Yesterday evening I read Facing Farewell: Making the Decision to Euthanize Your Pet, by veterinarian Julie Reck. She is exceptionally well qualified to write this, as she used to run an in-home euthanasia business. (Now she runs a full service veterinary hospital.)

In the course of working with many pet owners as they made the decision to euthanize, she discovered that many owners went through a great deal of anguish that could often be assuaged by providing them with more information. This book is the outgrowth of that discovery. Having had two of our dogs euthanized over the years, and closely monitoring two others who died naturally, I wasn’t sure if I would learn much. But I did. With LarryDog now sixteen, when I read about  this book in an email from Dogwise, I immediately bought the ebook version and read it.

Here is how she describes the purpose of the book:  ”I spent a significant amount of time pondering why a veterinarian can make end of life decisions for her personal pets with less misery and suffering then the average pet owner. This difference resides in knowledge and familiarity. I have been trained to recognize animal pain, I understand when no further medical options exist for a disease, and I know the procedure and drugs of euthanasia. I cannot provide you a veterinary degree in this book, but I can provide you the comprehensive information on the process of euthanasia that you deserve as a pet owner.”

The first chapter discusses how dogs and cats don’t share the human fear of death. Dr. Reck tells some interesting stories of how dogs and cats have reacted to the death of other pets in their households when she has been present. That reminded me of when our dog Cider was euthanized by our veterinarian on  her bed, on our living room floor, and how our other dog Teddy Bear sniffed her once and then ignored her body. Seemed to us that he understood she wasn’t there. Read the rest of this entry

There’s a large pile of dog books on the bookcase where I put books I want to read. That’s because my favorite place to browse for dog books has a sale going on.

Dogwise is cleaning house and getting rid of hundreds of slightly shopworn books and older editions… many of them at 70% off. That link takes you to the page which lists them all, so it may be a little slow to load if your connection is anything like mine out here in rural Colorado.

I got seven books for just over $60, and the list prices of those books were in the upper teens all the way to $35. I got a book on dog agility, which I have never done, a couple of books on dog health, one on living more ecologically with your dog, and some dummies books. I was tempted to get some of the many breed books they have on the page, but I don’t really need them so I didn’t. Read the rest of this entry

Are you familiar with Dogwise? Even if you do go there now and then, maybe I can tell you some things you didn’t know. It’s a wonderful resource for dog lovers, full of excellent books and DVDs on all aspects of dog training. Plus some other things you may not have found, like a friendly forum, ebooks, and some interesting lists.

Dogwise Publishing grew out of a company named Direct Book Service, and it is a small (but clearly busy!) family-run company in Wenatchee, Washington. Here is a little bit from their About Us page:

Dogwise Publishing now produces six to ten new books a year on topics that are important to our customers. Renowned dog experts who are published by Dogwise Publishing include Jean Donaldson, Patricia McConnell, Turid Rugaas, Roger Abrantes, Brenda Aloff, Sarah Kalnajs, Rachel Page Elliott and Pat Miller. Our focus is on creating humane, understandable and scientifically sound information for people who enrich their lives by working with, playing with and loving dogs. Dogwise Publishing has an insider’s knowledge of dogs and serves both the dog-loving public and the dog-oriented professional.

Note that “humane, understandable, and scientifically sound information.” The emphasis is on reward-based methods like clicker training. While their website carry a wide range of dog training titles from many different publishers, the preponderance of them are very much in line with the principles of my website here, looking at training methods that the dogs enjoy. As the old saying goes, you can catch more flies with honey, and it is a pleasure to be involved with the movement towards pain-free, positive rewards methods of training dogs. Dogwise is at the forefront!

The Expanding Ebook Section at Dogwise

Dogwise has been bringing out a lot of their books as ebooks as well as regular books. This particularly pleases me because until they began this, most of the dog training ebooks were very high priced. Here is a link to the homepage of their ebooks section

I usually buy their ebooks in PDF format, which can be printed out, though mostly I just read them on my laptop. They also put their ebooks into the Mobi format which works on Kindles and in the ePub format which works on Ipads, Nooks, and other e-readers. You get all these format for one price, so if you start out with something as a PDF and later want it on your Kindle, you just log into your account with them, go to “My Ebook Shelf” and download the other format. They have help on the download page too.

