Oprah Winfrey was about 9 years old and living with her mother in Milwaukee when she started saving 25 cents from her lunch every week. Her goal: to collect 7.25 dollars to buy a black cockapoo she would call Simone. At that time, she was going through a childhood marked by abuse, and Simone became her only refuge.
At 72 years old, with 21 dogs in her life story, Oprah remembers that bond as something that kept her whole: “Dogs have always been my friends when everything around me was falling apart”. Today she is caring for Sadie, her 17-year-old cocker spaniel with kidney problems, who at the end of last year was on the verge of death and came back. Oprah says that seeing her wag her tail despite the IV fluids and diaper taught her something no book could give her: that even when the body fails, life is still good.
Oprah now narrates the miniseries “Life is Better With Dogs”, available on The Oprah Podcast’s YouTube channel, produced together with The Farmer’s Dog. Each four-minute episode follows a dog and its owner — the first features Chad Brown, a Navy veteran with PTSD whose Labrador, Axe, helped him heal and found the NGO Love is King. A story that, like Oprah’s, shows that sometimes the one who saves you most has four legs.