It’s time for another interview and this time its Ken Foster, author of The Dogs Who Found Me: What I’ve Learned From the Pets Who Were Left Behind. The book is about the dogs Ken has rescued (or as might say have rescued him) and how they have changed him and his life. Ken has lived through 9/11, Katrina, a serious heart problem and the deaths of friends and he credits the dogs for getting him through it all.

Have you ever met someone or even gotten on the phone with them and before you knew it time had flown by and you still wanted to talk? Just imagine if this was your first time ever talking and that happened? That was my experience with this urbane, delightful and open writer (who also happens to be a Dogster himself). What a delight to interview! I hope you’ll experience some of the fun I had as you read through this 10 part series. That’s right, 10 parts! There as just WAY TOO MUCH good stuff to get tossed on the proverbial cutting room (or in this case computer room) floor!

So plan on checking back in every day and getting to know Ken better!

Joy: A little bit on how you got started with writing The Dogs Who Found Me.

Ken: The way I got started writing it is someone asked me to write it, which is a little bit unusual and in spite of the fact I was asked to write it I initially said no. I had done a book before this that was an anthology of dog essays.

I’ve worked with the same editor—Ann Treistman— on all my books at two different publishers. When she moved to Lyons Press we thought we wouldn’t work together again because they do outdoor, nature, animal books and I had nothing to do with those things. Then I got a dog and she got a dog and we started running into each other again and she said do you want to do a dog book? At that time I said “I don’t think I can write a whole book about a dog. I can’t imagine that I have that much to say. “ Laughable now but that’s why I did an anthology first.

Then later when we were working on the paperback edition of that book, every time we were talking I had a stray dog in the house that I would refer to because I would put down the phone and go do something with the dog. She, like all of my friends, would say, “Oh you still have that dog that you found two weeks ago?” And I would say, “No, it’s a different dog.” That’s when she said maybe you should write a book about rescuing dogs and again, I said, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not any kind of expert.” But then the more I had people who were surprised that I kept finding dogs, the more I thought well maybe there is something unusual about this for some people, something that I could explore. And then I decided that I would write it and I wanted to try to really figure out what this is about and not just make it a series of anecdotes even though it is that in a way. But to also try to figure out why, why am I finding them when other people aren’t seeing them. Why do I feel compelled to do something when I used to be the kind of person who wouldn’t, to be honest. So that’s how the book began essentially.

Joy: You weren’t the one finding them. What does that say about you now that you are the kind of person who rescues them?

Ken: That’s exactly the question I was trying to answer in writing the book. Whenever people ask it I think, well, it took me two hundred pages to answer that question.

I think part of it is that I got a dog. A dog first in Costa Rica came to me every day for three months and I fell in love with him without meaning to at all, as frequently happens. When I couldn’t bring him home with me I was sort of devastated first of all but then when I did go back to New York I needed to get a dog because I didn’t know how to live without one at that part.

I think part of it is that I fell in love with dogs so I think living with dogs I have learned to become more intuitive and spontaneous and so the things I would filter out from the environment around me, whether it’s a stray dog or something else, I no longer filter those things out. I’m completely aware of everything. I think that’s one of the things the dogs have taught me because as you know dogs don’t ignore things and dogs know there’s something around the corner even if they haven’t seen it yet. And I think we’re capable of being not quite as intuitive but we’re capable of being more intuitive than we have been in the past couple of hundred years.

Joy: What’s important about having that kind of spontaneity and intuitiveness?

Ken: I think it changes your priorities. I think a lot of our human priorities, especially in contemporary culture, are false. They involve things rather than beings. And they involve things that exist only on paper and things that are televised and things that are electronic and they don’t really involve the actual living world. And I think that’s another part of the book. There are times when I would have to make a commitment to an animal without knowing what might happen or how long it was going to take to solve the problem of this animal’s health or this animal’s homelessness or whatever and I had to give certain things up. I couldn’t do whatever I wanted. I couldn’t take a vacation or I had to delay a vacation or all of those things. But as dog people we do this all the time actually. But it made me realize too, like what if I don’t get to visit my friends this weekend, it’s not that big a deal. I’ll visit them again; it just won’t be this weekend. That’s not such a big sacrifice to make.

