I returned to the “Talking Animals” podcast recently to listen to the interview that host Duncan Strauss conducted with with Deni when Catching Sight was released. He asked insightful and often challenging questions and demonstrated a thorough and attentive read of the book.

Curious, I looked over the long list of past episodes. Talking Animals is a radio show on a Florida NPR station, so many of the guests are local to the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, and one fun interview was with Stan Kroh, who oversees the Manatee Viewing Center that Tampa Electric runs in Apollo Beach, FL, a place I loved to visit when I lived in St. Petersburg.

Some recent interviewees are more familiar to me, including Marc Bekoff and Bonnie Bergin. Strauss and Marc Bekoff discussed Bekoff’s new book on animal emotions, which sounds like something I need to read!

I haven’t (yet!) heard Strauss’s interview with Ronan Donovan, whose breathtaking photographs of wolves were on exhibit when Deni and I visited St. Petersburg’s Museum of Western & Wildlife Art in June.

A dog trainer and behaviorist is an occasional guest, taking listener questions about their dogs’ or cats’ behavior. Listeners submit questions by email or text or simply call in.

The podcast is not specifically dog- or even pet-focused; it addresses a wide variety of animal-related topics with interesting guests. Give it a try!

The subtitle of this book is what really caught my attention: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without Humans.

The premise, that all humans vanish one day and dogs have to quickly pivot to self-sufficiency, is an interesting idea to ponder. And the book felt more like a collection of notes on conversations between the coauthors, Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff. But… it never really addressed the topic.

The book is full of speculation about how dogs’ body shape and size would impact their survival and ability to thrive, for example, with far too much commentary on breeding practices. And dozens of comments on how dogs are so dependent upon human food and waste (mostly trash/thrown-out food but they used the word ‘waste’ so often that I wondered whether they meant biowaste as well) that they would struggle to identify potential food sources.

But I kept waiting for the conversation on how a human-less world would look and feel from a more nature-focused perspective. It never came. Other species, both plant and animal, would change dramatically without humans in the picture, often for the better. I had hoped for some attention to how that might look — and, of course, how that might benefit or harm dogs.

An even bigger miss, in my opinion, was a lack of attention to dogs’ mental abilities. Would dogs bred for work, whether agricultural, military, or assistance, perform better at solving the new challenges of life without their servants-with-handy-thumbs?

Finally, the chapter on “doomsday prepping.” Prepping your dog. For the day that all humans instantly, simultaneously, mysteriously vanish, leaving everything else in the world intact. First, prepping for that is not necessary. Second, the suggestions are absurd. Maybe that chapter is intended as comic relief (I hope so) but … I even more fervently hope that no one takes seriously suggestions to let dogs:

• “forage for themselves while out on walks (goose poop,a half-eaten hamburger or tofu hot dog that has fallen out of a trash can…”
• “dig holes in the yard”
• “snatch food from the counter or even from our hands”
• “stop trying to ‘un-teach’ or constrain natural behaviors (marking outside the home, sniffing butts or crotches… digging, and roaming.)”

Don’t do any of these.

Their other suggestions, though, are great (and also: are basic dog parenting):

• Give dogs choices
• Socialize them properly to both humans and dogs (and other creatures)
• Provide opportunities for nose work, agility, flyball, frisbee, and other dog sports

Conveniently, these activities provide dogs and their humans with relationship-building opportunities and a lot of fun!

I like both authors, so I wish I could recommend this book but … I can’t.

The rollout of Catching Sight: How a Guide Dog Helped Me See Myself has brought unexpected benefits. One that I can share with all of you is the discovery of the Dog Words podcast.

The episode where Deni and coauthor Graham Buck describe their initial meeting, how Alberta came to be Deni’s partner, and key aspects of service dog partnerships is not to be missed!

After playing that episode, I explored their archives, and found that Dog Words has more than 200 dog-focused episodes. The website is a project of the Rosie Fund. Curiosity piqued, I needed to know about the Rosie Fund…

Which turns out (not surprisingly) to be a dog-focused charitable organization. The Rosie Fund’s mission is to “provide humans with the resources and education they need to give senior and harder-to-adopt dogs a better life.” 

While not specifically dog-focused, the “He’s Just” podcast has interviewed Deni, as has the Friends in Art Authors Collective (look for the May 22 episode). Find these wherever you get your podcasts.

And of course, you can still order your copy from Bookshop.org!

Orly is always (at least) a step ahead of me.

We’re constantly innovating on our Explorer Walks, and we try out new routes and variations of routes constantly.

Let me amend that: Orly is constantly innovating, and I am always a bit behind in figuring out the real motivation. Let’s be honest here: The One True motivation is food. But it’s a little more challenging (to me, anyhow) to tease out just how Orly thinks a new route or new behavior will increase her treat intake.

I know that she intentionally guides me past yards where a barky dog is likely to be outside. And that she requests a treat whenever we pass yards that might have had a barking dog, even if the resident dog is nowhere to be seen. She recently led me past Milo’s yard twice on the same walk (Milo’s brother is a reliable barker, and their mom keeps a jar of treats hidden in a planter).

I eventually caught on to at least some of the ways that she, um, encourages other dogs in yards to bark as we walk by, such as sticking her nose under the fence or muttering something rude under her breath.

But it wasn’t until I read a recent review of an old favorite book (How Dogs Love Us by Gregory Berns) that I started thinking about all of the cognitive skill behind her masterminding our walks.

The author of the review, Daniel Antolec, describes putting together his dog’s excited expectation on days that a doggy friend was visiting with his dog’s ability to identify a pattern. Daniel’s morning routine varied in specific ways only on the days the dog friends were coming over. Daniel describes the book’s discussion of dogs’ ability to anticipate and dogs’ skill at learning from, communicating with, and forming bonds with other species.

