Review: Follow My Lead: What Dog Training Taught Me about Life, Love, and Happiness
Follow My Lead: What Training My Dogs Taught Me about Life, Love, and Happiness by Carol Quinn – Purchase Follow My Lead from Powell’s Bookstore via this link and I’ll receive some of the money from your purchase. All comission from the sale of this book will go to the Naperville Area Humane Society, where we adopted our dog, Penny.
Perhaps we’ve forgotten, but dogs are not furry people, they are animals. Sure, we should train them to fit in with civilized life – to a certain degree. The rest? It’s golden. The imperfections, the flaws – they are precious to me. They both infuriate and amuse me. They also remind me of my unfinished self. There is a part of dog behavior that I just like to watch. It reminds me of the truth about life, and each time I see their oddness, I feel a bit better about my own. – Carol Quinn, Follow My Lead
My husband, Tim, and I just adopted a dog in May. We named her Penelope (and call her Penny) because he and I met in a graduate class about The Odyssey. She absolutely changed our lives. From the moment we brought her home, she would come sit with us on the couch, or lean against our legs and look up at us with the intense desire to belong to our family. She is absolutely the best dog. Ever. No, I am not biased. For a shelter dog, she also had surprisingly few quirks. She didn’t chew, pee on, or eat anything she wasn’t supposed to. She didn’t jump, scratch, bite, or bark. The only thing that seemed to stress her out was when we left and had to put her in a crate. Nevertheless, we enrolled her in a beginner training course at a local pet store because it seemed like a good idea to be able to give her basic commands in case she ever decided to jump or charge at someone or something.
Through our 8-week training program, I learned more about patience, love, rewards, humor, and how to get results than I have ever learned, even in my 5+ years of teaching. This training class, albeit short and relatively simple, seemed to be more about training the owners than the dogs. Say the command one time. Be authoritative. Be patient. Give rewards immediately. Correct bad behavior immediately. Needless to say, this training course not only made me a better dog owner, but also a better teacher and person, because so many of these ideas apply with people, as well.
So imagine my excitement when Follow My Lead by Carol Quinn came in the mail from Seal Press (I did receive a free review copy, but no other comission for this work). In this memoir, Quinn discusses her experience with agility training with her two Rhodesian ridgebacks, Nairobi and Sheila and a strict instructor, Irena. She chronicles what she learns with the dogs and applies it to her life – mostly her writing, advertising business, and a seemingly dead-end romantic partnership with a man named Henry. At times, the metaphor of training-to-life can seem a bit heavy handed, it is never a stretch. Quinn applies what she has learned about training her dogs to her experiences with remarkable clarity and humor. It is clear that she loves her dogs and, above all else, wants to do right by them and give them a good home and good experiences, and that is something to be respected. Throughout the book, she exists to help her dogs live the best lives they can, rather than inviting them into her home so she can enjoy their presence, and she happens to learn a few things along the way.
Much of the style of the book felt as if she had written several blog posts and mashed them together into a book, which did make it difficult to read at times. Many of the sections started with a description of dog training, followed by an instance in her life to which she applied what she had learned, or vice versa. Her sentences and paragraphs were often short and choppy – a device, I presume, that was used to try to keep the reader’s attention rather than create a halting sort of prose which, I felt, was the actual outcome. However, overall, the book was heartwarming, relatable, at times funny and at times deeply emotional. I would recommend this book to any dog lover.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars