The day before we left the Florida keys after our volunteer summer, my partner and I jumped out of a plane. Actually, jumped is a bit of a generous description. Our tandem instructors—two Florida men with intentionally overpowering “chill vibes”—rolled us over the side with no literal leap involved.

It took a massive mental one, though.

Up until the moment you and your guide are perched on the very edge of the plane with your feet dangling out the open door (at which point finagling your attached selves back into the small craft’s metal hollow would be more dangerous than anything else) you are allowed to shake your head no and stop the whole thing from happening. I knew I didn’t want to do that. Skydiving was my idea, after all! My bucket-list dream! But when my instructor told me our leisurely fifteen minutes of marveling at the island’s blue-green waters were over—when he asked if I was ready to do the thing I came here to do—all I could muster was a feeble “I think so.”

I hesitated for another second, attracted to the safety of the plane—clinging to the familiar form of air travel far more comfortable than the heavy harness contraption I still didn’t fully trust—until reluctance was no longer possible because holy hot hell we were in free fall.

The next two seconds are the entire reason I paid the extra fee to purchase a video of my skydive. When Marcus and I first leave the plane, my face is red and my eyes are wet and my body is stiff with fear, all of it magnified against his easy movements. Heartbeats later? I look euphoric.

My nervousness shoved out by joy and pride and awe, I screamed “oh yeah!” without realizing I’d made a sound, and I didn’t stop grinning until my feet touched the earth, and even then Sean and I spent the rest of the day catching each other’s eye to proclaim some version of “we did that. Can you believe we did that?!”

It’s the bravest I’ve ever felt.

What does any of this have to do with dog training?

“Stress” isn’t automatically bad. And it’s easiest to get through it—to actually benefit from it—when we have support!

I’ve written before about Scout’s joy throwing herself atop uneven rocks, the way she prances and tip-taps her feet and looks back over her shoulder like she not only is joy incarnate but also knows that’s how Sean and I see her. There’s something innate in her reaction to accomplishing a new challenge. After a demanding leap, she radiates fulfillment so potent you can breathe it right in.

I’ve also written about my sometimes-struggle to know how far to push her. Scout’s a sensitive dog, nervous by default, and in our early years it didn’t take much for her to shut down. I wanted her to grow—I wanted us to grow together—but each time I forced her into a situation she wasn’t ready for, it backfired and burned our fragile trust and only made her less willing to show her soft belly to the world.

What changed things was focusing on our social relationship first. Instead of viewing Scout’s capacity for challenges (whether walking past a somehow-very-scary plastic bag blowing in the wind or swallowing her fear of being attacked again to hold a sit stay near an unfamiliar dog) as a thing happening solely inside her, I started looking at our ability to get through difficult situations as a team.

I was able to jump out of that plane because I didn’t do it alone. I trusted my instructor to have my back—we were, as literally as two people can be, in it together. That’s how I want my dog to feel each day of her life.

Sometimes we’re going to do hard things. Sometimes she’s going to freeze up and look so stressed that the social-media mobs would be gleefully come for me in the comment section if I dared to share a clip of her body language, and the only reason she won’t shake her own head no is because she trusts me. But afterward, when we have conquered the trial, we will look at each other and feel brave. We will not even be able to believe how brave we were. Did you see how brave we were?! And the next time we embark on something difficult, the memory of our shared success will hang in the air around us, and we’ll start slightly further from tears.

It won’t always be perfect. We will overshoot on occasion. I’ll think she’s ready to jump out of a plane, and she’ll do it because I ask her to, but she won’t reach the moment of screaming with awe on the way down. We’ll have to recover from that, too, together.

But as often as possible? I will trust her to tell me if she absolutely cannot do it. She will trust me to carry her through things she’s not quite sure of. And I will take that trust as seriously as a tandem skydiving instructor, cheering her on through every moment of freefall, reminding her that even when I reach to adjust her harness and she feels gravity’s demand, nothing bad is going to happen because I’ve got you.

Related reading

Other notes and news

Van-life travel and personal happenings

What a busy chaotic fulfilling fast summer it has been! We spent four months living in Bahia Honda State Park, volunteering as campground hosts and sea-turtle surveyors. Since we left in late July, we’ve been splitting time between loved ones in our home state of Wisconsin. (My best friend is preparing to have her first baby!)

Writing world excitement

Next week I start the 2026 Incubator writing intensive. I can’t wait to focus on my PAWS AND REFLECT book project in an incredible community!

Updates on Scout Finch herself

Scout did a stellar job adjusting to our volunteer position in April. She’s done equally well settling back into a full-time, on-the-road, actually-driving-a-bunch situation again, too. We’ve been fortunate that she hasn’t had a seizure in a while, and she also keeps testing my belief in the “use it or lose it” adage by remembering all sorts of skills (from precise heel commands to general patio manners) we don’t often ask her for.

In short: It’s felt easy lately, life with this cattle dog. I hope she’s enjoying it half as much as I am. 💛

Welcome to a special Paws and Reflect nuance-letter, where I’m talking with my friend-mentor-author extraordinaire . She’s the voice behind Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter, an “offbeat yet heartfelt”1 work of narrative nonfiction published by HarperCollins in 2022. (It came out in paperback this past fall!)

Having lived through the loss of several pets across species—perhaps most notably the behavioral euthanasia of her dog, Seymour, which she writes about beautifully for WBUR—and interviewed dozens of fellow animal lovers about their own experiences, E.B. is something of an expert on saying goodbye to our companions.

I am no such expert.

But I’ve been thinking about Scout’s decline more and more and more in recent months. (In scouring my post archive for those links I was a little shocked by how many center around anticipatory grief. Clearly this has been more top of mind than I even realized.) Last month I celebrated my birthday, which always makes me think about Scout—how her presence has dominated this decade of my life, how I hope so fervently she makes it to my 30s with me—so E.B. and I wanted to talk more about what it means to love and lose the creatures who make our worlds whole.

What have your own experiences with anticipatory grief felt like?

I’m so glad you’re asking me about anticipatory grief, because it feels like something we definitely don’t talk enough about! (Though I did just read this lovely opinion piece by Marcela García in the Boston Globe about how her anticipatory grief is the reason why she can’t see The Odyssey, and I sent my own letter to the editor back.)

Probably the two most intense experiences of anticipatory grief I’ve had were with my grandmother, Nunni, and my dog, Seymour.

In summer 2019, Nunni started to experience signs of dementia and Alzheimer’s, which was really hard for me and my whole family. She sometimes thought I was my aunt, who passed away in 2011; other times she would just ask the same questions over and over. I’d never before lost someone like that, where their mind went before their body, and so it was this surreal experience of grieving Nunni before she actually finally died in January 2024.

With Seymour, he’d been fearful and aggressive at the vet since we first adopted him in fall 2020, but that escalated into full-blown vet phobia after he needed to be treated for heartworm in spring 2021. After that treatment, even when he was drugged into oblivion, he still was stressed out at the vet, so his vet and I formed a plan to minimize how much medical care Seymour needed since it was so high stress for him—basically just the required vaccines and bloodwork and that was it. So I always knew he probably wouldn’t live as long as other dogs since he wasn’t one who would ever tolerate full exploratory exams or be up for surgery or chemo or any treatments like that. I began pre-grieving him then, I think, knowing his lifespan would be shorter.

But my anticipatory grief of Seymour really exploded after he bit my newborn son. My baby was only five weeks old at that point, but Seymour’s fearful, reactive, aggressive nature got the worst of him. After that awful incident, we moved Seymour to my parents’ house and my husband and I spent four full months trying every possible thing we could think of—different combos of meds, new training methods, trying to convince child-free friends to adopt him—and all through that period I cried every single day, often multiple times a day, since I was anticipating losing him one way or another.2

Do you think anticipatory grief makes the when-it-actually-happens grief any different? Do we feel more prepared? Is it just a totally separate thing? (I’m sure it depends on so many things? We already know losing a loved one is such a personal experience, different for us all.)

Sorry that this is a cop-out kind of answer, but I really do think it depends on the situation. When Nunni died, I’d already spent five years grieving her as she slipped farther and farther into dementia, and so her actual death felt more like a relief—I could finally start to focus on other emotions and remember different things about my grandmother and her life.