Joy: What’s bad about having this focus on things and things on paper?

Ken: Because you can spend a lot of energy on those things and they don’t give us very much back. The living world is continually giving back to us.

When you rescue a dog you make a commitment and you make sacrifices. Even if the dog doesn’t stay with you the rest of its life, even if the dog goes on to live somewhere else, there’s a huge reward to doing that, which sounds, I hesitate to say things like that because I listen to myself and think it sounds so corny.

My dogs have saved my life more than once. They’ve made me appreciate really simple things and simple things are also really affordable. My parents sometimes worry that I spend a lot of money on my dogs, the medical bills and things like that, yet I think they keep me at home when I might have gone out to dinner and spent fifty dollars on an entrée or given me entertainment that doesn’t require that I gas up the car and drive out of town. And so, I feel like the existence of the living world, particularly in this case, animals, dogs particularly, it’s just a much more efficient way of living and appreciating our lives, to me.

Joy: What does that do for you to have that much more efficient way of living and appreciating your life?

Ken: It makes me happier for one. It makes me feel more alive. I often think what did I spend my time doing before I had a dog? I think what I spent my time doing was thinking a lot about myself, which is just sort of embarrassing. (Laughs) Particularly when I almost died and had to get a pacemaker I was sitting there thinking, “What about the dogs?” Again, I thought, thank God I’m thinking about the dogs. It would be so embarrassing if I were in this situation and thinking , “Poor me!”

Joy: What does that do for you that you can think about them and not yourself?

Ken: I think it’s very liberating. And I think in some ways, I’ve become, to go back into the terms that what we value in society, I think I’ve become a much more efficient person.

Come back tomorrow for Day 2 of the Ken Foster interview! He’ll explain what he means by a “more efficient person” and how the dogs helped him cope with a life-threatening heart problem.

If you can’t wait until tomorrow to know more, you can always visit Ken’s website to see some pictures of the dogs and read up on other things happening to this New Orleans resident and fromer New York City bon vivant! You can also check out Brando’s website here on Dogster!

Welcome to Day Four of Gina Farago’s interview. Gina’s book, Ivy Cole and the Moon, is the tale of a responsible dog-training werewolf living, and killing, in a small mountain town.

In the last installment of Gina’s revealing interview she told us that part of the reward for her in writing this novel is helping others come to better understand and appreciate wolves.

JW: What’s important for you about doing something worthwhile like this for the wolves and the dogs?

GF: I have always grown up with a real concern for the environment, a real concern for animals. I’m a member of the Defenders of Wildlife, the World Wildlife Fund, the Humane Society and it’s very satisfying for me to know that I can combine my passions. I can be a writer. I can entertain with a story. But I can make a difference to perhaps educate and help people learn about wolves and love wolves and consequently, love dogs because they’re so much love for dogs in my story that I feel that someone who may never have given their family pet much thought or has never owned one might think, “wow, I never realized the amount of depth that a dog can bring to a family.”

JW: Take us to a point in time when you’re telling yourself that this is the right book, the right subject, the right everything.

GF: There was a magical moment for me. Surprisingly, it wasn’t right at the wolf facility. It was down the road. They were having a cookout for the participants of the seminar. It was October. It was very crisp night. The sky was clear. The moon was out and there was a campfire. I was sitting at the campfire just myself and my husband. One of the little handlers came over and began asking me about my book. Before I knew it a small crowd had gathered because all the other participants had come over. So now I’m sitting at this fire. I’m surrounded by this small group of people. I’m telling the story about Ivy Cole and in the distance, the wolf pack started to howl. And so it was like I was being serenaded by the wolf pack as I told the wolves’ story. And that is a moment I will never forget.

JW: I’m getting chills as you’re telling me about it. As you see this time in your mind’s eye, what goes through your mind?

GF: Grateful. I feel grateful.

