In spring 2012, Gail Bartholomew Gilbert ’81, ’18 MFA happily welcomed Scout, a new Labrador retriever puppy, into her home in Evanston. But a week later, the pup suddenly lost its ability to walk. “He was like a pile of Jell-O on the floor,” says Gilbert. She brought him back to the breeder, Cindy Nauer, and discovered that five puppies from the litter had developed varying degrees of paralysis.
Several vets examined the puppies and couldn’t pinpoint a cause; they all advised euthanasia. But Gilbert and Nauer refused to give up on the pups. Four of the puppies stayed with Nauer to begin their healing journey. (The fifth puppy had been adopted out of state.) Gilbert, Nauer and a few other dedicated dog lovers designed a daily physical therapy regimen for the puppies, using acupuncture and underwater treadmills to exercise their legs. And they refined the dogs’ diets to include Chinese herbs and chicken soup. Over the course of six months all four puppies regained the ability to walk before their first birthday. A few even went on to compete and win honors in the Labrador Retriever Nationals and two became champion tracking dogs.
Gilbert, a filmmaker and editor, began filming the puppies at the start of their rehabilitation journey to record their progress. “I thought [they were] going to die, so I started shooting everything, thinking I wanted to have a record of it,” she says. Years later, while Gilbert was taking a documentary course at Northwestern as part of her MFA in screenwriting, she reviewed the footage for the first time.
“It was really painful to look at the footage [at first],” says Gilbert. But when she was tasked with creating an 8-minute film for the course, she knew she had the perfect story to tell. That class project eventually became Puppy Love, a 75-minute documentary that was released in 2023 and is now available for streaming.
“It’s more than a movie about dogs,” Gilbert says of her first feature film. “It’s a movie about the power of the human spirit to conquer things that seem unconquerable.”
Reader Responses
At Reach Rescue in Mundelein, where I volunteer, we took in a litter of Great Dane puppies who could not walk. Our partnering veterinarian found, through X-rays, that their leg bones were practically transparent and prescribed heavy doses of calcium along with a better diet. In a surprisingly short time (weeks), the puppies gained their ability to walk once again, and all were adopted out to loving families.
—J.B. Lee '08 MA, '10 MFA, Mundelein, Ill., via Northwestern Magazine
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