With Seymour, in the end, he attacked me unprovoked one day in June 2024, and Richie and I decided that euthanasia was the kindest option for him. It was the most painful pet loss I have ever experienced, and his actual death was particularly brutal because of the added layer of guilt that comes with behavioral euthanasia, but at the same time because I had so much time in the months leading up to Seymour’s death working through my anticipatory grief, I felt like I was able to better take care of myself once he finally did die. I knew what I needed to do to help myself mourn—visit Dog Mountain, get a memorial tattoo, write about the experience a lot, make a little shrine of his photos and ashes in our living room. It’s like I went into his death with a plan for how to cope, and while it was still hard and sad—I cried about Seymour every day for six months after we put him down—it felt better to go into the experience prepared.

I love what you said about your plan to cope with Seymour’s death—both that it didn’t magically make the experience not terrible and difficult (because how could anything inoculate us, truly, against such a loss?) but also that it helped you care for yourself. In Good Grief, you learn and share so much about mourning rituals. How did you decide what ones felt right for you? Was it instinct, experience, part of a larger framework?

One of the most liberating things I realized about mourning when researching and writing Good Grief was that you don’t have to do the same grief rituals every time, for every animal. It feels so obvious to say this, because clearly you don’t do the same grief rituals for every single person—some people want to be cremated, some want a full Catholic wake, some want a “celebration of life” and not a funeral—but I had felt before like, okay, if I bury my fish in my backyard cemetery, then I have to bury all of my pets in my backyard cemetery, or if I get a pet memorial tattoo for one pet, then I need to get a pet memorial tattoo for every pet I’ve ever had. That is not true. For each animal, instead, I’ve thought about the specific pet and his or her personality and the things we did together and what was special about our relationship, and I’ve tried to find a way to remember them that feels fitting to the specific pet.

So, for Seymour, I knew I wanted to get a tattoo to honor him—I felt a closer bond to him than any other dog I’d had before, and so I wanted to carry his likeness on my arm for always. Having a tattoo of him also makes me happy during funny moments like when I go swimming, because Seymour hated getting wet. So I laugh whenever I’m in the pool or Walden Pond and I look down and see his little tattoo form all soaking wet and I say, “Buddy, you would have hated this!” Also Richie was the one who suggested we go to Dog Mountain to leave a photograph of Seymour in the Dog Chapel there, and this was also such a perfect way to honor him, since we’d taken Seymour there before, and it felt like a special place for our little family—me, Richie, and Seymour, and now it is for our son, too. But did I do those things for my childhood dogs, Gus and Gwen? No I didn’t. And will I do those things for my next dog? I don’t know.

I often think about the “extremes” of anticipatory grief. On the positive side, I believe it can help us remember to cherish the time we currently have. But on the negative end, I sometimes feel it preventing me from being present with Scout. It’s like this knowledge of my dog’s inevitable death simultaneously makes me love her even more but also hangs, wet and heavy, over my head. I feel it when we’re on a sunrise walk, and when I throw her ball, and when we lie down afterward with our bodies touching in the sun. I’m grateful it’s there, sometimes. I’m also devastated.

I totally get this feeling! It’s such a weird, guilty feeling that comes alongside anticipatory grief, like I am wasting time I have with my loved one by pre-grieving them, when I should just enjoy being with them while I can, but it’s impossible not to. Anticipatory grief is a very natural and real human emotion. What I try to do though is to not let that feeling take over my time with my loved one, but rather serve as a reminder to nudge me back into being present. I write in my book about how there is this Bhutanese folk expression that says in order to be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times every day. It seems counterintuitive, but I think that thinking about death so much helps you appreciate the ones you love and the time you do have. In Good Grief I write that, “Perhaps we love our pets so much not despite but because they remind us of death. They’re a daily embodiment of how short life is, how important it is to be present in every moment.” Anticipatory grief is just another way of getting at that idea.

Tell us more about your “death is certain” dog shirt, please!

I would love to! My friend Janna was the one who found the shirt for me, and I love it so much. The contrast of the very alive and alert Cavalier King Charles Spaniels and the heaviness of the message, all in the style of a ’90s hip-hop shirt is funny to me, but I also really appreciate the reminder every time I wear it. We think we can control all these things in our lives, but really, nothing is certain except death. Never forget!!! (And if you want to buy the shirt for yourself, make sure to order it from the original designer Mega64 and not the knock-off version being sold by that monstrous online retailer that I hate!!!)

I know we both appreciate nuance and the honesty of the “it depends” answer (which might sometimes feel like a cop-out but is also, I think, important). That said, are there any overall best practices for grieving? Anything you definitely would or would not recommend?

The thing I always say is: as long as you aren’t hurting yourself or anyone else, mourn in any way you need to. Take as long as you need, and do what you’ve got to do.

I first published a version of this article all the way back in June 2020. That feels like a lifetime ago (what do you mean I’d only had Scout for two years?!) but my sentiments still stand—and some recent retractable leash hate has inspired me to unearth and update this post.

Read on for what has turned out to be a surprisingly hot take in the dog training world.

Flexi leads. Retractable leashes. Dog tape measures. Horrible tools that should be banned immediately. On-leash off-leash freedom. One of the biggest taboos in dog training.

Whatever you call them, there’s no denying that retractable leashes are a mixed bag in the dog world. At this point I might even argue that they are one of the most controversial tools we can put on our dogs.

When I tell someone that we love our flexi lead, I get everything from befuddled looks of shock (“aren’t you like, obsessed with being a responsible dog owner?”) to flat-out condemnation.

Finally, something different trainers can agree on?

While many tool debates seem to create “sides”—most of the balanced dog training community in favor of prong collars while the force-free community is against them and vice versa for front-clipping harnesses, for example—flexi leads often appear universally hated.

In fact, an anti-retractable comedy bit by a guy named Drew Lynch went viral across the dog community. Casual pet people and seasoned trainers alike enjoyed laughing together as he ripped on negligent dog owners in what’s admittedly a great piece of humor.

Give it a watch yourself, and tell me at least part of you wasn’t vehemently cheering along:

Good stuff, right?

When retractable leads go wrong, they go really wrong

Flexi leads can be dangerous. So can a multitude of other dog training and walking tools—I’d argue all of them, in fact—but there’s no denying that:

1. Retractable leashes are easier to misuse than their standard-length counterparts, and

2. When a flexi lead is used incorrectly, the consequences can be particularly extreme.

When you read the words “flexi lead”, what comes to mind? The first thing I used to picture was an out-of-control dog running a full block ahead of their owner. Barking at people, getting in the personal space of other dogs, ruining the evening walk experience of the entire neighborhood.

The vision got even worse if I imagined this in a city or crowded park—or when I remembered that:

• Some of the folks simply minding their own business nearby might be afraid of dogs

• The flexi-lead-wearing canine could trample protected wildlife or neighbor’s careful landscaping

• Other pet owners being charged by this unfamiliar dog could have spent months building their dogs’ faith in handler to overcome fear reactivity only to be ambushed by clueless Jane Doe and her retractable leash

Yeah, that’s a yikes.

Flexi leads are known for a range of problems

The above scenario is often enough to completely turn dog owners off of retractable leashes for good.

These dog “tape measures” are notorious for plenty of other issues, too:

• Constant leash pressure: Many dog trainers believe retractable leads teach dogs to pull by rewarding them with more freedom when they fight the line’s resistance. That’s pretty much the opposite of the understanding of leash pressure most handlers want!

• Tangles: The thin, string-like flexi leash varieties can easily get tangled with each other—and they’re a nightmare to separate. This is especially dangerous in dog fight situations.

• Breakage: Some more cheaply constructed (or worn out) retractable leads can split open in the middle of walk.

• Poor grips: The hard grip of flexi leads can be difficult to hold, increasing the chance that they drop it and fully lose control.

• Panic in dogs: If an owner drops their retractable leash, it can scare their dog. Because the handle reels in toward whatever it’s attached to, pets may feel as though they’re being chased—so they just keep running farther.

• Injuries: Humans and dogs alike have been injured by flexi leads, particularly when the string gets wrapped around a finger or leg. Talk about a spectacular rope burn.

That’s quite the laundry list, right? It’s no wonder that jumping aboard the “flexi leashes are awful” bandwagon is the popular move.

But what if retractable leashes aren’t all bad?

In case the above sections aren’t clear: I don’t think that flexi leads should be the “average” owner’s go-to for every walk around the neighborhood.

But I do think retractable leashes can be amazing tools in the right hands. It would be remiss to write them off completely!

Any tool can be misused. Leashes. Collars. Harnesses. Food. So much of a specific tool’s success or failure lies in our hands as owners and trainers.

