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Updated: February 21, 2025 @ 11:45 pm
Jen Hinkle, a professional musician, walks the Grammys red carpet with service dog, Kita, a PAW animal shelter alumnus.
Jen Hinkle and her service dog, Kita, are together at the Grammys. Kita is wearing an outfit made by Hinkle. (Submitted photo)
Kita is a service dog owned by professional musician Jen Hinkle and is wearing an outfit designed by Hinkle, on the Grammys red carpet. (Submitted photo)
Jen Hinkle, a professional musician, walks the Grammys red carpet with service dog, Kita, a PAW animal shelter alumnus.
Jen Hinkle and her service dog, Kita, are together at the Grammys. Kita is wearing an outfit made by Hinkle. (Submitted photo)
Kita is a service dog owned by professional musician Jen Hinkle and is wearing an outfit designed by Hinkle, on the Grammys red carpet. (Submitted photo)
It’s not every day a girl from Fort Madison gets all dolled up and goes to the Grammys.
Especially when that girl is a former shelter dog.
Kita, an 8-year-old dog adopted in 2020 from PAW Animal Shelter, is a service dog for her owner, Jen Hinkle.
According to Hinkle, Kita “is a total mutt” and “a mega foster fail.”
“We got her DNA tested just to find out what kind of mutt, and it’s basically dog by committee,” she said. “She’s kind of a Heinz 57. Dalmatian came up, she has lab, she’s got some pit bull, she’s got a bunch. She even has some of the Xolo [Xoloitzcuintle] dog, the Mexican Hairless terrier, and her whole little tummy just bald as can be. So I don’t know how she came to be so exquisitely mixed on the streets of Iowa. Pretty wild.”
Hinkle’s parents live in Wapello, which is where she graduated high school.
“My mom had been following PAW in Fort Madison because of the work that they do,” she said, “and she saw an ad saying they were looking for fosters.”
At that time, Hinkle, who is a professional musician, playing bass trombone, was with a national tour of Broadway musical Miss Saigon.
Hinkle has a sensitive immune system, she said, and decided to go back home to Iowa due to COVID concerns.
“New York was crazy then, because nobody knew how it was spreading. Everybody was just losing their minds and the hospitals were COVID-full,” she said. “I was like ‘well, you know, maybe I’ll just go stay with my folks for a couple months.’ Here I am, in my 30s, at the height of my career, now I’m unemployed, living with my parents in Iowa. So to say it was a bit of a culture shock would be an understatement.”
Hinkle’s mom suggested fostering a dog from PAW.
“We went down to the shelter and we met Kita. They found her starving to death behind a dumpster in Iowa City. She was very, very, very skinny,” she said. “They were like ‘oh you wouldn’t believe what she looked like when we first found her’ because they’d had her for a month at that point. She still needed a lot of weight put on. So we put some weight on her.”
After about two or three weeks of having her, Hinkle said, all of a sudden Kita started acting strangely.
“I have this condition called trigeminal neuralgia and it was getting so bad that I was probably not going to come back out of the pandemic as a musician, professionally, because it was so painful, because it’s in your face,” she said. “We couldn’t predict it, I was on awful drugs trying to manage the pain. And so I was looking into going on disability or finding out if there was a career that I could do while under a tremendous amount of pain intermittently.”
Kita seemed to notice that something was wrong with Hinkle.
“She would come up and start messing around that side of my face, getting really obsessed with it. And then maybe 15-20 minutes later, I would have a huge pain attack,” she said. “And I went ‘huh, that’s kind of weird. I wonder if she can smell whatever’s causing this,’ because we had no idea what was causing it.”
Hinkle contacted a professional dog trainer, who suggested she swab her mouth when she was having an attack and again at other times when she wasn’t.
“It turned out that she was capable of smelling it, picking that one out 100% of the time. We just gave her a treat after she put her nose in the one with the trigeminal neuralgia and none of the other ones,” she said. “Very quickly, it became apparent she could definitely smell a difference. We didn’t know what she was smelling but we knew she was smelling it.”
After that, Kita went into service dog training by Hinkle herself.
“I don’t do any performing without her anymore because she is absolutely trustworthy. So she has all this extra training that we put into her to not wag her tail around expensive musical equipment, to sit quietly when there’s fireworks on stage, when there’s other sorts of pyrotechnics, some of the things that we do can get really loud and intense.”
Kita, of course, has military grade ear protection.
Now, Kita accompanies Hinkle on stage.
“She was the first service dog in the pits in Broadway because I do a lot of Broadway playing. She was the first service dog on stage at the Metropolitan Opera. Lots of firsts for this one,” she said. “And now, I think, the first service dog at the Grammys. I don’t even know how to verify that. She was there for the whole album.”
The album in question is ‘Bianca Reimagined: Music for Paws and Persistence’ with the Dan Pugach Big Band.
“We were at the Grammy awards, and she did the whole red carpet and some interviews,” she said. “She was a real champ. And then we won the Grammy for the best big band jazz album.”
The album itself, Hinkle said, is all about foster dogs.
“Some of the proceeds from that go to specifically bully rescues here in the New York City metropolitan area, because the husband and wife team who are the band leaders. They rescue a lot of pit bulls because they have a harder time finding homes than some other dogs because of biases and fear and all of that,” Hinkle said. “So it was really cool especially having a service dog on stage for an album that is all about dogs. Bianca was their dog that they had when I met them, who actually looks quite a bit like an older version of Kita.”
The album cover features a colored pencil drawing of “Bianca the Jazz Dog” done by Hinkle.
Hinkle expressed appreciation for PAW.
“We’re excited to give PAW a little boost there and also just get the word out about service animals and what they’re capable of,” Hinkle said. “Because I had no idea that a service dog would be capable of doing the complex stuff she does. And I have one now, so it’s like if I didn’t know then people really didn’t know.”
Kita has her own page of Hinkle’s website (www.jenniferhinkle.com/kita)
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