The Dog Forum and Some Useful Lists

There is an active and friendly forum here, with sections on dog training, general chat, health, wellness, and nutrition, and showing dogs.

Here is a page which is a list of lists created by customers and staff. You can make your own list if you want to add one!

Dogwise has a variety of other lists in their sidebar menu too.

My Relationship with Dogwise

Besides being a customer, and sometimes posting reviews on their pages, I am also an affiliate of Dogwise. That means that if you click through on one of my links to them and buy something, I may earn a small percentage of the sale with no cost to you. It’s a way that Dogwise can reach more people, helpful to them as they compete with bigger websites.  I have been doing this ever since I began training-dogs.com… geez, I don’t remember exactly what year that was, but  it was  in the past century!

I still remember very clearly the  first sale I made from Dogwise. Someone bought Dr. Ian Dunbar’s excellent puppy training DVD–well, it was a video then– Sirius Puppy Training and when I saw that on my statistics page at Dogwise, I burst into tears. Not because I had just made my first three bucks or so as an affiliate, but because some puppy somewhere would have a better start in life. Later, as I watched my stats over time, I was surprised to see that some articles I had done on training deaf dogs had resulted in a lot of sales of a couple of books on the topic.

If you are interested in signing up yourself as an affiliate, go to http://www.dogwise.com/Affiliate/index.cfm to sign up, with the name of your website.

Do Take a Look!

Check them out at Dogwise, All Things Dog!

A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog is the most compelling dog story I have read. Well, duh, you might say–it’s by Dean Koontz. Actually, I almost didn’t download it onto my Kindle because of that.  What I knew of him was that he wrote in a genre I avoided.

I don’t read much fiction–as my father was science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith (link to my site about him), I grew up hearing more than a lifetime’s worth of scary tales. So I had never read a word by Koontz, an extraordinarily prolific and popular author, because I thought his stuff was too horror-filled for me.

But  Amazon has this useful–or tricky–feature where you can download a selection from the start of a book onto your Kindle. (Or your free Kindle reader for PCs or Macs, link takes you to Amazon page that explains how.) So I figured that I could look at the first chapter. That word “Joyful” in the title kinda hooked me. So I read the first chapter, and then on a Kindle, you can just click to buy the book and download the rest immediately. Without a moment’s thought, I did.

I was immersed for hours in the story of how Dean Koontz and his wife Gerda had been so hardworking for so many years that they had never had a dog or a child. But they both loved dogs, and evidently dogs feature in many of his novels. They had been deeply involved in supporting Canine Companions for Independence, which trains and provides service dogs at no cost to kids and adults with disabilities, and they had good friends in the organization. So they mentioned to one of their friends there that they were about ready to get a dog.

She found them Trixie, who had been a service dog but had needed surgery for a bad elbow and couldn’t go back to the person she had been assisting because of regulations about the health of service dogs.

Trixie changed their lives. In SO many ways. I’m not going to tell you any of the stories… Koontz does that so incredibly well. I did cry… several times.

I will comment that it was a tremendous pleasure to read some of the passages, here and there through the book, where he talks about how Trixie was to him and his wife a manifestation of the Divine. Here is one such bit:

I believe that Trixie, in addition to being a dog and a child and an inspiration and a revelation, was also a quiet theophany, a subtle manifestation of God, for by her innocent joy and by her actions in my life, she lifted from me all doubts of the sacred nature of our existence.

(can’t quote a page because Kindles don’t show them but it is at 88%)

That captures so well what brings me back to dogs again and again. If that point is not your cup of tea, I think you’d still like the book.

Trixie  has her own part of her dad’s website: Trixie Koontz.

Click on the image above to go to Amazon, where you can get it for the Kindle, as a hardback, as a paperback, or as an audiobook. Highly recommended!