There is a time and place to use a retractable lead—just as there is a time and place to use a harness or some high-value treats or pretty much anything else.

Acknowledging that there might be situations where a certain tool is a good decision is not the same as recommending its use in every scenario. I don’t encourage the entire world to go out and use flexi leashes willy nilly!

But I do encourage responsible handlers to not be afraid of their benefits.

The “good side” of flexi leads does exist

Though their usage is wrought with problems, retractable leashes have plenty of great traits too.

I learned a lot about their responsible implementation from dog trainer Jay Jack, and I think his ebook says it well. Here’s a summary of what a properly used flexi lead can do for you and your dog:

• Help teach leash manners: Jay actually uses retractable leashes to teach dogs how to walk politely on leash. It’s a fun, game-based style of learning that builds killer engagement.

• Help sensitive dogs get used to pressure: Some dogs are really sensitive to leash pressure and shut down when it’s applied. Scout is a little bit like this. We’ve come a long way, but there are still times where any resistance freezes her in her tracks. Getting her used to feeling a small amount of pressure on our retractable lead has helped her become more confident!

• Provide more freedom while maintaining control: Retractable leashes are perfect in situations where you think your dog would do well off leash, but you still want an extra layer of control just in case—or you want to respect the legislative intent of leash laws while allowing your companion more space to romp.

“Why not just use a long line?”

Many people (myself included) often use long lines to give their dogs more freedom while still having ultimate physical control. This works well in many situations—but flexi leads can be even easier to use because they manage the leash slack themselves.

This is important from an accessibility standpoint. And the convenience also helps if our goal is to increase owner compliance with the legislative intent of leash laws!

If a handler finds that their long line keeps getting tangled and dirty, they might be more likely to just unclip the leash altogether. If their retractable lead is conveniently managing the slack, though, there’s a greater chance that they’ll keep it on.

I’m reminded of Tim Ferris talking about the “best” strategy to achieve any given goal (a concept that blew me and Sean away when we were 21 years old). He concedes that the actual best method isn’t just the one with the greatest chance of success on paper—it’s the one with both a high chance of success and a high probability of compliance.

The convenience of a quality retractable leash can make it easier for owners to follow through on keeping their dogs from disturbing wildlife, the environment, and fellow park users even when it’s really tempting to throw caution all the way to the wind.

“But doesn’t the resistance teach dogs to pull?”

This point is often debated. I think the truth, quite simply, is that every dog is different.

Some dogs—especially those on the small end—might become desensitized to leash pressure if they always feel a retractable leash clipped to their collar. Others barely notice it.

Jay Jack once measured the resistance of his particular retractable leash model at about six ounces. He contrasted that to the smallest ecollar he could find at the time, which weighed about eight ounces.

Of course those two things aren’t directly comparable. But it stands to reason that a few ounces coming from different directions might not be that big of a deal. (This is especially true when we consider that dragging a long line also puts resistance on a dog’s neck.)

If we are nervous about the resistance of a retractable leash ruining our dogs’ leash manners, though, there’s an easy solution: attach it to a harness instead! We’ve taught Scout she’s allowed to pull into any back-clipping harness but needs to yield to leash pressure on a collar, and it’s been a great distinction.

We proudly—and carefully—use a retractable leash to have more fun together

I love our flexi lead. I think it’s awesome. Our retractable made some particularly enjoyable beach trips possible for us when we first moved to Florida—and it’s a regular choice for trail walks and park visits now that we live on the road in our van.

Some situations just lend themselves really well to a greater level of freedom without worrying over long-line slack!

Although I’m proud to say this is a tool in our toolbox, I hope it’s clear that we don’t use our flexi lead like clueless Jane Doe in the story up above. And you’ll definitely never find us in a Drew Lynch comedy bit 😉

Here’s how we use our flexi lead safely and respectfully

Being responsible is always important to us, and even more so when such a controversial tool is involved. (The same way I want to be a good ambassador for dogs and their people overall, I want to be a good ambassador for the tools we love!)

1) We treat our retractable leash a lot like being off leash

I only put Scout on our flexi lead in situations where I’d feel pretty comfortable with her being all the way off leash. We don’t use the retractable anywhere that’s crowded or confined!

For us, this often looks like sniffari walks to open natural areas. We like to go to parks and easy hiking trails when it’s raining, windy, or otherwise “terrible”. It means no one else is around and we can have the space to ourselves.

Honestly, it’s sometimes tempting to break leash laws entirely in truly empty situations… but we value the nearby wildlife (and the simple, delightful fact that dogs are even allowed at our favorite parks, beaches, and other spots at all) too much to give in.

We also don’t expect the leash to be our only connection to Scout. Her recall and desire to simply stay near us of her own accord need to be solid, too.

2) We only use an all-belt, ribbon, or tape flexi

No cattle dogs on a string here. Our flexi leash is a tape variety, sometimes also called belt or ribbon. The entire length of leash is a fluorescent flat belt, which serves a few different purposes.

• The thicker line is much easier to untangle than a thin string would be.

• Folks can see the entire length of leash from far away, so even at a distance they know that Scout is attached to us and under control. Hopefully this eases the minds of people who might be afraid of off-leash dogs!

• We can grab it, if needed, without worrying too much about rope burn.

• The line is less likely to snap or break if it gets caught on something.

3) We regularly check that our leash is in good shape

As with any tool, I understand that our retractable leash could break. Before using it each time, we check that it’s still in good condition with no obvious signs of acute damage or excessive natural wear.

4) We usually attach our retractable leash to a harness

We’ve taught Scout that she can pull into a harness but must yield to leash pressure from her collar. Most of the time, we attach our flexi lead to her harness so that the slight resistance she feels doesn’t run the risk of upsetting her leash training.

As our time together has gone on, we have started sometimes attaching the retractable leash to her collar now. It’s such a slight amount of pressure that it’s never been a big deal for our individual situation—and I’m happy to say her (fairly stellar, if I may boast for a second) leash manners have remained intact.

If we decide to attach the flexi to her neck, we make sure of a few things:

• The collar is wide (1.5 inch minimum) so that the resistance is distributed over a large surface area.

• It’s also loose enough to turn around her neck so that the pressure doesn’t always come from the exact same place.

• The collar buckle is not cracked or at immediate risk of breaking under force.

5) We bring a standard leash along with us as back up

A retractable leash is rarely the only walking tool we have with us. We typically bring a standard fixed-length leash along too!

One of my personal favorite combinations is to attach our flexi lead to Scout’s harness and then carry a slip lead in my pocket. This way I can quickly recall her and put the slip over her head if we come in close proximity with other people or dogs.

We’ll also often go somewhere with Scout on her six-foot leash and bring the flexi along just in case the opportunity arises. When entering the beach boardwalk, for example, she can wear her regular lead for optimum control in a tigher space—and once we confirm that the beach is empty, we might then decide to switch over to the retractable.

Another possible solution to this is to simply lock the flexi when in a smaller area. I don’t think this gives quite the visual cue of “under control” that a standard leash does, but it’s reasonable in many situations!

Despite popular opinion, not even retractable leashes are black and white

If a flexi isn’t the tool for you? Cool! No biggie. That doesn’t mean it can’t be the tool for us. Flexi leads aren’t as obviously terrible as many dog owners and trainers make them seem.

In the right hands, retractable leashes can be a wonderfully responsible way to enjoy more freedom with our dogs. In the wrong hands, they can be disastrous. (Reminds me of several other dog training tools, too.)

I think one of the most important things we can do as responsible guardians is keep an open mind. When we consider different perspectives and take the time to think through situations (instead of passing instant judgment) we can learn, grow, and ultimately do more for our dogs.

You won’t find me encouraging everyone and their brother to go out and buy a retractable leash tomorrow… but you also won’t find me hiding the fact that we own, use, and love one ourselves. Happy flexi-ing!

“Miss Batty” looked like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, all wrinkles and curious-sad eyes. She was heartworm positive (so common as to be expected for dogs in the southern shelter system) and recovering from surgery to fix a broken leg with a few ounces of metal (not as routine but still less rare than you might think). Because the bustling SPCA kennels were no one’s idea of a healing environment, Miss Batty was looking for a foster home’s living room instead.