I feel grateful that God has put me on a path where I can combine the things I love and get these opportunities to do these really special, remarkable things and then share them with other people. I just feel grateful.

JW: What is it about the combination of the wolf and this magical moment you’re telling us about that’s really adding to that grateful feeling?

GF: I almost feel like I have their validation.

I was telling the story and I was talking to these people who also loved wolves and I was talking about how I wanted to do right by the wolves in my story. It would be very easy to write a werewolf story and make people walk away hating the werewolf and wishing the werewolf were dead and that is not the goal of my story. I wanted them to love the wolf and love the werewolf. I’m talking about this and the wolves started to sing to me, it was almost felt like it was a sign that you’re on the right path.

JW: How does that make you feel?

GF: Really good. It makes me feel encouraged. It gives me the confidence that I am doing what I’m supposed to do and I am working on the sequel so her story will continue onto another book.

Join us tomorrow for part five of this seven part series!

Welcome back! Its Day Two of the interview with Gina Farago, author of the werewolf story with a dog twist — Ivy Cole and the Moon (NeoDeo Press). Gina has lived with and worked with dogs for many years (she’s a certified canine massage therapist) and had just mentioned at the end of yesterday’s installment that there is a difference in books about dogs when the people really are “dog people” versus just writing a dog into a story or book.

JW: How does that make it different? There are dog stories out there. How does it make it different that it’s somebody who really loves dogs and has the kind of history in dogs that you have, being a certified canine massage therapist and long history in dogs? How does that make it different for you writing that and ultimately for the reader reading that book?

GF: I think a lot of people when they write, if they’re not a deeply engrained dog lover, the dog is in the story but he’s a peripheral character. He’s not really important. He’s not really that much a member of the family. He is just a presence in the household. But when you truly love dogs and you write about dogs, it’s very clear that they are integral to a family. They are a family member. And because I’m around dogs so much and I know their behavior I can make my dog characters very realistic in the story. I think that’s something that people who aren’t dog lovers, but throw a dog in their stories, they can’t capture. They don’t have that hands-on, day-to-day experience with the animal that a true dog lover has that they can pull out for their story.

JW: What’s important about capturing that real “having the hands-on”?

GF: When you’re writing a fiction novel about a werewolf, that’s way out there anyway. And my story is set in modern day. It is today. It’s in a small mountain town where views are going to be very close-minded. I’m writing about such a fanciful topic, to not have as much realism in it as possible, would make my werewolf even more unbelievable. So I pack the story with all kinds of facts and realistic details to bring believability to my werewolf character.

Particularly with wolves, I actually went to a facility in Indiana. It was called Wolf Park. I went up there to work hands-on with wolves. I was doing all this textbook research but as a writer there are just elements and details that you can’t get from reading a book. You have to be able to run your fingers through the fur and smell them and hear them and touch them and see with your own eyes how they act with each other. So I went to that facility in Indiana and I got to do all these things with real wolves. Including Wolf howl. That’s what I brought to my story; that particular element of realism. I had found that people who love dogs, also love wolves. It’s quite a cross-over.

JW: You’re saying being at the Wolf Park really gave you more of the intensity. How did that change or add to your view or feelings of dogs?

GF: It made me see how they are so connected to their wolf ancestors. I have observed my dogs doing things that I might think that’s stalking behavior or that’s hunting behavior but then when you go to a place and see a wolf doing the exact same thing. Now one of my dogs, bear in mind, is a miniature poodle. I mean you couldn’t feel more removed from a wolf than a miniature poodle but then to go up there and see wolves doing the same behaviors that I see in my house every day; that was very exciting. You know that the dog descended from the wolf but to go up and see the wolves doing these things that you’re already familiar with in your own animals, I really loved that part!

Come back tomorrow for the next installment in this interview series with author Gina Farago!

If you’e just joining us in the interview, you may want to page down to Day 1 and read back to this point. I got a chance to visit with Randy Grim, founder of Stray Rescue last week and we’ve been talking about the feral dogs he rescues and how he got into rescuing. Today Randy talks about rescuers and what makes them different.

