

Nobody wanted Crunchy.

His age and pedigree were unknown. His coat was a haphazard mix of colors, as if his fur had decided on black and then switched to gold halfway through and then back again, throwing in some white tufts here and there for variety. A DNA test to discover Crunchy’s breed type proved inconclusive. He was by all measures a stereotypical mutt.

Even his name, Crunchy, betokened a sort of farcical unsteadiness of character. And yet, now in the summer of 2024, Crunchy has been deemed worthy of the title AKC Therapy Dog Supreme.

It took some imagination, and a lot of work, to get here.

In 2015, Joan Struble, a hospice volunteer, had a friend who owned a boarding and grooming facility. Crunchy had been looking for a forever home for around five months and the foster owner was having trouble placing him. “She had actually tried to adopt him out to people numerous times and it never worked out. And he sounded like kind of a hopeless case,” says Joan.

Joan initially resisted her friend’s entreaties to adopt Crunchy, but, accustomed to taking in strays that are unlucky enough not to otherwise find a home, Joan agreed to give Crunchy a chance. She was immediately surprised and relieved to discover that Crunchy’s reputation was meritless. “We’d had him a few days and my husband’s like, ‘He’s really a good dog.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know it!’”

Despite having no experience, Joan had always harbored a desire to train a therapy dog. So Crunchy became her guinea pig. “I took him to every obedience class I could find and other things that I thought might be helpful and tried to expose him to everything under the sun,” recalls Joan. For therapy training, Joan consulted books, websites and even online videos. A novice therapy dog trainer and an untrained stray; the odds that it would work out were long.

But it did work out. Crunchy began regularly visiting patients at Monument Health Home+ Hospice House. Not to be confused with a service dog — who assists those with disabilities to accomplish physical tasks — a therapy dog’s primary function is to provide comfort and compassion to terminal patients.

Crunchy flourished in his new role. As far as how he specifically provides comfort, Joan says he lets the patient take the lead. “They might want to just pet him. They might want him to lay there. They might want to put his front legs up on the bed. And he has been in the bed from time to time, depending on the person and the circumstances.”

Crunchy is such a prolific and successful therapy dog that he was recently given the American Kennel Club title of Therapy Dog Supreme. According to the AKC, the title is awarded to those therapy dogs who have completed over 600 visits. Supreme is the highest accolade available in the AKC Therapy Dog program. In some form or another, Crunchy has touched hundreds, possibly thousands, of lives. At a time when those people needed compassion the most, Crunchy was there.

He’s getting up in the years these days, so Crunchy’s not as energetic and spry as he once was. Still, Joan can’t quite pinpoint what exactly makes Crunchy so effective, except to say that maybe it’s his simple, quintessential “dogness” that is so appealing to patients. Maybe they once owned a dog that looked like Crunchy. Or something about his mild disposition soothes them just the right way. “It’s really hard to define. And most of the time, he has a better idea than I do of what’s needed.”

Whatever it is, Crunchy doesn’t really need a piece of paper to verify that he is an All Star, it is written on his soul.