Through a Dog’s Eyes
By Jennifer Arnold
This is, primarily, Jennifer Arnold’s memoir about Canine Assistants, the nonprofit she founded and still runs, training assistance dogs for people with a variety of handicaps. Arnold herself, as a teen, developed multiple sclerosis, and faced the prospect of possibly never walking again. She was deeply depressed, and her father, knowing she needed emotional as well as practical help, tried to obtain an assistance dog for her from a California organization. They wouldn’t send a dog so far from their home base—the Arnolds lived in Georgia—and he quickly discovered that there were few options for obtaining a trained assistance dog closer to home.
He created a nonprofit corporation called Canine Assistants, and three weeks later was killed by a drunken motorcycle driver. Years passed before Arnold was able to pursue her dream of truly creating this organization to train assistance dogs and provide them free of charge to handicapped individuals.
When the opportunity did arise, Jennifer Arnold leaped on it. She bought the perfect property on a shoestring, after persuading the seller to provide the financing directly when she couldn’t get a bank loan. Then she went to a shelter and adopted the first dogs she would train, and opened a boarding kennel on the same property in order to finance Canine Assistants.
She started learning about dogs, dog training, and people.
We meet her own dog, Nick the Goldendoodle, who can’t be adopted out as an assistance dog because he’s unreliable with other dogs. He’s fantastic with people, though, and becomes a popular therapy dog, visiting children in hospitals as “Dr. Nick,” complete with doctor’s white coat and black medical bag. We meet the dogs she did train and adopt out as assistance dogs, and the people she provided them to. These stories include the dog who, trained to alert his young owner’s mother when the young man’s respirator switched off, worked out on his own how to flip the machine’s switch back to “on” one day when the mother was temporarily out of reach. We experience Arnold meeting her husband, the death of her mother, and Nick’s aging and death, and her gradual building of a new bond with his successor, Jack.
We also get Jennifer Arnold’s ideas about dogs, which range from well-grounded ideas about training and mildly controversial but scientifically grounded thoughts about dogs’ emotional lives, as well as a somewhat more outré belief that dogs have extrasensory perception abilities. What shines through it all, though, is her love of dogs and her love of people.
The book concludes with appendices presenting the basics of her ChoiceTraining dog training program, together with clear warnings about when you need to call a professional rather than try to solve the problem yourself working from the appendix in a book.
Altogether, this is a warm, enjoyable book that any dog lover will get a lot of pleasure and satisfaction from.
Recommended.
I received a free copy of this book for review from the publisher.
There’s a related PBS documentary; here’s the trailer for it:
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 have read this book and thoroughly enjoyed it. When I purchased the book I thought the primary focus was on positive dog training and how to go about training your dog. While she does touch on this in the end, I found myself reading quickly through to get to the part I was really needing.
Still it was a wonderful book, as long as you go into it knowing the story is more about her memoirs than anything else.
Jodi, yes, I agree, I was expecting a book more about positive dog training; that really seemed to be how the book was pitched. I liked to book, I recommend it–but I’d have liked it better if I’d known what I was picking up.