We got the chance to meet a truly amazing dog last week - a black lab named Adele. One of the members of the Snif Labs team, Mitch, met Adele and her owner Marty Harris, while walking his dog and convinced her to come by the Snif Labs office to share her inspirational story with the whole team.

This dog is truly amazing! Adele is a service dog who is specially trained to be able to sense when her owner Marty is about to lose consciousness due to a rare heart problem. Adele will alert Marty to sit or lie down BEFORE she actually faints. Doctors don’t even understand how Adele is able to sense an oncoming episode (she can also sense things like oncoming seizures & low blood sugar in diabetics), but they think that dogs are able to use their more sophisticated senses of smell and/or hearing to detect very subtle changes that happen to a person before they have an episode.

While they were in the office, we actually got to see Adele alert Marty. I think Mitch put it best when he said that it “gave him chills”.

Adele was trained by an amazing organization called Canine Partners for Life. They train service dogs to help people with muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, spinal cord injuries, seizure disorders and more.

To learn more about Adele and how she helps Marty in her day to day life check out this feature on them that was in the Boston Globe.