I’d like to say I loved Batty instantly. In a way I suppose I did—the shallow admiration I feel immediately upon seeing any new creature, especially a canid—but I was also afraid of her. Not of her blocky head or her unknown-only-guessed-at behavior around other dogs or her medical prognosis. None of that felt overwhelming; I figured we knew enough about training and management and risk assessments to get by. No, I was afraid of what welcoming her would do to Scout, my nervous blue heeler who’d always had us to herself. I was afraid of what Batty’s ability (or, god forbid, inability) to thrive under my roof would say about me.

But the fear tasted a bit like excitement, too. I wanted to get involved in the rescue world beyond walking shelter dogs a couple hours each week. I wanted to know if Scout trusted me as much as I hoped she did by that point. I wanted to see Sean, who still insisted he was “not a dog person,” lose his heart to another four-legged creature.

We’ll take her, I replied to the SPCA’s foster coordinator. Does tomorrow morning work?

On April 28th, 2022—three weeks after Sean and I got married and three-ish years after I’d adopted Scout—we humans drove forty-five minutes to pick up Miss Batty (who we decided was actually more of a “Val” from the Ender’s Game book series). Val was instantly affectionate and endearingly clumsy and seemed like she might have needed to be lifted into our sedan’s sandy back seat even without the broken femur on scene. She felt woozy in the car and cried the whole way home, showcasing a sliver of the hilarious (and sometimes heartbreaking) monkey noises she’d soon become famous for. She was tired on her pain medication and irritated with her plastic cone and still interested in the world around her.

She was about to teach me so much in less than two months.

The hardest part of fostering? My emotions

And not when we had to say goodbye (though it is difficult to let them go). Sean called it early on that the most challenging thing about fostering would be balancing my energy between all the creatures who needed my support.

My “emotional capacity”—the palatable phrasing I’d use in a job interview to convey that I feel everything at a tidal-wave scale, no small inklings or “reasonable” responses—is my favorite and least favorite trait. My partner and I were fortunate to have the logistical resources we needed to open up our home to a dog in need. I was years into intense work on myself that I hoped would give me the emotional resources I needed, too. But it was still not seamless!

I had some “only child syndrome” going on with Scout. After bringing Val into our previously stable equation, I felt stretched to the limit in opposite directions. I convinced myself, all in the same day, that I was the world’s best foster parent and also the world’s worst—some mornings I felt like a saint, some evenings I felt like the Most Terrible Dog Lover Who Has Ever Lived.

I’d love to conclude this with some rosy reflection about an epiphany that I was in fact good enough, a moment of clarity that enabled me to see and feel things for what they actually were, but that didn’t happen. Instead, fostering Val was an ongoing exercise in rollercoaster-y small incremental growth.

Non-social dogs can be good foster siblings

Despite feeling ready to foster—or at least as ready as we’d ever be—and knowing our house’s layout would provide flexibility when it came to integrating or separating our resident dog from our temporary guests, I was still worried. If Scout had a hard time sharing her space, would that negatively affect the other creature we’d promised to care for? This felt particularly salient in Val’s case, because she needed a calm, supportive environment to recover from significant medical trauma.

My hesitation wasn’t unfounded. These are all important things to think about (and I’d have been negligent to not consider them)! But all in all, what I learned from bringing another full-grown adult dog into our space was this: Non-social dogs can actually be helpful foster siblings.

Scout didn’t want to interact with Val. Given that Val was on crate rest with so many activity restrictions, this worked out better than if our blue heeler had wanted to be her new best friend. And even if Val was cleared to romp around with another dog to her heart’s content, I think the ability to ignore fellow canines is an underrated skill for modern pets to have. Scout’s reticence to get up close and personal with our foster created ideal opportunities to practice!

I do think fostering is loads easier with social, tolerant resident dogs. I admittedly still feel a little jealous when I see people for whom that is the case: Their canines can do a lot of the work to make a new addition feel welcome and confident, which takes oodles of weight off the human end of the leash. But I’m equally sure that Scout’s preference for calm coexistence over direct interaction didn’t hurt Val’s recovery in the slightest, and I’m quite hopeful it helped her develop foundational skills that will serve her for the rest of her life (which will undoubtedly involve not always being allowed to greet every other animal she sees).

“Fair” isn’t always “equal”

I am over-the-moon obsessed with Scout. It was also important that any animal coming into our home felt safe and seen and loved, too. How could I give everyone what they needed without drowning in guilt about not being a superhero who could stop and start time at will?!

The answer, it turns out, was to remind myself that being fair to all dogs in my care did not require me to treat them in equal ways. Sometimes I started to feel terrible about letting Scout snuggle with me on the couch while Val was crated nearby, or about putting Scout outside so our blocky-headed gal could roam the living room, or about taking our healthy cattle dog on a long walk when our foster could barely leave her bed (let alone the house). That guilt was natural, but it also wasn’t productive (or, you know, fair to myself).

Although I never wanted anyone to feel actively slighted, it wouldn’t have made a lick of sense to set a timer to make sure both dogs got identical time with us each day, or to keep Scout crated every second Val had to be, or to otherwise drive myself mad trying to make things even. What I did instead was ask what mattered most to each individual dog. What had the greatest impact on our shared life? What was my own capacity to give looking like each day? What would best prepare us all for the future?

Easier thought than acted on, of course, but the “fair not equal” refrain always helped.

Some dogs bark just for the sake of barking?!

My friends, I can’t believe how much this blew my mind. Scout has never vocalized much unless she’s acutely upset or incredibly amped up (like, overstimulated in an unhealthy way). Val, in contrast, talked incessantly no matter what was going on.

I do think part of our foster’s tendency to vocalize came from a lack of physical fulfillment—medically mandated crate rest is hard even in the best of circumstances—but the majority of her noises weren’t tied to how long she’d been confined or how recently she’d gotten to play or any other factor. She just liked singing the songs of her people.

Because my previous life with Scout had created a negative conditioned emotional response to barking and whining, exposure to Val’s “just because” noises was the best therapy I could have asked for.

Knowing one dog does not mean you know all dogs

Scout and Val were both thin and roughly the same height, but the similarities stopped there.

• Floppy versus pointed ears move in different ways. This made Val’s body language subtleties harder to read since I’m so used to Scout’s upright satellites.

• Scout’s eyes and facial tension show a lot of expression. Val’s face mostly always looked the same (unless she was panting). Over time I grew more accustomed to our blocky girl’s slight movements, but it took a really, really focused look.

• Their snout lengths required different treat-delivery techniques. (Also, Val’s saggy lips meant a lot more drool cleanup. Oops.)

• Val was afraid of things that didn’t faze Scout at all, and vice versa.

Although domestic dogs share many overall traits as a species, their behaviors and mannerisms and appearances vary. (A lot.) It was wonderfully humbling to learn another creature from scratch.

Surface-level looks never tell the whole story

Above all, our first foster experience reminded me how unfair (and unproductive) quick assumptions can be.

There were several moments in our time with Val where I’m sure we looked like a total trainwreck to the outside world. She cried the entire time we sat in the drive-through for her first pup cup. Overwhelmed with too many many sights and sounds and smells competing for her attention, she struggled to settle outdoors. She nearly pulled me to my knees trying to zoom around our front yard. She shouted with her whole chest when we brought her to wade in the river (and Sean had to carry her past a bemused-and-slightly-uncomfortable man trying to read his book in silence on the shore).

With Scout, I often get snagged on too-deep concerns about what other people think of us. Do we look put together? Can strangers tell that we’ve worked diligently to get here? Can I feel proud of our behavior?

Navigating the world with a brand-new foster dog was welcome—and desperately needed—perspective.

Other notes and news

This week marks a full month since THE DOG LOVER’S BUCKET LIST hit bookshop shelves. (If you’re new here, that’s my first published book—you can read more about the process here!) I am overwhelmed in the best possible way by the kindness of my friends, family, literary community, and all the total strangers who have shared in the celebration.

June also means we’re more than halfway through our time volunteering at one of Florida’s busiest state parks. Our various obligations have been so demanding but also so fulfilling, and best of all: The very first sea turtle nests should hatch by the end of the month!

All my love to you and your dogs (and cats and rabbits and other beloved creatures).

Two and a half years ago, my then-baby niece received a board book called That’s Not My Kitten. It’s a simply illustrated story about a narrator trying to find their cat via sensory details. My niece loves animals—especially cats, as she’s grown up with them!—and so of course loved this book with its interactive touch-and-feel details.

I loved it too. (The whole series is darling.) My only gripe? On every page, the book refers to the various kittens the reader encounters as “it.”

That’s not my kitten, its nose is too smooth. That’s not my kitten, its tongue is too fuzzy.

