Title: The Dog Who Wooed at the World
Author (primary): Laura Lee Cascada
Date: 2024
Publisher: Every Animal Project
Length: 317 pages
ISBN: 9798325940063
Illustrations: digital color photos
Quote: ""[W]hile I was out protesting circus cruelty, Powder was at home, protesting my absence."
Powder was a problem dog. (True story. All stories in this book are basically true, though some are imaginative--one writer put lyrics to a friendly robin's songs--and all are edited for length and clarity, no tangents about how the "pit-beagle" might also have been part this and that else and so on.) She was part pit bull, she had not had a good start in life, she did not do well in dog "school" or even at making friends with neighbor dogs at the dog park. Yet this seemed to make her a good therapy dog for a young person having her own problems with this complicated world.
Most of what we learn about animals from this book, we (probably) already knew. That's not a problem; we never mind re-learning that animal friends are delightful to know. This book may have something new to tell readers about the people who love animals.
People who love animals form a wide spectrum. There are farmers who see most chickens as food, but recognize something about this chicken. There are people who work in modern, ethical zoos where animals are likely to live longer, and have more viable offspring, than is typical "in the wild," and people who believe that the existence of zoos is somehow immoral. There's a man who always liked fishing but suddenly stopped fishing when he suddenly felt empathy for a fish he'd caught. There are the "professional vegan" types who agonize over the plight of dogs living outside in clean yards in mild climates, who even manage to project love onto beetles. ..people who don't just observe an unusual beetle on the window screen, look it up, and blog about its place in the environment, but give it a name and talk to it. (Social isolation during the COVID panic gets the blame.)
I would actually agree that, although we'll never know what beetles feel, it's unscientific and a rather transparent emotional defense mechanism to claim that beetles can't feel. Probably they feel something; we just have no way to imagine what.
But, even in extraordinary circumstances--the beetle one woman picked out of the spider's web was unable to fly, and it crawled into her home as if it could think that she might be willing to offer it food and water, so she did--should people devote their time, energy, and compassion to beetles? Isn't that taking time, energy, and compassion away from the person's relationships with other human beings?
I'd have to say that one thing this book documents is that, no, that's not the case. Some of the people whose animal stories are in this book do, as the editor does, mention mental illness, relationship problems, isolation by disabilities or diseases. Other stories mention ongoing, apparently healthy, relationships with other humans: friends, families, even careers in "human services" fields. While reading I was aware that some writers' social lives seem "immature," and yes, they mention being in their teens and twenties at the time. Other writers' social lives sound more mature and stable, sometimes even supporting them through physical illness.
Working in markets where different people rented spaces, I've noticed a paradox. It is true that customers bring in only so much money to spend and, if they spend their money on one thing, that is money they're not spending on another thing. It can be very annoying when vendors who are not being paid for their time see someone come in and talk about buying several items, then wander on through the market and finally come back loaded with bags and buy one small item "because this is all the money I have left." People, especially the ones who live on handout checks and don't even want to have to admit making a profit, can be tempted to project their frustrations onto other vendors and start what the Bible calls "biting and devouring one another." "Don't buy their stuff, it's probably stolen, it's probably not any good!" And a few people who wanted to buy their stuff anyway will listen to them, and may even buy more of their merchandise--one day. And then what happens? A market where people sabotage one another has an unpleasant atmosphere. If A says B's merchandise is no good, customers think it's likely that the whole marketplace is not a good place to shop, and they take their money somewhere else. A hostile market is an unprofitable market. A market where vendors encourage each other, or even buy each other's stuff to cement alliances, gives off friendlier vibrations and attracts more customers.
I suspect it's the same way with the energy humans invest in other species. People can and do let their relationships with animals become obstacles to some specific relationships with other humans. They have reasons for this. Powder, staying with Cascada through short-lived relationships, was the "therapy dog" who helped a young person come to terms with the amount of control of our lives we mortals do not have. Someone else takes time to notice birds or insects at the window while the person is bedfast or quarantined. Someone who lets a dog "chaperone dates," jumping up and down and yapping in between the person and a "date" on the couch, may be consciously aware that "I can't afford another intimate relationship while I'm paying child support." But most people whose love of animals is conspicuous to other humans--definitely most of us "cat ladies"!--actually relate to animals as part of a social life that includes about the amount and kind of inter-human relationships we want.
