Pause for Paws Marks 15 Years of Spreading Puppy Love

Pause for Paws Marks 15 Years of Spreading Puppy Love

By Brian Hiro

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It all started with a dog lover and a dog in desperate need of some love.

Bonnie Biggs was a longtime Cal State San Marcos librarian - so long that her tenure predates the university's official founding by three years - who knew that her second act would revolve around canines. The colorfully named Koshare Squash Blossom Beignet Biggs - Koshi, for short - was a Catahoula leopard hound from Louisiana who had survived Hurricane Katrina and been rescued from a high-kill shelter in Fresno.

When their paths crossed at a local animal shelter two decades ago, Biggs knew she had found her next four-legged friend. What she couldn't have anticipated was that the magic that happened between the two of them would ultimately spawn a magical event that has transformed the CSUSM community for the better.

Koshi has passed, but her legacy will be evident at CSUSM on May 7. On that Thursday, Biggs, her husband, Gunnar, and two of their current dogs - 12-year-old Zuni, who was Koshi's little sister, and 3-year-old Molly - will be on campus along with 18 other teams of owners and dogs. They will be stationed outside the third-floor entrance to Kellogg Library to mark the 15th anniversary of Pause for Paws, the beloved, twice-annual event at which therapy dogs help soothe the jangled nerves of CSUSM students during the week before final exams.

To say that Biggs, fellow volunteers, their dogs and the campus community - not only students, but canine-crazy faculty and staff and even President Ellen Neufeldt - look forward to Pause for Paws would be an extreme understatement.

"There are hundreds of volunteers who I've worked with over the years, and this is everybody's favorite visit," Biggs said. "The students come swarming up the dogs and drop to their knees, hug them, love them. Even these big athletes go goo-goo. Everything changes when they're around dogs."

During the three-hour event (which runs from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.), hundreds of students will get their fur fix as they enter or exit the library. They will love on not only Zuni and Molly, but a menagerie of mutts - among them Lucy, a maltipoo whose owner, Liz, has been with Biggs from the beginning; Daisy, a terrier/dachshund mix; Katie, a cavalier King Charles spaniel; Dude, a standard poodle; Biscuit, a chocolate Labrador; Myles, a golden retriever; Bear, a mixed mutt; Sammy, a corgi; and Camper, a silken windhound.

Students can write and post messages on pieces of paper cut into the shape of chew bones, and in past years the sentiments have included things like:

• "Thank you for bringing the dogs. I really needed them."
• "So grateful to you and our fur friends!"
• "This is amazing. This is the best day ever."
• "All the beautiful pups brought me so much joy today."
• "Thanks for making our lives not so ruff! XOXO"

With finals staring them in the face, students might derive the most benefit from the dogs, but plenty of employees mark their calendars as well. Regina Eisenbach, who retired as dean of academic advising and academic programs last year and is now serving as a faculty fellow, owns two dachshunds and jokingly calls herself a "crazy dog lady." Pause for Paws is perennially her favorite day of the semester.

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"Seeing so many different kinds of dogs is amazing to me," Eisenbach said. "How can a corgi and a Great Dane be the same species? And how did they all descend from wolves? Truly incredible creatures.

"At Pause for Paws, I get to pet them all, release all the stress in my day and just get doggie kisses. Nothing better than that. Also, seeing how happy the students are to see the dogs warms my heart - I firmly believe it helps them study for finals."

Biggs is a lifelong dog lover, but it wasn't until her retirement years that she had time to make this present work her passion project. Her career had been a foundational one in CSUSM history. She began working at the university in 1986, when it was still a North County extension campus of San Diego State, housed in a Jerome's furniture store.