So I got permission from my sister and brother-in-law—the adults ultimately in charge of decisions regarding my niece’s belongings—to change the book. I crossed out every instance of the pronoun “it” (which we most commonly use to refer to inanimate objects in English) and replaced them with the gendered pronouns we use for fellow people. I recorded a short video showing my copy tweaks and shared it to my dog Instagram account.

I felt proud of the example I was trying to set for this small kid I so deeply adore. Pets aren’t things. They’re individual, sentient beings like us!

The internet both did and did not see my intervention the same way. Although big organizations like PETA asked if they could repost my reel, hundreds of other commenters expressed their distaste at what I’d done—either because I wrote in a book with a permanent marker (oops, I hope these folks never realize one of my great joys in life is annotating printed pages) or because I was arguing against “proper” grammar (officially, English calls for “it” to refer to nonhuman creatures unless they have a close relationship with a person) or (most understandably, and a criticism I took to heart in future edits) because I’d neglected to include a range of neopronouns in my changes.

When the vitriol peaked with some truly disgusting insults, I deleted the whole post. (I am still too much of an Internet Person, but I am not willing to go through that level of adrenaline just for views.) I never did give PETA or anyone else permission to amplify the reel.

Now the topic has come up again in some recent reading—I’ve seen “it” used to refer to nonhuman animals in several articles written by professed pet lovers and in a bestselling dog-centric anthology—so I wanted to reshare my thoughts. Language is messy! It always will be messy: We come to conversations with our own preexisting ideas and experiences and connotations. But I still believe in taking words seriously, thinking about their impact, and, if nothing else, chatting about why we feel the way we do.

Here goes.

Nonhuman animals aren’t inanimate objects

As the International Society of Zooanthropology says: Our fellow creatures aren’t automata. As Humane World for Animals echoes: “Calling living beings ‘it’ can subtly reinforce longstanding rationales that prop up abuse and exploitation.”

If you’ve been here for any length of time, you know I do not buy into the idea that humans exist at the top of some arbitrary scale from least- to most-valuable beings. Our insistence on being the “only species to have ___” (insert your favorite example here; erroneous claims so far include language, tool making, and mental time travel) has hindered nonhuman animal research and stunted our capacity for interspecies empathy. Instead of evaluating fellow creatures in their own contexts, we too often judge them in ours. I think casually using “it” is tied to this implicit demeaning.

While drafting this piece, a red-winged blackbird perched atop the arm of the empty chair next to me. The chair does not live or breathe or think or feel, and I am happy saying it is yellow; it is comfortable to sit upon; it held the bird’s weight nicely. But referring to the bird the same way—looking into their eyes, seeing them maneuver, then using the word I use to reference an inanimate piece of furniture—feels wrong.

It’s not that my dog or your cat or that red-winged blackbird or any other creature without a strong grasp of human language cares what words people use about them. They have literally no idea what those words mean. (I don’t get offended when a stranger assumes Scout is a “he,” for example; it does not automatically affect how they make her feel.)

But the words we use affect how we feel. I don’t know anyone respectable who believes in the strong Sapir–Whorf hypothesis—linguistic determinism is reductionist—but linguistic influence is widely accepted for good reason. Is it possible that some people can use “it” for animals without the pronoun fundamentally changing how they view and treat nonhuman creatures? I’m sure it is! But it’s equally possible that this subconscious use worms into our thoughts and beliefs in insidious little ways, and we might as well embrace new norms that prevent that possibility altogether.

Grammar schmammer (sorry not sorry)

One reason “it” is so common to refer to nonhuman animals is because the pronoun is still, officially, grammatically correct. Unless an animal is “personal”—meaning they have an intimate relationship with a person or are anthropomorphized to talk in a children’s book, for example—most style guides insist we use it rather than singular they.

But grammar constantly changes. Saying “well, that’s just how it’s always been done!” and “well, that’s just what the Powers That Be have decided is right!” isn’t a good enough reason for me to keep making a choice.

A real perk of my writing primarily for pet-focused publications is that editors don’t argue with me when I say “the dog who” instead of “the dog that” or use singular “their” instead of “its” or otherwise embrace our fellow creatures as beings with minds and emotions and value. I think we’re seeing an overall shift here outside of animal-specific contexts too. (At minimum, more people are talking about why and how and when these pronoun choices matter.)

What about people who prefer it/its pronouns?

Now, this whole conversation gets messier because some humans prefer to be referred to with it/its pronouns. I can’t be clear enough here that I fully support this choice. (My friends, the very bare minimum we can do is use people’s preferred pronouns without question!)

The problem is that the vast majority of folks I see calling animals “it” aren’t intentionally using a neopronoun. They’re just doing what comes naturally—what they were taught in school, what our “humans are the ultimate species” beliefs have instilled. They’re saying a dog is an it the way a chair is an it. They’re using the pronoun we’ve historically reserved for inanimate objects and creatures “less” than human.

I wouldn’t call a person “it” without them explicitly telling me that’s what they want. We default to singular they for people (like in middle school when my teacher announced “someone left their phone on their desk,” not “someone left its phone”) and so, in my mind, it’s sensical to do the same thing for nonhuman animals.

Language isn’t everything—but it’s is something

I probably need to start paying Anne Curzan for how often I reference this line in her book Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words. She sums it up too well:

And in a world where animals who aren’t human routinely receive unfair, thoughtless treatment? The consequences of our words are particularly important to me.

Other notes and news

Well, this is it, my friends and fellow creature lovers: My first book, THE DOG LOVER’S BUCKET LIST, was officially released by international publisher Quarto yesterday! (This inspiration-education-journal contains no instances of “it” referring to nonhuman animals 😉)

I plan to share some longer reflections on the whole process—from initial editor reach out to standing in a bookshop holding a volume with my name on the cover?!—soon. For now: Thank you so very much for supporting me and Scout.

I just finished reading The Best Dog in the World edited by Alice Hoffman. There are multiple moments worth mentioning (and enjoying!) in the book’s fifteen essays, but I find myself stuck on two interactions. First, an adoption coordinator at a rescue event insists that:

And later, a different humane society employee tells a different writer that:

I read those passages, and I felt lonely. I reread those passages, and I felt angry. I spoke the sentences aloud to my partner, and he laughed: “But no one believes that all the way, right?” he said.

“I think too many people believe it,” I answered. “And if it doesn’t feel true for someone else, they’re quick to assume that person is the problem.” No bad dogs, only bad owners, right? Your dog is your mirror, right? All dogs need is love, right?

Oh, dear reader, I want to shout from the rooftops that these generalizations are wrong.

Domestic dogs are incredibly intelligent social beings. They’ve coevolved with humans for tens of thousands of years. I do think our pets are capable of feeling gratitude—their emotional wells run deep, far deeper than many of us care to realize as we go about our busy people-centered lives—and they’re absolutely attuned to our behavior!

But dogs aren’t privy to the machinations of human society. They do not understand our abstract verbal language or grow up with our species-specific norms or catastrophize into the future about what their lives could have been. When we take them from one stressful environment (a row of shelter kennels) into another brand new (our apartments, our houses, our converted campervans) they do not know what’s happening the same way we do.

Scout was not grateful when I brought her home seven years ago. I don’t mean she was actively ungrateful—just that there was no reason she should have thrown herself at my feet like I was her savior. No way she could have gotten all the intricacies of the situation. As far my new cattle dog realized, I was a near-stranger she’d only met twice, a (hopefully) pleasant presence she was curious about but did not implicitly and fully trust.

That trust came later. That trust came through consistency and curiosity and work (on both ends of the leash). And gratitude did follow: I believe, now, that I can read the look Scout gives me when I offer her a frozen bone in Florida’s sweltering heat, or pour some of my own water bottle into her empty bowl, or help remove a stubborn bur from her right ear, or put myself between her and an oncoming off-leash dog. We dance together. We play and orbit and lean and take turns. We fit. We love. It is beautiful.

But it would have been unfair of me to expect her to know, all those years ago, from the first moment I loaded her into my unfamiliar-smelling car, that I was “rescuing” her. It would have been unkind of me to think that because I was doing this Good Deed, her only reasonable course of action was to meet all my emotional needs and never express her own opinions and resist causing me any problems. (Oh, gosh, did she ever cause me some problems.)

