The Dogs Who Found Me: What I’ve Learned From Pets Who Were Left Behind
By Ken Foster
Ken Foster is a somewhat disaster-prone writer and academic who didn’t set out to do dog rescue. After he adopted his own dog, Brando, though, it was just a matter of time. He loves dogs, especially pit bulls, and can’t ignore the stray or abandoned dogs he’s now seeing as he moves around New York City with Brando. At first he’s just making sure someone (else) takes home dogs abandoned at the dog park. Then he’s calling his friends in dog rescue to find foster homes.
Then he starts taking in dogs himself. Even if he has to cut across traffic and, once, nearly hit a pedestrian, to do it.
He and Brando (a Great Dane mix) survive 9/11, but are driven out by increasingly restrictive dog laws and enforcement that goes after easy and obvious minor violations, targeting mostly responsible dog owners, rather than pursuing dog fighters or other real cruelty violations. They move to Florida, and eventually New Orleans. By the time they reach New Orleans, they are a household of four; Ken has adopted first Zephyr, and then Sula–both pit bulls.
They’re in New Orleans when Katrina targets the city, and evacuate to a friend’s house outside the city. Then they need to evacuate from there, after the storm, when conditions are so bad as to be basically unlivable.
It’s Zephyr, one of his pit bulls, who first identifies the heart problem that nearly kills him. (I did mention “disaster-prone”, right?)
Through all of this, Ken keeps rescuing dogs–a border collie in a shopping district while he’s on vacation, a pit bull by the highway on his way home to Florida from a visit to New Orleans, a corgi in his still mostly abandoned neighborhood in New Orleans when he returns there after Katrina. Ken tells his story and theirs in a gentle, sometimes self-mocking way, and makes every single dog memorable.
Highly recommended.
Reviewer Bio:
Lis and Addy
Lis Carey is a librarian with an odd sense of humor, who finds excitement in helping people find the information they need, and in the varied corners of library work–reference, cataloging, circulation, resource development, reader’s advisory. She reads voraciously and enjoys a wide variety of material–including, of course, fiction and non-fiction about dogs and cats. Addy, her Chinese Crested, is always happy to keep her company while reading, and occasionally tries to help write the reviews.
Check out her Blog Lis Carey’s Library for more Book Reviews.
I love, love this book. I just picked it up last week to reread it. Ken Foster has another book too, called Dogs I Have Met and the People They Found. Both great books.