My contribution to The Dog Who Wooed at the World mentions, but does not explain, the Cat Sanctuary. I don't go into much detail about it here, either. Because I try to avoid writing about living people other than myself, it may sound as if it's just me and the cats. There are hours when it really is just me and the cats, but actually the local Cat, Dog, and other animal sanctuaries are a social network beyond the friends and relatives of the individual (or couples of) animal rescuers. Empty-nesters are likely to have room for more animals, but some animal sanctuaries are operated by young working parents, too.
Some other contributors to this book mention working, whether paid or not, with animal rescue and protection in some way. (Regrettably, none of them questions HSUS' tacit agenda of extinction for domestic animals.) Many don't mention their jobs or social lives at all, but several mention living with parents, spouses, and/or children. Some mention the animals as part of their relationships with family members they've lost.
One contributor shares an experience that was among the better ones in my childhood too: when you live in the country and have time and space to do more or less anything, so people send all sorts of animals to you, just to see what you might be able to learn by nursing, perhaps healing, and training them. A brother brought two baby raccoons to her and announced that they were hers. Baby raccoons are adorable, though also a great nuisance to their whole neighborhood, so it's hardly surprising that she mentions crying real tears when park rangers explained that the raccoons were being transferred deep into the forest where they wouldn't see humans again.
A few contributors do mention living alone with an animal, like the parrot who accurately announces "the day when you are to die" and how the parrot will save the human. (Was the parrot speaking English, or a language in which the thoughts it utters would be easier for a parrot to say?) However, these stories, taken together, provide evidence that people who care about animals tend to care about other humans, also.
Do some animal lovers go to unjustified extremes, projecting their own emotional dramas onto animals that know nothing of what the humans imagine they must be feeling? Yes, I think so. I think this book shows some examples. Exotic fishes very often do die prematurely because their survival needs aren't adequately met or understood. Does that make it inherently inhumane to keep tropical fish? I think it's hard to justify the expense of keeping tropical fish, but do fish have enough consciousness that keeping them can really be considered humane or inhumane? Goldfish, the practice pets given to children, are among the few species of fish who seem able to remember or learn anything, yet their function is often to be underfed, overfed, or poisoned by things dropped into the bowl, and teach the children about death. One story in this book describes exotic fish who were dyed to match bridesmaids' dresses, as favors. Did the fish enjoy being dyed, or displayed in small jars? Probably not. Did they remember it the next day? If left in the lake, would they have been eaten by other fish? Who knows? Would the bridesmaids have preferred to receive more useful souvenirs--purses, or plates, or handkerchiefs or whatever--rather than live fishes? About that we can at least ask. I'd be surprised if any bridesmaid ever wanted an exotic dyed fish as a souvenir.
It would be good for our human characters if all our dealings with other animals were based on respect for whatever consciousness the animals seem to have. It's unlikely to happen. Should animal advocates sometimes get some perspective, and put more energy into activism on behalf of humans as well as animals? One of the stories in The Dog Who Wooed at the World is about how a dog, adopted because he was ill and seemed unadoptable, was kept alive for a few years but is now ineluctably dying, at the same time that his human, who was able to keep food down during a short visit to Japan, is now unable to keep food down back in the United States. I remember our dyspeptic kitten Traveller, how much better he looked during the week when an extravagant friend donated some top-priced kibble, how hard it was at the time to find human food that wasn't full of glyphosate, how outrageous it seemed to ask anyone to pay for overpriced kibble when chickweed and dandelions were about the only non-allium vegetables most people could afford for ourselves. If cheap grain-based kibble had been free from chemical sprays, would Traveller be alive today? How many animals', and humans', chronic conditions would be cured if we insisted on unsprayed, non-GMO food?
Animal stories tend to be biographies rather than comedies. They're usually written after the animal has died, as memorials. These days they often end with confessions of how, after so many years of love and friendship, the human killed the animal. Humans who've opted for euthanasia find comfort in sharing these stories. Children don't like to read them. About the last third of The Dog Who Wooed at the World consists of stories about the ends of pets' lives. If there's a sequel I'd hope that more of the stories would at least focus on animals alive and well, with only brief mentions of the ends of their lives.
