I'm busy on book tour, but was asked about this case at the Ohio Vet Conference late last week. You can read the description below, but the bottom line is this sweet, dear hound mix, Kasey, was rescued from a research lab but needs rescuing again. We didn't have much time to talk about the case at the conference, but I was so touched by the story I suggested that we put it out to the village. The bottom line is that Kasey is predictably fearful of many things, but the urgent problem is an inability to sleep through the night, and barking when she wakes up. This is making it extremely difficult to find a forever home for her, people being strangely attracted to being able to sleep more than a few hours a night. (I went through a period of Willie waking up every hour, or even less, for a Read More
Archives for February 2017
Dogs and Psychological Trauma
In 2006, Willie who came to us as an eight-week old puppy who behaved as if he'd served three tours in Afghanistan, and came back with the canine version of PTSD. The title of The Education of Will is in part based on his name. In the book I talk about how all mammals can be psychologically traumatized, and that they share many of the same needs as human survivors for a sense of safety and autonomy. One of my motivations for writing the book was to make it clear to the general public that dogs can experience trauma, and that the last thing they need is force or coercion to "behave." Given that I'm traveling around the the country talking about this issue through the very personal lens of Willie and myself, it seemed appropriate to repost this article that I wrote in September of Read More
It’s Official! The Education of Will is out in Print and Audio.
THANK YOU Milwaukee! Three hundred of you came out to hear my first talk about The Education of Will, and I can't thank you enough. Needless to say, I was excited and terrified and thrilled and nervous and empowered and overwhelmed to be speaking in public for the first time about the journey that Willie and I took to overcome our fears. I won't pretend that it was easy. But we all know that some of the best things in life are hard won, and that certainly is true for the journey I began six years ago when I first started writing about how Willie set me back before he helped me to recover. Thank you Wisconsin Humane Society and Boswell Books for having me! Today is another big day because it's the official release date of The Read More
Collars I have Known and Loved. Or Not.
The impetus for this topic came from an article I sent out on Facebook on how to behave around a service dog. The article made many good points about respecting the space around a working service dog and his/her human, but I didn’t notice that it came with a photograph of a dog wearing a prong collar. Many people commented on the content of the article, but several also called me out for sending around a photograph of a service dog wearing a prong collar. After initially being abashed abut not noticing the dog’s collar, I realized that this created an opportunity to have a dialogue about the state of dog collars in 2017. Our family dog, Fudge, had the same collar worn by all the dogs in the neighborhood--leather, buckle fastener. I’m sure she would have pulled us around like a wagon if Read More
The Books Behind the Book
I spent three years writing The Education of Will before deciding that I would go ahead and publish it. I wrote and wrote and wrote for myself, as a well-documented way to resolve baggage from my past and move on. I had wanted to try writing fiction, but got discouraged by editors and agents who said, "Well, that's a very difficult world to enter; every week publishers are blasted with a fire hose of works from hopeful fiction writers. Why don't you write a memoir?" I had no plans or interest at that time to write a memoir (don't you have to be, ahem, older?), but I was also working with a brilliant therapist at the time who encouraged me to write about some of the things we were talking about. Not for her, not for anyone else, but just for myself. Writing is a powerful thing. I often Read More