There are times when shelter stories truly are rosy. I’m happy for those dogs and guardians! I’m glad that instant-joy dream remains alive and well, and I’m thrilled when it becomes reality. But saying every adoption tale is destined to be smooth—like possibly confused and stressed dogs are supposed to be instantly grateful, to never have dietary restrictions or require breed-specific fulfillment beyond a daily walk, to subsist on a cozy feeling of “love” alone—doesn’t help anybody.

It hurts.

It hurts the pets who find themselves struggling to adjust to a new situation and the handlers who don’t feel ready to guide them through. It hurts the guardians who were promised a seamless bond and now feel like failures because this relationship that should be “easy” is proving quite difficult, actually. It hurts the dogs who are nervous, withdrawn, unsure—and then get labeled “ungrateful” because gosh, we literally saved their lives, isn’t the least they could do let us snuggle them on the couch without complaint?! (Real comment I saw on a social media video about a dog who didn’t want to be pet the other day: “Dogs should always take petting. We care for them and they are supposed to do their job for us in return.”)

Scout didn’t know I rescued her. She didn’t understand what happened when animal control picked her up wandering the streets, when her stray hold expired at the shelter after no one came looking, when she was put up for adoption and stress-chewed her way through everything soft in her kennel. She didn’t know that my face meant freedom. How could she have?

Our bond wasn’t automatic. And I think, looking back, that this relationship is sweeter for the effort it demanded. I’d rather be chosen day in and day out because of my ongoing actions than lauded in perpetuity because I simply signed an adoption contract.

Love is part of it. Oh, gosh, please don’t misunderstand me here: Love is so much of it. But I think we can talk about and honor and highlight that love without slipping into generalizations that might make someone else feel small. Our journeys to our unique dog-human bonds look different for each of us—and that’s okay.

Other notes and news

Oh goodness, things have been so very busy lately (in mostly good ways).

First up: In less than a week (!!) I get to call myself a published author! THE DOG LOVER’S BUCKET LIST officially enters the world on May 19th. It’s been almost a year since senior acquisitions editor Nicole James reached out to me about this project (Nicole, I will never be able to thank you enough for your trust) and it sure felt special to get to hold the finished book in my hand.

Next: We’ve been campground hosts in Florida’s twelfth-busiest state park for exactly six weeks! Time is flying by. We’re all a little hot, but Scout seems pretty darn content—see below for a photo of her relaxing in her shady kingdom—and continues to make me pretty darn proud.

Last, I’ve been (finally) dipping my toes into the “query trenches” with my book proposal for the PAWS AND REFLECT: LESSONS IN LIFE WITH A SENSITIVE DOG memoir. Part of the reason I care so much about this project is exactly what inspired today’s post. There are many wonderful dog-centric books out there! But I find that they often—even when gorgeously written and well intentioned and otherwise lovely—end up repeating some of these romanticized generalizations (or, in the case of the above examples, showcasing how these myths persist in in-person interactions). I realize my experience with Scout’s fear and reactivity isn’t everyone’s experience, and that’s exactly my point. I mean… there’s a reason I call this newsletter a “nuance-letter.”

Love to you and your dogs (and other creatures) 💛

How do I decide what to do with Scout? What does she enjoy most? (For that matter: What do I enjoy most?) Here’s a look at some of our favorite physical, mental, and social activities—and how I think about whether they fill or drain our heeler’s metaphorical cup.

Thank you for reading the Paws and Reflect nuance-letter! Today’s post is on the longer end, combining thoughts about canine biological fulfillment overall, Scout’s individual preferences, and several links to related reading. The whole thing might get cut off in your email inbox, so I recommend clicking the headline to read it in your browser if possible. You’re the best.

How I choose my dog’s activities on a given day

The short answer: I consider what our life has looked like recently and try to identify any big “gaps”. If something’s been missing? I focus on that! If our activities have been pretty balanced? I just ask what we’ll both get the most satisfaction from in the current moment.

Averages over single data points

Looking at “averages over single data points” has been an ongoing journey since I adopted Scout. This idea helps me feel significantly less stressed on the overwhelming days.

• It isn’t about walking X distance every morning. It’s about giving my dog enough exercise overall.

• It isn’t about playing a set number of minutes. It’s about fulfilling my dog’s biological drives overall.

• It isn’t about settling at a new place every day. It’s about maintaining my dog’s public exposure and comfort overall.

• Ultimately: It isn’t about following a set routine day in and day out. It’s about making sure Scout’s cup is filled on the average.

It’s okay if we have a really lazy day where all our dog does is eat her daily calories and go outside to pee a few times. And it’s okay if we have a really crazy day where we ask a lot of her and she’s exhausted by the end!

What matters is that, when we “zoom out”, things are in balance.

How I think about things that “fill” or “drain” my dog’s cup

My daily goal with Scout used to be to “tire her out”. I didn’t put any value judgments on the type of tired. As long as she wasn’t bursting with energy at the end of the day? Cool, good job team!

But then I realized there is a huge difference between being tired because you just had the most stressful or boring day of work ever… and being tired because you exercised your brain and body in satisfying ways.

Both might send you to bed early. Only one gives good dreams.

Instead of fixating on Scout’s surface-level energy today, I focus on her biological fulfillment. Is she satisfied? Is she getting lots of reps in the Seeking and Play emotional systems? Or is she exhausted because I’m pushing her too far too often?

While it’s inevitable to feel drained in a not-so-satisfying way sometimes (and it’s important to build frustration tolerance!) I want Scout, on as many days as possible, to feel the type of tiredness that comes from a job well done. From satiated instincts and drives.

So I think mostly about satisfaction and enjoyment here. Something like fetch, for example, could fill Scout’s cup from a fulfillment standpoint but drain her physical energy. Many activities do a bit of both. More examples below!

Primarily physical activities

High energy play! (fills her cup)

Scout is more playful than ever nowadays. We’ve worked hard to build her confidence to let loose in a range of environments! Play is one thing we do every single day, no matter what (though it can take different forms depending on where we are and how we’re feeling).

Scout’s favorite aspects of play are “fight” (based on the part of a canine’s natural predatory sequence after catching prey and before consuming it) and “chase” (yep, exactly what it sounds like). She also likes to celebrate (flaunt that she has something in her possession) particularly if we’re cheering her on.

Because of these preferences, we spend most of our intense playtime on tug. We let her win regularly—but only after she’s really put in effort. We also enjoy cooperative chase & catch, which mostly looks like a pretty traditional game of fetch now that we’ve cleaned it up.

Play almost always fills Scout’s cup. The only times it leaves her frustrated are if we mess up and ask for too many obedience commands, especially in a chaotic environment where she’s struggling to feel safe.

More reading:

This blog’s entire “Play With Your Dog” tag

Runs and hikes and other fast-paced adventures (fill her cup)

Scout runs with us less often now that she’s older and gets sore more easily. (We humans are in better shape than ever since moving into the van, so our physical abilities are sadly just starting to diverge.) She does still join us about half the time, though, especially if it’s an easier route. And we’ve had more opportunities to hike than ever recently!

These activities usually fill her cup—but depending on the environment they can have their stressful moments too. In general, the busier a trail or road is, the less enjoyable it will be for our heeler.

Primarily mental activities

Structured walks (drain her cup but build relevant skills)

A structured walk is where I ask Scout to hold a “heel” position next to me as we move through the world. We don’t have a flashy focused heel like you’ll see in dog sports—she just needs to stay within a few inches of me, give or take, regardless of what’s going on around us.

We don’t go on structured walks as often as we used to. When we lived in our first few apartments (and were in the initial throes of addressing Scout’s dog reactivity) I listened to advice to have her heel just about every time we left home. Nowadays we focus a lot more on self-regulation at liberty—but on occasion a structured walk is still nice to maintain impulse control!

I say that structured walks usually drain our heeler’s cup, but (as always) it depends on our exact approach in a given moment. Fast-paced heeling with lots of rewards, direction changes, and celebration? Way different than a slow, steady march down a busy sidewalk.

More reading:

Sniffaris (fill her cup)

This is our favorite way to walk nowadays! A sniffari is pretty much what it sounds like. Scout leads the way on a long-line, flexi, or all the way off leash. We explore surrounding scents and interesting things as we go along. Sean and I can recall her if needed (say we’re about to pass another person and dog) but try not to interfere unless it’s necessary for safety or public respect.