As a librarian, Biggs was a member of the founding faculty when CSUSM was instituted in 1989, and she doubled as the assistant to longtime library dean Marion Reid. Early in her tenure, a professor who was Lakota Sioux asked her to reach out to tribal libraries that recently had lost funding from San Diego County. One of the unexpected outcomes of what became a long and fruitful partnership with local American Indian tribes is that, when students (seeking a school mascot) came to Biggs wondering about the Luiseno word for mountain lion, she consulted the tribe's language keeper and came back with "Tukwut." The name stuck.

Biggs planned to retire in 2003, but then-President Karen Haynes convinced her to stay on by creating the job of tribal liaison - the first such position at the college level in California. In her role, Biggs established another state first in the Native Advisory Council, a body that counsels the president on university relations with American Indian communities and fosters collaboration with area tribes.

"After we developed them, almost everyone in the state, all the way up to Berkeley, wanted to have some kind of tribal liaison, some kind of native council," Biggs said. "So that's something I'm proud of, and CSUSM should be, too."

Retirement held for Biggs in 2007, and one of the first things she did was sign up for obedience training with her new dog, Koshi. Told by the trainer that Koshi would make a good therapy dog, Biggs admitted that she didn't know what that was.

She learned that therapy dogs are different from service dogs and emotional support animals. They are specifically trained to tolerate a wide range of environments and to provide companionship and comfort to many people.

Biggs was introduced to Love on a Leash, an organization founded in Oceanside in 1984 by Liz Palika, a dog obedience instructor who introduced the idea of pet-provided therapy to schools, hospitals and nursing homes. Love on a Leash has since expanded nationwide, with thousands of members across the country.

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Biggs put Koshi through the Love on a Leash certification and began volunteering with her at hospitals, hospice facilities and - close to Biggs' heart - libraries, where shy children gain confidence by reading books to eternally patient dogs. It seemed only natural to expand dog therapy to CSUSM, and that's just what Biggs did in 2011.

"The idea of bringing all this love and support back here to such a special place for me was the best of both worlds," she said.

Biggs and Koshi - joined by other volunteers and dogs - debuted at CSUSM in May 2011 for an event that they called the first University Stress Buster. By the second edition that fall, a volunteer had tagged it with the catchier name Pause for Paws.

"I knew I was on to something the minute I came here with Koshi, just based on the reaction," Biggs said.

From the outset, CSUSM's library has been a hand-in-hand partner with Pause for Paws - starting with Melanie Chu and continuing for the last nine years with Rosa Rodriguez, Chu's successor as outreach librarian. Rodriguez has broadened the scope of the event to include arts and crafts, creative activities and supply giveaways in collaboration with campus groups like Student Health & Counseling Services and the Cougar Care Network.

"I appreciate the joy it brings to students during finals," Rodriguez said. "I love seeing the smiling faces around me as students, staff and faculty join the event to get some fur love."

When Koshi was in her later years, Biggs and her husband - Gunnar is a bass musician who used to be an instructor at SDSU and Palomar College - adopted Zuni from Arkansas. A treeing Walker coonhound, Zuni also was certified through Love on a Leash and picked up the finer points of the therapy dog craft by observing her big sister. Molly, a "stubborn" beagle adopted from Calexico, in turn has learned from Zuni, who has been read to by children so often that a friend of Biggs awarded the dog an honorary Master of Library Science degree (the same one earned by her owner, of course).

The Biggses have a third dog, a chihuahua-beagle mix named Lupe, but she's not people-friendly enough to be a therapy pet.

What do the dogs derive from their work?

"I think it's that oxytocin exchange," Biggs said. "It's a comfort hormone, and they know they're being loved. They know they make people happy. They feel useful."

Pause for Paws has grown so popular that Biggs and her crew now make three other appearances on campus annually: the "What Gives Your Life Meaning?" campaign organized by the CSU Shiley Haynes Institute for Palliative Care each semester and Super STEM Saturday every March.

The event on May 7 outside the library, however, is what Biggs lives for - what she has lived for the last 15 years.

"I get the same good, warm feeling being on the other end of the leash," she said. "I can't imagine not doing this."

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Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

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