One cat, returned to a shelter at age fourteen because its "Daddy" is dying of cancer, appears as the narrator of its own story: "Though we were miles apart, I heard my Dad take his last breath as surely as if he'd been beside me. I curled into a ball and closed my eyes. One more deep breath, and my body shuddered. I was sitting on the arm of Dad's chair, and he was brushing my silky black fur." It could well be true. Animals have dying visions of happy reunions with friends, often with their human friends, just as we do. That they sometimes die not only calling but clinging to a friend who isn't dead yet, looking for all the world as if they are going to join that particular person in Heaven, does not necessarily prove that they may not join that person in Heaven some day.
Whatever your favorite kind of animal is, there are not enough stories about it in this book. There is a manatee story. It's not much of a story; manatees are not the liveliest animals. There could have been another chicken story, you might think, or a story about a hawk or a skunk, or a horse, or a few more dogs and cats. I don't know anyone who's ever claimed that possums make very good pets, but I could have stood another story from someone who's learned to like a possum. The sight of the manatee--a rather ridiculous-looking animal, truth be known--convinced one writer that it's worth warning motorboat users to avoid manatee habitat, where motorboats often wound or kill the slow-moving, slow-witted manatees. A lot of us feel that way even without looking at a manatee's face. Whatever it takes, I suppose. There's more variety in stories of how living animals behave than there is in stories of animal euthanasia, in any case.
Beyond this ability, which non-participants find macabre, to take comfort from stories of other animals being euthanized, do animal lovers show other cognitive blind spots? Consider the one chicken story in this book. The humans had built a safe habitat for a few brown hens of their own. One day a smaller hen with black and white spots found her way to their house, and wanted to get into the safe habitat with the brown hens. The humans let her in, but the brown hens pecked her so mercilessly that the humans ended up building a special mini-pen for the hen who was "different" and was never going to be accepted by the others.
Are hens that mean? Some are. The question also arises whether humans exaggerate the brutality of chickens' pecking behavior. Basically, if they're not crowded, they rarely do each other any harm; if they are overcrowded, chickens can and will peck other chickens to death, and eat the bodies. The story is about how the humans devised a way to keep the speckled hen "not alone," but not among the other hens.
Then, reflecting on this story, the writer thinks that she's like the speckled hen because her job in the medical care industry required her to deliver COVID messages from the government to her community. By now those official COVID messages are known as Lies My Government Told Me, which is the title of an actual book on the subject. New vaccines are always experimental. By denying the reality that the COVID vaccines were experimental and might do more harm than good, our bureaucracy laid itself wide open to charges of having lied with genocidal intentions, rather than merely hyped new products for experimental purposes (and/or for profit). Many people had the vaccines themselves, and recommended them to others, in good faith, and many who had the vaccines show no effects--good or bad. We now know that there were some bad batches of vaccine, and there were several people who should have been discouraged from having any vaccines at all, who were given a COVID jab and died the same day, and the whole scientific basis for at least one of the COVID vaccines was a badly flawed idea, and most people were far better off just building natural immunity to the virus, because it turns out that, if anything, being vaccinated against one strain may make people more susceptible to the new strain that's likely to be in their neighborhood by the time the vaccine arrives.
This writer might have concluded, "Unlike the hen, who was pecked merely because she was an outsider, I'm finding myself unpopular because my job required me to help market a dangerous product. Unlike the hen, I have some apologies to make. I should give thanks that the COVID vaccines didn't turn out worse than they did, as might easily have been the case." No such luck. Her cognitive blind spots allow her to tell herself that, like the hen, she's being persecuted just because being paid made her a bit "different" from the people who weren't being paid to sell pro-vaccine propaganda.
People who've had every vaccine that's come out are still down with COVID this summer. The writer is not to blame for this, nor is she to blame for not having had a premonition of it a few years ago. In view of how difficult it is for anyone who's done a job long enough to have "successful professional experience" to get any other kind of steady work after quitting, I'm inclined to forgive her for overlooking what everyone ought to know by now about new vaccines against virus. Still, she could at least admit that people who blame her behavior are not merely prejudiced against the color of her plumage.
So...who doesn't have blind spots? Overall, what this book tells us about animal lovers is that they, or we, are a very diverse lot of mostly nice, kind, imperfect people whose social relationships with other humans are probably within the normal range for our life situations. We suspected as much. It's nice to read a book that confirms it.
The animals in this book are a delight to "meet," too. Which is why it's taken me so long to write the full-length review of this book. Manatees and, arguably, beetles apart, these animals are as individual and interesting as Mogwai was. Beetles don't have much personality, but the (two separate) humans who bond with them do. This is a book to savor.