More reading:

Food searches (usually fill her cup)

We sadly can’t set these up very well in the van, but they’re still one of my favorite ways to feed Scout when the environment is right. For a food search, we break her meal up into several small parts, often add broth or a smelly treat to make it easier to find, ask her to hold a sit or down stay while we hide a portion out of sight, release her to sniff it out, and repeat until the whole meal is gone. Our heeler gets to use her nose and tap into her canine scavenger instincts.

More reading:

Box feeding (drains her cup while building relevant skills)

At its simplest, box feeding is a concentration exercise where Scout indicates (sniffs / points with her nose) on an article (a small object to indicate that the “restaurant” is open) inside of an opaque box. When she stays committed to the task through distractions, I drop food in the box as a reward.

For a while our cattle dog got almost all of her meals from the box. We don’t do it very often anymore (partly because fitting her original box in the van wasn’t a great use of space) but I enjoyed seeing her focus grow when we first started.

More reading:

Scattering her food in the grass or a snuffle mat (fills her cup)

Sniffing can lower a dog’s heart rate and decrease blood pressure. Feeding in a snuffle mat or scattering food in the grass (when the environment is safe for it) is a great way to get our heeler to use her nose! This is especially helpful if she’s been stressed.

More complex food puzzles (can drain or fill her cup)

Giving our dog her meals in puzzle toys isn’t as relaxing as scattering her food—she has to think more about what she’s doing instead of just casually sniffing in a given area—but she seems to thoroughly enjoy different treat-dispensing balls and contraptions. Especially if she hasn’t gotten much other stimulation lately.

More reading:

Trick or obedience training sessions (can drain or fill her cup)

Most of our active training sessions have been food based (though we’ve branched more into play-based work as time has gone on).

Depending on how we structure things, tricks and obedience can both fill or drain Scout’s cup. In our early days (when commands were new to her) it took a lot more effort for her to perform than it does today (when most things we ask for are second nature).

More reading:

Anything else using a lot of impulse control (drains her cup but can build skills)

In general, any activity that requires Scout to exercise a lot of impulse control will drain her fulfillment cup but build useful frustration tolerance over time. I try to be mindful of how often I ask her to really work her brain like this—and make sure to intersperse plenty of more relaxing things so she can recharge. As always, a balance!

Primarily emotional and social activities

Snuggling and sharing affection (fills her cup)

I love “just hanging out” with Scout. It feels a little weird to include this on a list of “activities” I share with my dog, since this sort of social time often feels very passive—but it’s a huge part of our life!

Snuggling up in the van bed, sitting next to each other in the front cab chairs, giving her a focused canine massage… (*sing song voice*) these are a few of our favorite things. And they really are fulfilling for everyone involved.

More reading:

Exposure-focused activities

Public outings (can drain or fill her cup)

Bringing Scout into public places is something I’ve written about a lot. Supported exposure to the world has been an integral part of helping her feel more confident in herself and trusting in us! We love relaxing at breweries, coffee shops, or cute public parks as a family—but I recognize that not every environment is suited to her sensitive nature. Certain spots provide more satisfaction than others.

More reading:

There’s almost always overlap between categories

An important note: I can’t really think of any activity that’s just physical or just mental or just social. I also can’t really think of any that only fill my dog’s cup or only drain it. While I did my best to categorize our go-tos here for the sake of organization… nothing exists in a vacuum.

Scout usually lets me know if something feels different on a given day. I’ve learned to trust her—and myself—more to be able to adjust in the moment.

This means three main things: 1) We now live next to an impossibly turquoise ocean, 2) we’re about to spend our longest time in a single location since we first moved into this yellow van all the way back in early 2023, and 3) we interact with more people and pets in a typical morning than we used to average in a whole week.

Those of you who know Scout or have read a handful of my Paws and Reflect posts over the years understand that she is not a social butterfly. I thought she was ready for this new challenge—if I didn’t, we wouldn’t have willingly put ourselves in a position where strangers walking into your campsite is the norm—but my stomach still fizzed with trepidation-tinged excitement (or maybe excitement-tinged trepidation?) the whole drive down.

There’s a difference between being ready in the sense of “can handle this without causing a major scene; will survive” and being ready in the sense of “will actively enjoy herself with no regrets.”

As we settled into our new normal, how much help would Scout need from us? How able would we be to provide that help when stretched in more different directions, trying to maintain existing remote work obligations on top of volunteer duties? Startling situations have always been our nervous cattle dog’s kryptonite. Were we waltzing into an environment where each and every day would put her through an adrenaline rush?

Before we arrived, I wrote “recovery from stress” on my calendar as a top priority for the month. Now that we’re officially two weeks in, I’m thrilled to say the stress itself has basically been a non-issue.

How Scout used to be in campgrounds, in the olden (read: very reactive) days

Our cattle dog’s fear reactivity has always been worse when she’s stationary but triggers are moving. Sitting still in a campsite—trapped in one location—while other dogs passed in close proximity was one of the hardest situations we could put her in, up there with relaxing at a dog-friendly patio.

The first time we took Scout tent camping, long before our van-life days, we had to:

• Keep close watch on her at all times (like, actually holding the leash)

• Always have treats on hand to immediately reward (and admittedly distract) her

• Be hyper aware of the environment in case someone was going to walk into our campsite to say hello, especially if they had their own dogs in tow

Her self-regulation around prey was also still in the works, so we stayed on the lookout for squirrels and lizards wandering too close. She could resist the urge to chase with reminders from us, but left to her own devices? Gal sure knew how to sprint after critters.

Scout’s campground baseline before we arrived for this volunteer position

Thanks to full-time living in the van, Scout’s camping finesse improved. I credit both natural exposure and continued management/training on our human end of things.

A little over a year ago (after staying in this very state park where we are now volunteer hosts!) I put together a post of ways our cattle dog was an excellent campground neighbor. “Instead of working on Scout’s skills each time we park somewhere new, mostly we get to sit back and enjoy those skills,” I began.

The list included things like her increasing environmental confidence (not taking so long to get comfy in a brand-new spot), how much she genuinely loves just resting outside, her overall neutrality to people and pets not in our own space, her ability to play just about anywhere (which drastically improves our fulfillment opportunities!), and her fairly quick bounce-back when something does catch her off guard.

Also this: “She likes to have her own lawn chair. This belongs on the list because it brings a lot of joy into the world: to herself, to me and Sean, and definitely to the friendly folks who walk by and tell us how cute she is.” 😉

But still. Just because I thought she was one of the world’s best campground dogs didn’t mean she’d be one of the world’s best campground hosts, you know? My biggest worry was this: With so many more people actually entering our space to ask questions and chat and get help, would she be able to stay so neutral? I think a big part of her confidence in van life has come from the fact that she knows Hermes is always a safe space. She’s able to ignore much of what goes on around her because she trusts it’s not going to affect her. Would that change when she realized that this time around the circle of comfort was smaller? We still wouldn’t let anyone actually enter our van, of course, but they’d much more often come up right next to it.

And then there was the whole “she is adorable and interested in affiliating with humans but also doesn’t want strangers to touch her” thing, which gets more complicated if she’s outside with us when somebody approaches. If the new person is open to it, all she wants to do is take a cautious-curious sniff from afar. But friendly strangers often interpret that mild interest as a bid for full-on head and belly rubs, which 1) she hates and 2) erodes her confidence that she can investigate people in the future without her boundaries being violated.

How would I manage my role of community-minded, open-and-welcoming campground host without feeling awkward about simultaneously advocating for my reserved dog?

What Scout’s days look like now

I don’t want to over-romanticize anything about our life living in a van, and particularly not this new chapter with all its nuances, so let me say right away: Scout has gotten startled a couple times. Once she was asleep in our site when a fellow volunteer came to say hello, and she woke with a bark. If we holler to someone she can’t see in the campsite next to us, she might low growl a little under her breath. Mostly she wants to know what’s going on. (This is natural, especially for a herding breed.)

But when she does know what’s going on? Holy hell, my friends. I can’t believe how excellent she’s been at processing—and dismissing—it.

A typical day looks something like this:

• We wake up before sunrise and take Scout on a walk when the temperature is still cool enough for her to comfortably explore.

• She eats breakfast while we work out, either in the van if we leave her behind for our own jog or outside with us as we stretch and strength train.

• If we’re on camp host duty, she spends most of the morning napping in the air conditioning while we clean the bathrooms. If we’re off, she lounges outside as we start our computer-centric work.

• When someone without a dog comes to talk to us, we try to greet them in front of the van, closer to the road than the back of our site. So far Scout generally stays where she is—either sunbathing outside or napping inside—and simply observes. (Most of the time she doesn’t even lift her chin off the ground.)