JW: What’s different about rescuers? What makes them get out there?

RG: I think one common thread is that we all seem to be the misfits of the world and I mean that in a good way. I’m glad I’m not quote, unquote normal. Everybody seems to have a lot of compassion behind them and everybody seems to have had maybe a tough childhood or early adulthood. I think they get out of it what I get out it, that feeling of self-worth by helping something that’s not capable of helping or speaking for themselves. It draws an eclectic group of people. It really does. I don’t want to say anti-social people but maybe a little bit.

JW: What about that little bit?

RG: This is about a dog website, correct? I hear all the time from volunteers how they don’t really care for people too much so I think it’s a lot of people who don’t care for people too much.

You ask good questions. You ask different questions than I normally get. I usually have stock answers but for you I don’t. You’re really good. You pick up on the things I don’t really think about. Then you make me be honest here when I say a lot of us don’t really like people. We have over two hundred.

JW: I won’t ask you how difficult that’s got to be.

RG: It’s always hard because they’re volunteers so it’s not like you can say, “oh, you did that wrong or something. You have to always be appreciative of their help.

JW: Well, since a lot of the readers are volunteers themselves what would you say to them about how to volunteer and what’s the best way for them?

RG: There are so many different volunteer opportunities at all shelters, but the one key thing is find an organization you feel comfortable volunteering for. If it’s a kill shelter, make sure you’re comfortable with the fact that dog or cat may not be there the next day. If you’re okay with that, and it takes a special person to be okay with that and God knows they need the help, then I would say volunteer with a kill shelter. If its something that you can’t get past, then volunteer for a no-kill shelter. But it can be, we have volunteers who do a little bit of everything. If you don’t like to be involved with the animals because it is too sad, help with the fundraising efforts. I mean, none of this is cheap. Help out, we have someone who comes in and organizes and cleans the office for us. There’s a lot of little things people can do. And the one thing we have so many volunteers for is petting on the dogs. This guy here, Mambo, was just rescued yesterday. I’m just hanging out with him so he knows that people are cool.

Come back tomorrow for the last installation in the Randy Grim interview!

Randy Grim talked about the causes of America’s feral dog problem in yesterdays’ blog. Today he talks about what we must do to begin to fix those problems and how the media treats dog issues.

JW: Most dog people come from the middle class. What do you say to them if we really want to take America out of this third-world mentality, what do we do?

RG: Wherever you are, encourage your local shelters to get involved in the poor urban areas, or the poor rural areas I’ve heard it’s just as bad. But to get involved. But encourage, if you donate money to a shelter, with your donation check, write a letter saying, “What do you do with the strays you pick up? Do you have a feral dog program?” We’ve got to start as an animal welfare community to at least start recognizing that the problem exists before we can start working at solving anything. I can’t do it alone and I realize that now.

JW: What happens if we don’t recognize that the problem exists?

RG: Then it keeps getting worse. Already its gotten worse in the sense that so many of the street dogs across the other side of the river have TVT. I’d say fifty to seventy percent.

JW: What is TVT?

RG: It’s a form of cancer. It’s a venereal tumor through sex. This is something vets are taught in school, don’t worry. You’ll never see this. We’ve had over a thousand cases. It’s treatable but the best method is chemotherapy. This is going to start crossing over into mainstream society. Once that starts I’m sure awareness will be there but I’m also a little concerned that we’re also an alarmist society we’ll just take the inhumane method. My fear would be a shooting policy, a police shooting the dogs. And its not that I’m against euthanasia; I’d rather see a doggy put down rather than suffer but I think that we need to always try to save them.