Full disclosure: I received payment for my story, which appears about the middle of the book, and receive no further commissions on sales of copies. But you should absolutely buy this book, anyway, because Cascada pre-invested a lot of money in making fair payments to each of us deserving writers and because the Every Animal Project is not a big publisher with sales of textbooks or genre fiction to prop up investments in books like this one. Sales of this book determine whether there will be more books with, one can hope, a higher proportion of stories that aren't about how the animals died. Definitely buy a copy for everyone you know who has kept a pet alive until euthanasia seemed necessary, and is likely to find comfort in that kind of stories.
Now three dogs...As usual these are just the photo contest winners. They don't even predict which animal, if you were to meet all the animals in the shelter, you would consider the most appealing. These dogs have "special needs." Like Powder. They're not the photos people used to tweet with the suggested message, "Have you ever seen a more perfect [specimen of breed]?" but the fact that people are setting up Petfinder pages for them tells us that some experienced dog rescuers believe these dogs will be great pets for the right person. So let's share the photos and see if we can find the right person for...
Zipcode 10101: Gunnar from New York City
Gunnar is a foster pet. Sometimes something about the Petfinder experience for foster pets just doesn't fit right. Foster pets are shelter animals being kept in private homes, outside the shelter; the organization running the shelter pays the food and vet bills because that's cheaper than paying for a bigger shelter building. It's also better for the animals. But, no points for guessing, sometimes the family who've agreed to help place the animal in a new home really don't want to part with it, and one way or another the animal stays with the foster family for years. I suspect Gunnar is likely to be one of those dogs. Do you really want to separate him from that child? This little terrier is described as fifteen pounds of perfect pet except that he will have to take anti-seizure medication all his life. You could work out an arrangement just to help the foster family pay for the meds, so they could keep him.
As it might be this Chihuahua, who has to take heart medication. There seems to be some disagreement about whether to call him Midnight or Chico or Tiny Dancer. He's nine years old, but sometimes Chihuahuas live fifteen years or more, like cats. This one is recommended for a quiet, adults-only home--no chance of
his bonding with a child.
Zipcode 20202: Snoop from Bowie
Yes, HSUS. Apologies. Anyway, this three-legged beagle is said to get around pretty well with only a little trouble going downstairs, and enjoy running around the yard and chasing squirrels. He's recommended to families where the children are over age twelve, but said to get along well with everyone.
Or, as an alternative to going to HSUS, consider Ginger from Arlington...
She has cataracts. Already she doesn't see well; she needs to be able to learn her way around a place before she's completely blind. She's not a young dog, either, but she is a cocker spaniel, bred to be a sweetie-pie.
Zipcode 30303: Charlotte from Decatur
Charlotte's special need is training and socialization. She's not well-behaved around other animals, though she is described as friendly and just a bit "mischievous" with humans. Basically she's just a big mutt that nobody bothered to train when she was little. She needs to be taught about sitting and staying and walking at heel. For someone who is strong enough to hold her and patient enough not to spoil her friendly dsposition, she might still be a great dog, though the shelter stafffdon't even have a guess what breeds her ancestors might have been. If you like smarty answers, Charlotte could furnish lots of opportunities for them.
"What kind of dog d'you call that?"
"An excellent dog."
For someone who is patient, but not necessarily all that patient, an alternative might be Daisy, also from Decatur.
Daisy is deaf. She's not very energetic; needs lots of short leisurely walks throughout the day, will romp and wrestle for a few minutes a couple of times a day, mostly likes to hang out with people. She has done reasonably well adjusting to a foster home with other animals, but they think she'd be just as happy to be someone's only pet. She gets scared and wants to leave dog parks, and she can get overexcited and do what her current caretakers call nibbling on people. This is friendly puppy nibbling, like kissing only with lots of little sharp teeth. When terriers bite people, it's serious. Daisy is not known ever to have bitten anyone but, like a puppy or kitten, she does encourage people to tickle her and then chomp on their hands in an affectionate, though occasionally painful, sort of way. She just might be a good therapy dog for someone who wants to practice slowing down, mellowing out, and remaining calm. Her favorite things, once her need for short leisurely walks (about every three hours) has been met, are said to be playing hide-and-seek and snuggling up beside people.
