Reviews for A New Owner's Guide to Cavalier King Charles Spaniels

The average rating for A New Owner's Guide to Cavalier King Charles Spaniels based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-04 00:00:00 Brett Smith There are very few books that I finish actually speechless. Most of the time, in the course of reading, I make a few notes of things I want to be sure to include in the review. Not this one. This one swept me away so completely I could only read, I couldn't even think about the experience of reading, and reviewing was entirely out of the question. Starkly, this book is the story of what happens to one man's life when, in his 40s, he realizes that his high-flying journalist life in LA just isn't cutting it anymore. First he ends up with a dog, and a 14-step outline of how to take care of that dog. The he falls in love with a dog rescuer. And before he fully understands what's happening to his life, he has moved to a tiny drug-ridden town in New Mexico and is living with an ever-varying number of rescued dogs, all of whom have special needs, and regularly starting his morning with "shit toe" (what happens when you step in dog poop barefoot.) Many books have been written about how animals have changed a human's life. But only very rarely, in my experience, are those books written by people who didn't start out as dog people. This guy didn't. He didn't grow up with dogs. He lived alone in a city without one. (Something this book caused me to realize I could never even contemplate anymore. Three months in NYC without Lily was almost the end of me). He also didn't start out as a "pack" person; he was perfectly fine on his own, or thought he was. But moving in with a pack, and then realizing he needed them -- and further realizing that they were daily expanding and deepening his worldview threw his world for a serious loop. Being a skeptical, hard-bitten journalist, he responded by researching the heck out of the situation. He appears to have interviewed every canid expert, ecologist, behaviorist, anthropologist, shaman, psychologist, and philosopher he could get his hands on and read a truly staggering number of books. So many books and articles, in fact, that I started wondering who was financing all this reading. These aren't books you can find in just any public library. I'm going to have to use some of my research library access to read many of them (which I'm very much looking forward to doing.) This is the kind of book that makes you rethink your worldview in a wonderful and unexpected way. It made me realize that the times in my life I have fought depression the hardest have been the times I have tried to live pack-less. And those depressed times are peppered with my attempts to find a surrogate pack. What Kotler learned about canine and human evolution--that in a very real way we domesticated each other and evolved to live together and suffer when we live apart--made a huge amount of sense. Many of the books and much of the research he cited I was familiar with, but a lot of it was also new, and I can't wait to check it out. His writing style was wonderful. The prose was gritty, realistic, human, humble, proud, crazy, tragic and very funny. In short, it accurately reflected what I have experienced of real life. At times, he could come off a little--well, something that could probably be called credulous, overzealous, or overly-optimistic. And while I realized that it could come off that way, it did not to me. This level of epiphany cannot be counterfeited. And epiphanies, by their very nature, often imbue one with optimism and a willingness to embrace ideas you would never have otherwise considered. While I am withholding judgement on some of his conclusions, he inspired me to explore them for myself, and to think more deeply about who I am and how I fit into the world. You really can't say anything better about a book than that. I highly recommend this to everyone on the planet.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-03-14 00:00:00 Paul Clark Actual rating: 3.5 stars. A Goodreads friend recommended I read this book, and I must say I'm glad I did. Written by a professional writer and dog-lover, A Small Furry Prayer recounts the work of a husband and wife team of dog rescuers, a couple who adopt dogs slated for death at animal shelters in order to give them a last chance at rehabilitation and adoption, or at the very minimum a happy and loving home during their last months of life. Interestingly, I recently finished The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, a novel about what it means to be human, as opposed to a "lesser animal," where the thrust was that humans are not nearly as special as they like to think they are. Steven Kotler has the same outlook on animals and humanity. He sees, in his pack of dogs, empathy, altruism, grief, homosexuality, imitative behavior, moral behavior, intelligence, abstract intelligence, language skills, laughter, even evidence of a belief in god. Between chapters recounting his troubles setting up a dog haven ranch in northern New Mexico, and his adventures with his ever-changing pack of dogs, he devotes chapters to each of the human-like traits listed above, quoting the works of philosophers, psychiatrists, and scientists who study human and animal behavior. I've always thought of my dog as a person; so do most of us who love dogs. If I have a soul, so does my dog. I need no convincing. Nevertheless, this is a beautifully-written book, and it puts meat on the bones of the argument that we are all one. This is one of the best dog books I've read, and it belongs on every dog-lover's shelf.