JW: Is this reminiscent of what’s going on in the breed specific legislation where people are starting to…

RG: That’s big alarmist hoopla. The thing that kills me about the breed specific legislation that’s being passed now is that there have been no, for the last thirty years, the amount of people who have been killed by a dog attack has not increased at all but the population has increased tremendously so its gone down. The dog that has caused the most injuries to the people in the United States is not the pit bull. The other thing, to identify a pit bull is almost impossible. If you mix a boxer and a lab it looks just like a pit bull. Quentin, the dog that survived the gas chamber, is half pit bull so he’s not welcome in a lot of places but he travels first class on an airplane. Its, we have to be responsible pit bull owners and if you want to pass a law saying no more breeding of pit bulls, I’m all for it but we’ve got to still deal humanely with the ones that we have and the ones that end up being born. I have two at home and I love them and they are the most wonderful dogs in the world. Its just people. Its people. I’m not saying that all pit bulls are the sweetest dogs, but there’s usually a person behind them making them the way they are and I’ve seen that too. If you think back, it used to be the Doberman and it was the Rottweiler. Next it’s probably going to be the Akita. So really if they look at the Center of Disease Control statistics it’s the Cocker Spaniel.

JW: What’s causing that?

RG: The breeding. It’s over bred. The woman that had the face transplant, it was a Lab. But if it was a pit bull, everyone in the world would know. Nobody knows that it was a family pet, their Lab. The all-American dog mauled and took her whole face off. My point is once you start pointing fingers like that. Oh, and my favorite statistic is that you have a better chance of winning the Powerball twice before being mauled and killed by a pit bull. I’m on the streets all the time and I’ve never been bitten by one. The truth is, I have been bitten by a Cocker Spaniel at someone’s house.

The point is that the media really has hyped it. The media loves this. They love scaring people to death. I blame the media for making this, that horrible couple in San Francisco with the Canarios, they’re the reason why all this is happening. It made such news. Even though they weren’t even pit bulls. I think it put the media on alert that there’s always going to be maulings and people dying from dogs. There always has been but the San Francisco story was so big, so international.

JW: Did you see a change in the media or people’s reactions?

RG: I did. I saw a big change in the media wanting to do negative stories on any type of terrier related to the pit bull family and I saw people being more afraid of any dogs that look like the ones from San Francisco. Sure. And you know the odd part is, like I said, that there have always been maulings by dogs that killed people. Last year, a Pomeranian mauled and killed a child. That’s a Pomeranian. These statistics are from the Center for Disease Control. They’re not made up.

Come back tomorrow as we continue our visit with Randy Grim!

As promised we continue today with Randy Grim’s interview. As I mentioned in the first of the series yesterday, Randy is the founder of Stray Rescue, the subject of the book The Man Who Talks to Dogs and the author of Quentin, the Miracle Dog.

Yesterday we left off where Randy was telling us about being shy and how the dogs have brought him out of himself.

JW: You’re telling me you’re really shy but you’re making yourself get out there?

RG: There was a time when I didn’t leave the house for two years. I had that agoraphobia. I had social anxiety too, afraid of meeting new people, but here I am afraid to go the mall or something but I was never afraid to go into the poorest ghetto, the crime-ridden ghetto. In fact, that’s the time when all my fear is gone and that’s why I say the animals saved my life. I was able to overcome so much fear. I have had to overcome the fears I had of driving on highways and meeting new people and speaking up and talking and actually fighting and believing in something that I do believe in. I’m not a very religious or political person but I think maybe I am more than I think. But it’s pretty one-sided – the animals.

JW: What is it about helping them and rescuing the dogs and getting out there that lets you overcome these fears and go into these neighborhoods?

RG: I don’t know. I wish you could bottle it in a pill and I would take it all the time. They need me; there’s no one else to do it. The police don’t even go into these neighborhoods. You’re not going to get animal control or the humane society into this stuff. That part, its epidemic in these neighborhoods. Its pandemic. There’s not veterinarians. There’s no spay and neutering. There’s a lot of dog fighting. There’s a lot of drug dogs there. It’s a world with its own rules and it’s a world that I think America has really turned its back on. I think the curtain was lifted just a little bit for America to see after Hurricane Katrina because the same people who were left behind at the convention center, those same parishes that we have all over the country. People saw there are poor people and there are a lot of animals that these poor people have and there’s no programs in these areas. New Orleans had forty thousand feral dogs prior to the hurricane. Now there’s eighty something thousand. St. Louis, it’s estimated at forty thousand. Fifty-five thousand in LA. Its pandemic but the people that can make the difference, the people that can make all the decisions, they don’t live in those areas, they don’t go by those areas. They prefer not to look at those areas. One of the really cool things that came out of Hurricane Katrina is that people saw that we may be considered the strongest and best country in the world but we also have a lot of dirty secrets that we keep.