Looking at Orly’s navigation of our walks with a bigger-picture view, I finally understand that she plans the route and engineers encounters with other dogs based on much more than a passing scent. She sets out with her goal firmly in mind (maximum number of treats) and is able to shift gears and redirect us by a block or a half mile if she picks up a promising cue.

I have accepted the truth that she will consistently outfox me. Lead on, Orly!

“I met a dog I could trust with my life,” author Deni Elliott says about her motivation to write Catching Sight: How a Guide Dog Helped Me See Myself. “Once I got past how amazing that was, I wanted to know how a dog gets to be that way.”

Catching Sight presents a three-pronged narrative that describes the extraordinary training and inter-species communication that goes into transforming a puppy into a competent, confident guide dog.

While researching Guiding Eyes Alberta’s early-puppyhood experience—and indeed, the pre-puppy experience at Guiding Eyes, which conducts deep research into genetics and past results—Deni explored every aspect of what makes it possible for a human with a disability to have a collaborative relationship with a dog who helps to mitigate that disability.

Anyone who wonders how guide dogs work, how they know what to do, and what makes them extraordinary will get answers in Catching Sight. They’ll also learn about how and why a person might hide their disability and Deni’s struggle come to terms with being publicly, obviously identifiable as a blind person.

But Catching Sight is about more than the guide dog-human partnership. It is relevant to anyone who wants to raise their puppy to become what Deni describes as “a true collaborative companion.”

Combining serious, fascinating information about Guiding Eyes Alberta’s education with humorous stories, it’s also a great read. I should know; I have read it at least a dozen times in various drafts over the past couple of years—and I will happily read it again, once I have the ‘real’ book in my hands.

Pre-order your copy at Bookshop.org, where you can support your local independent bookstore from the comfort of your living room—and get the book delivered still hot off the digital press. It will be in bookstores on June 16.

The Thinking Dog’s first iteration of Smell Walks (also called “Sniffaris”) was released in 2016, while I was reading Being a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz. When Koala, Cali, and I walked in my current neighborhood, the Walks got their first serious update.

Orly, who is very much her own dog, has spurred a third release with a new name: Explorer Walks. Huh, she sniffed virtually to Koala (who retired a couple of years ago). “I’ll take your sniff budget and raise it … exponentially.”

Orly enjoys deep, long sniffs of anything I will let her investigate. And she loves our usual morning walking route, which takes us through a couple of neighborhoods, past three schools, and through the alley behind a restaurant and a mini-market. That was Orly’s choice; she does not like going past those businesses on the front sidewalk.

This route connected her with Super Hedgie, whom she carried all the way home.

She definitely has her favorite stop-and-sniff spots, but she is more novelty-seeking than Cali or Koala.

At least once a week, she chooses a different route. We start off the same way, and at some point she turns left or right where we’d usually go straight, or continues down a street, breezing past our usual left turn.

We’ve explored the Rose Park, many side streets, and a significant chunk of the neighborhoods around the university and a high school. We’ve walked the wrong way on one-way streets, explored small parks, met new dogs and, presumably, different neighborhood deer. We pass a couple of friends’ houses, countless interesting gardens, and a couple of fences with windows at dog-height, but no dogs.

Orly’s other enhancement to the Smell Walks is the pursuit of yards with barky dogs.

Orly has expertly engineered our morning walks to maximize:

• New and interesting sniff spots
• Old, reliable news sites
• Treats extracted for provoking but not responding to barky dogs
• Number of times we pass by the Big Dipper each week, just in case it has decided to open before 8 am

All this, and we (almost) always get home in time for me make some coffee before I start work at 8:30. Not surprisingly, I nearly always need more coffee…

I recently joined the volunteer team for the Missoula chapter of the Street Dog Coalition. This Colorado-based organization provides “pop-up” vet clinics for people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. Its 60+ chapters served more than 9,000 pets and their humans in 2025.

In Missoula, the vet clinics occur once a month and are advertised at shelters, food pantries, and other places people who might need them might be. The vets and vet techs, along with a dozen or so pet-loving volunteers, serve a seemingly unending stream of people of all ages with dogs and cats of all sizes over a few very busy hours.

The vets provide vaccines, check-ups, advice, and vouchers for to get the pets spayed or neutered. The vet techs clean ears, trim nails, and more. The volunteers weigh the pets, dispense food, donated leashes, collars, and toys, fill in paperwork, hold squirming pets for nail trims, clean messes, and hand out treats. Lots of treats.

Assigned to assist one of the vets, I got to hold dogs ranging from a 9-week-old puppy to an older dog who had been through a lot before finding her current human, a warm and loving woman who was working every angle to try to get the dog some care she urgently needed.

The chaos of vets, techs, and volunteers, along with a crowd of waiting patients, didn’t help reassure the already nervous dogs. (The cats were in a separate, quieter space.) Many of the dogs were too stressed to even take treats. Those dogs generally skipped the nail trim.

It’s still pretty chilly in Missoula, and many of the pets come in wearing sweaters, jackets, and onesies of all types and colors. Donated dog- and cat-clothing is popular and disappears quickly from the giveaway table.

Next to the giveaway table is a second table, piled high with bags of dog and cat food, separated into adult and puppy or kitten foods, most of it donated by area pet stores. At this clinic, the vets were also giving out flea & tick preventive and heartworm preventive, also donated by clinics that were clearing out stock that is close to expiring.

Chatting with one of the vets, I heard about a continuing ed seminar she’d been to recently about mosquito-borne illnesses, including heartworm. Since we barely  had winter this year, she said that we should be giving the preventive tablets year-round, since we can’t count on having enough days of weather cold enough to kill the mosquitos. That’s probably as surprising to most Montanans as it was to me!