Aegis 2012
Book Review >>> Hannah Biggs
A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life Steven Kotler. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010. 307 pp.
Despite the title, Steven Kotler’s nonfiction book, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life, is not just a story for dog-lovers. This is a story of lived human existence—an existence riddled with joys, pains, losses, regrets, empathy, compassion, and startling introspection into what it means to be human. Kotler transports readers to a world where dog rescue and life with and dedicated to another creature (or two, or five, or the more startling thirty-nine—as in Kotler’s case) outside of the human is more than a caring, unselfish action; it is a way of being. For Kotler, life took a drastic change in direction when he dedicated his life to a world of the canine, a world for which he “traded forty years of the most ordinary for a world made of dog” (13). And as his book asserts, he has emerged from that selfless, dog rescue-focused life with the understanding “that the life [he] was living was, in fact, real” (x). This is a story of the transformative life, both in changing the lives of others, human and canine, and in transforming the own individual life into something more than a mere “ordinary” existence. Kotler’s story begins in the town of Los Feliz, California. He is dating his soon-to-be wife, Joy—a woman dedicated to dog rescue. At first, this is Joy’s passion. Not Steven’s. But, Kotler takes no time in transitioning into how Joy’s passion suddenly morphs into a lifestyle choice of his own. They buy a farm in Chimayo, New Mexico with the intention of starting a dog recue, a rescue that soon turns into what it is today: Rancho de Chihuahua, a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with the mission to rescue and rehabilitate and, hopefully, find new homes for the many abandoned and abused dogs of New Mexico and surrounding areas. This story gives a voice to the othered dog, the one who is different, abnormal, and not completely functional or acceptable according to companion animal standards. He gives these canines a voice denied to them by a world of sociocultural factors that mirrors the othering even human people face, a world of separation and exclusion with which we are all too familiar. Kotler recognizes that: Dogs go unnoticed in shelter for a variety of reasons. Most people come looking for puppies and purebreds, so older mutts are at a considerable disadvantage. Beige dogs are often overlooked, brown dogs ignored. Black dogs are so hated that rescuers refer to their trouble as ‘black dog syndrome,’ which oddly extends beyond the boundaries of race: even black people don’t like black dogs. Ugly dogs, sick dogs, handicapped dogs, retarded dogs, shy dogs, fat dogs—those too don’t stand a chance. Pit bulls are out of the question, Rottweilers as well. Dogs that need too much
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