We’re the only non-third world country with a pet overpopulation problem. People come here to adopt because of how bad we treat our animals. And that’s pretty amazing to me. We always hear about Americans going to China or Romania to adopt children because of conditions there and we’re considered like that when it comes to dogs and cats to the rest of the world. So we are the only developed country in the world with this problem and we should be embarrassed about it. Our politicians should be embarrassed by it. You know we created this problem with our greed and selfishness. It’s on all of us to fix it.

JW: Tell me about that. How did we create the problem and what can we do to fix it?

RG: I think the problem started, to the degree that it’s at now, I think its started in the eighties when gangs started, a lot of urban violence started. The dogs were being used for protection and status symbols and then the dog fighting started. People don’t keep their dogs. When they’re tired of them they just let them loose. They just run the neighborhood and then they just keep populating to the point where we have third generation feral dogs now. And they have a distinct look.

JW: What do the feral dogs look like?

RG: There are a little bit smaller than this guy here. They’re a little bit smaller than Mambo. Usually they’re almost the coloring of Mambo, the straight color of tan or straight color of black. They have pointy ears with the tail that kind of curls up.

JW: So like the thirty to forty pound yellow dog you find all over the world?

RG: Right. Actually they’re the perfect medium size dog except they’re feral and some require rehab and some require years.

JW: What kind of rehab do they require?

RG: Uh! We’ve got quite a few ferals now and usually requires just a month to be able to touch them so it requires volunteers going in and sitting and doing their work. I have people go in and read, just to get them used to people. That’s the very first step and I can usually tell within two weeks how fast they’ll come around. Some come around pretty fast and some will always have issues; a shyness or a separation anxiety issue. Either skittish and shy or so attached to their caregiver it really upsets them when they leave. That’s a small percentage because some have gone on to become therapy dogs. There is that desire in all of them to be loved and to be a quote, unquote normal dog. Genetically they’re still domesticated. They can’t hunt. They can’t, that’s probably the saddest part to me that they can’t really hunt. I’ve found this one pack of dogs and they were very feral. They would kill all these pigeons but they wouldn’t eat them because they couldn’t get through the feathers. They wouldn’t know how to pluck the feathers to get to the meat. Now they would eat a carcass that was already cut open but that’s how poor their hunting skills are. Kansas City, I was doing a story there, a special for one of the major networks there. I followed a dog around forever that was starving. It killed a bunny, carried it around as a toy. It didn’t eat it. It didn’t know how to, it has to have a wound already open. That’s kind of sad to me. It doesn’t have the basic instincts.

Check back tomorrow for the next installation of the Randy Grim interview!

You’re right if you’re saying to yourself right now, “Gosh, that sure isn’t a glamour shot.” But this is exactly how Randy Grim let me interview him last week. Randy had just brought in Mambo, the dog in the picture with him, and was spending some time calming down this dog who has probably never lived with or trusted humans before. But he trusts Randy. And that says a lot about Randy.

If you’re not familiar with Randy, the organization he founded (Stray Rescue), the book about him (The Man Who Talks to Dogs) or the book he wrote about Quentin who escaped the gas chamber (Quentin the Miracle Dog) then let me be the first to introduce him to you. He’s done all these things and more. He’s done it all to put the spotlight on the forgotten and abandoned among our furfriends. Randy has received numerous accolades by the animal rescue community; far too many to mention here. Randy is NOT the kind of person who looks for fame but he is the kind of person who stands up for stray and feral dogs when the times require it. And the times require it now.

