To say that Peter loved Meg would not be strictly true. Peter adored Meg. His life revolved around her. A day without Meg was not worth living. That was what Peter thought. That was how he felt.
Meg had not been looking for a Peter. Life was going well enough. She already had a successful career as a model and a boyfriend but he, like her, had a knee problem. Oddly, at the same time, they both needed to see Peter, the orthopaedic surgeon in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Knees fixed, life moved on: for Dr Peter Rork, to the next patients; for Meg to Denver and a break-up with her boyfriend. A year later, Meg agreed Cody in Wyoming as the meeting place for the knee check-up with her surgeon. Peter told Meg he would be in Denver two weeks later for a baseball game. Why didn’t she join him.
And so it began, this love. Meg learned that Peter was a New Jersey boy who loved the Sky King television series so much in his youth that he would spend hours at the library looking for books on aircraft. His dad got him flying lessons as a teenager, and on his seventeenth birthday Peter obtained his pilot’s licence. Peter paid his way through medical school in Baltimore as a $6 an hour flying instructor and by giving sight-seeing tours over Chesapeake Bay. Peter also loved dogs as a boy, but not in the way Meg was passionate about them and, for that matter, animal welfare in general. Wouldn’t it be a brilliant idea, they agreed, to pick up one or two dogs from a dog shelter and fly them to their new owners on Peter’s plane. It was fun, time together, passion for dogs and flying shared. Peter and Meg could not be apart. Life was too good together and on 29th February 2012 they took a leap into the future by getting married.
Only the future came too quickly. Two months later Meg suffered a cardiac arrest and died, leaving Peter bereft. Broken with grief he gave up work as a surgeon, couldn’t face another day, another hour, another minute without her. In his heart he knew Meg would want him to be happy, to pick himself up, but it was only weeks after she died when a neighbour said as much, that his freefall stopped. Dogs, he thought. Meg loved dogs. So did he. And flying. He loved flying. He could rescue dogs, fly them from A to B, and feel good about doing that. Meg would be smiling. That’s what Peter did. It felt good, the right thing to do.
One flight led to another, the same with friends, until Peter found himself on 4th September 2012, listening, dumbfounded, to Sharon Lohman from a non-profit rescue group in California called New Beginnings for Animals. So few of the abandoned dogs in their care were adopted locally, he was told. Sharon and her team did their best, loading dogs in the van, driving state to state for hours on end, desperately trying to find new homes and loving owners. In spite of these heroic efforts the vast majority of dogs had to be put down. The team simply couldn’t reach every possible new home.
Peter had heard enough. He would cover the miles for them, flying the dogs, wherever he had to go. After only a few months of helping Sharon by making dozens of flights at his own expense, word had spread about this crazy dog rescue pilot. Peter, like so many who have preceded him who never thought of themselves as philanthropists, had found the simplest answer to the questions, Why wait for someone else to do it? Why wait until I have everything in place, all the money, all the resources, people to support me? It has to be me. Now.
In the next few years, Peter reached new heights with his charity, Dog Is My CoPilot, sticking to his three prime directives as he called them. First, Dog Is My CoPilot would only fly from non-profit to non-profit organisation. Secondly, flights would be from facilities where dogs were put down to ones where they weren’t. And thirdly, Dog Is My CoPilot would never charge either dog centres or dog recipients for its service. He built it up, first flying 1,000 dogs a year, then 4,000, then 6,000, mortgaging his home in the process to buy a bigger plane. Every flight to New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, wherever, would mean another 150 to 200 dogs saved; every flight a response to the statistic of more than one million animals euthanised in the United States each year. Meg would be smiling.
Today, Dog Is My CoPilot operates two Cessna Caravan aircraft, piloted by Peter and a team of volunteers, criss-crossing the United States, working with more than 150 dog shelters and animal rescue centres. Peter is unequivocal. His dog rescue efforts ended his downward spiral of despair. The dogs saved him: ‘The same thing that saved me is probably saving thousands of other people when they are getting that rescue animal.’ They just didn’t know they had that piece missing in their lives, he says.
As for Peter, he likes to give the same answer whenever anyone asks him how he is. Best day of my life, he will say.