For a little more background on Randy let me put you on to a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor about Randy’s efforts and the efforts of those who are inspired by and work with him rescuing stray and feral dogs out of one of the poorest areas in the Midwest, if not the country, East St. Louis, Illinois. He risks his life every day to save dogs who have never known human compassion, and he has been doing this for years.

Last week, Randy made time to let me visit with him at one of the Stray Rescue shelters in St. Louis. As you might expect, Randy had a lot to say and I wasn’t going to stop him until he got tired of talking. The combination made for a lengthy interview so I’m cutting it up into a number of segments. Please check back each day for the next installment of the interview.

I hope you enjoy meeting this true animal friend via the blog as much as I enjoyed meeting him in person.

JW: I know you mentioned earlier that some of your best childhood memories were about dogs.

RG: Well when I was a kid I grew up in a home that had a real loving mother but an abusive father so my sister and I grew up in Washington DC and my sister and I would always bring strays home that I saw. That was the one time that my father was nice. Which was odd. He seemed to love the animals. When my dad was acting up a bit I remember stealing bowls of tuna fish, I remember doing this at five, and climbing down in the sewer and just sitting with all the cats and feeding them. Poor cats; I probably gave them all diarrhea.

JW: Let’s go to one of these times.

RG: One that stands out in my mind is an Irish setter that my sister and I rescued. I was probably seven, eight years old and my sister was about ten then. We had a snow storm and we had about two feet of snow. At the time, the city wasn’t as developed as it is now and there were pockets of woods, and there was a pocket of a wooded area and a dog looked frozen in the snow. We thought he was probably dead and I’m touching him and he’s not really reacting. My sister and I carry him back to the house. It wasn’t an easy carry. It was probably a good mile. My father was there and got a good fire going, put blankets on him and we realized he was starving to death but he might make it. We took him to the vet. I had him for eighteen years.

JW: Let’s stay right here. At one point you realize he might make it. What do you see?

RG: In a child’s mind, “oh he might make it. I hope he’s nobody’s dog so we can keep him.” As a child that went straight through my mind right away. The other thing too, it made me at a young age it made me understand how innocent dogs are. I saw myself in him.

I saw the pain, the fear. Then I saw that he suffered. I empathized with him at that age. I think that was my big lesson in empathy. I understood him.

JW: As you see him at this time. You’re realizing you’re seeing that same pain and fear. What does that do for you to be able to help him recover?

RG: A bond. It produced a bond that I never experienced before in my life and I think most dog lovers, dog guardians understand that bond really well. He’s more than man’s best friend. He was my best friend.

JW: How does that make you feel that you can help him?

RG: I get told all the time, “Randy, you’re so wonderful what you do,” and I don’t think people understand that the reward I get from doing this. Its not pure unselfishness. It feeds my soul.

JW: Tell me about that.

RG: I know if it wasn’t for the dogs the rescue work that I would be a lost soul out there. It’s what makes me tick. It’s what makes me feel that I have a purpose in life. I feel like I’m making a difference. All my self-esteem comes from these guys. I’m not Mother Theresa, that’s for sure. I just love what I do. I feel really blessed. I never thought in a million years that it would turn into an organization, shelters, books and radio and all that stuff. I’m really shy. I just got used to being the dog guy to promote the cause but in real life I’m still a recluse and prefer to be with my six dogs at home.

Check back tomorrow for more of the interview with Randy Grim.

If you haven’t read either The Man Who Talks to Dogs (about Randy Grim) or Quentin the Miracle Dog (by Randy Grim) then you’re missing some of the most moving real dog stories in print. Well, times a wasting! Get those copies soon because I’ll be interviewing Randy Grim in a few weeks and, among other things, I’ll be asking him YOUR questions.

This is your chance to catch this illusive rescuer and ask him those questions you’ve always wanted to ask. As most people who know Randy will tell you, he’s not easy to catch and even harder to get talking about himself. But I will!

If you want to learn more about Randy and the rescue organization he founded, Stray Rescue, then you might want to check out this recent article in the Christian Science Monitor and Stray Rescue’s web site.

So send your questions to me at joy@dogster.com. I’m looking forward to sharing them with Randy!