• She’s gotten bolder with some of our fellow volunteers and now approaches them to sniff. They have unanimously been perfect when we ask them to not reach for her. She even took a treat from a very tall, very deep-voiced new friend!1

• If someone with a dog comes over, we just preemptively tell her to “go away” (her crate cue) so we can focus on our guests as needed.

• She sleeps deeply in and outside of the van. I like to think the ocean’s constant hum helps here.

In many ways Scout’s world has gotten smaller these last weeks—we’re staying in one place with less driving than usual, we talking the same walking route most mornings, she isn’t allowed on the beach, there’s less novelty in the passive sense we’ve all come to take for granted—but she doesn’t seem to mind one bit.

Allow me to celebrate that this whole thing is going even better than hoped, for all of us.

Other notes and news

Oh gosh, where to even start?! First, thank you so much for being here. I will never be over the fact that hundreds of kind creature-loving people care to read about my life with Scout (and musings on tangentially related things). Amidst recent chaos, I have one big thing to shout about:

THE DOG LOVER’S BUCKET LIST comes out in just over a month!!

Five weeks from now I will officially be able to call myself Published Author. I still can’t quite believe it?! This week we finalized plans to donate some copies of the education-inspiration-journal book to Scout’s humane society—where I adopted her in 2019 (although I maintain that it can’t possibly have been so long ago)—which brings me great joy.

I can’t wait to open my box of author copies and probably sob.

In my perfect world, all dogs would be biologically fulfilled.

They’d have opportunities to perform natural behaviors and act on innate instincts. They’d be honored as complex social creatures. We wouldn’t expect them to fit into our modern human society without meeting their canine needs.

In my perfect world, we’d have far more off-leash legal spaces

where the cultural norm was for unfamiliar dogs to briefly sniff before moving on (or simply not greet at all).

These areas would be large enough to facilitate natural social interactions—no cramped half-acre dog park fences—and full of interesting terrain to keep people and pets exploring.

In my perfect world, leash laws would actually be followed.

If a park’s signage said dogs must be tethered? Visitors would respect the rules! People who were afraid of dogs could then enjoy these areas without worry—and dogs who were reactive, fearful, injured, elderly, or otherwise in training could too.

This goes hand in hand with the above fantasy. If there were more accessible designated spots to “let dogs be dogs” the way many owners enjoy, it would be easier to block off other areas as truly on leash.

In my perfect world, we’d have widespread education about how our pets can impact wildlife.

Owners would balance meeting their dogs’ needs with preserving the natural habitats around them. We’d work alongside each other—handlers, trainers, park rangers, biologists, additional experts—to come up with alternatives where instinctual behavior (like chasing endangered species or roaming over cryptobiotic soil) wasn’t a safe option.

In my perfect world, no one would expect domestic dogs to be indiscriminately social.

Strangers would always ask before reaching towards a pet they didn’t know. Kids would be taught from a young age not to grab dogs without permission.

In my perfect world, that respect would go both ways.

Owners would prevent their dogs from approaching anyone new—person, dog, cat, livestock, whoever—if they weren’t clearly invited to say hello.

In my perfect world, everyone would know basic canine body language.

Our dogs’ stress signals and signs of discomfort would become common knowledge. And when we noticed them, we’d care enough to try to figure out their cause—to improve our companions’ comfort and confidence and sense of security in the long run.

In my perfect world, dog bites wouldn’t just be preventable… they’d be successfully prevented.

No one would expect their dog to act like a small human. We’d better understand prey drive, natural territorial inclinations, and the ways our species communicate in fundamentally different ways to reduce conflict.

In my perfect world, ethical breeders and rescues would band together

to reduce the homeless pet problem. There would be more curiosity and thoughtful conversation about how intentional breeding impacts our modern world. There would be more understanding that rescue dogs aren’t inherently damaged or “less than”! There would be more foster initiatives designed to keep pets in their current homes rather than simply find them new ones.

In my perfect world, unethical breeders wouldn’t exist.

Everyone who bred dogs would be doing it with a well-understood purpose—and only after health testing and temperament screening. Breeders would take full responsibility for their dogs, throughout their entire lives, so that they’d never end up in shelters.

In my perfect world, rescues and shelters would have adoption criteria free from discrimination.

Approval would be less about surface-level details like having a yard—and more about understanding the commitment, and wanting to experience the true joy, of an inter-species bond.

In my perfect world, everyone who was able to and excited about sharing their life with a canine would get the chance to. We would support each other instead of judging.

In my perfect world, dog training goals would be tailored to individual teams

based on lifestyle factors like immediate environment, personal preferences, and long-term plans. Not on arbitrary lists of what makes a “good dog” across the board.

In my perfect world, owners and trainers would spend more time focusing on shared core values than arguing over messy semantics or internet controversies.

In my perfect world, we’d live in harmony with our dogs.

And our dogs would live in harmony with us.

In my perfect world, this wouldn’t be some magical utopia that simply sprang into being. It would come to fruition because we worked for it. Because we opened our minds (and hearts). Because we learned about our canine companions. Because we learned, too, about ourselves.

Tell me what your perfect world would look like!

This morning we had to pass a dog on a narrow boardwalk, maybe three feet wide. The other handler stopped to let us go by, which I found thoughtful (I appreciate any recognition, ever, that not all dogs just want to rush into on-leash greetings! This man was extremely kind) but also more difficult (his dog stared pretty hard at Scout while we walked by, and it would have been easier on our nervous gal if everyone kept moving to make the whole interaction shorter).

Anyway, it was really no big deal, except that at the very last second Scout growl-barked. A small reaction. A reaction she shook off in seconds. A reaction I understood given the specific situation on its own and even more so with the surrounding context: We’ve been in the midwest for Sean’s work and now family visits (both celebratory and chaotic), dealing again with colder temperatures, changing up our usual routines, asking her to tolerate more both physically and mentally.

But even with all that great logic—hard-won logic, honestly, thought processes I’ve spent ages building and practicing since our early days—I still felt the old emotions rise in my stomach. Settle back in the spot they used to live full time when my dog’s reactivity was the single greatest stressor in my life. Refuse to budge for a few gray hours.

Today Scout’s behavioral problems are nowhere close to that all-consuming calamity. But we never fully “cured” them, either. Is there more we could have done? (Could still do?) Undoubtedly—I am not the tiniest bit ashamed to admit that. I think we need to talk about marginal returns and individual situations and the deeply personal decision of what “finished” looks like for us, as individuals, a lot more.

But once in a while, on a narrow boardwalk at sunrise through tall grasses full of cardinals, I run into a bit of residual grief. Small but stubborn. The kind of jagged emotion that forces my palm open to hold it even when I really, really don’t want to.

I am so proud to know this dog better, and to love her so deeply, and to—most importantly—no longer beg her to be different in order to deserve that love. The last years have held all these highs scattered across the country and continent living in a converted van: chasing sunrises and laughing on beaches and thinking my morning coffee view looks like something out of a movie montage made even better by Scout’s speckled fur at my feet. By her eyes, the second I turn to look into them, having always already found my own.

Life together is so damn great. It’s just still not always easy.

And I suppose I’m still learning that it was never supposed to be.

Related reading

Welcome to a very long “related reading” section! 😉 Because the vast majority of what I’ve written about on this blog over the years has touched on 1) Scout’s reactivity, 2) my emotions about said reactivity, and 3) finding joy and connection regardless.

As always you can find the whole Paws and Reflect archive at pawsandreflect.blog, and you can sort posts by tags if you’re looking for something specific!

Some of these books are explicitly about dogs. Some are about the larger nonhuman animal kingdom—and our species’ complicated interactions with creatures beyond our anthropocentric lens. Some are directed solely at people. But all have impacted my dog ownership philosophy, relationship with Scout, and approach to love in general.

So here’s a running collection of books I recommend to dog lovers, listed in no particular order.1

You can also find specific excerpts and annotations from a smattering of these titles in my Books, Books 2, Books 3, Books 4, and Books 5 story highlights2 on Instagram—as well as a longer list of titles I’ve read (including ones I don’t necessarily recommend) here if you want to compare notes.

Why do I believe in reading so much, anyway?

I’ve learned a lot about emotional intelligence and the complexity of creatures, relationships, and the larger world from books. Getting into a character’s head is an excellent exercise in empathy! Growing up, my favorite titles were novels that bounced back and forth between different points of view. Those stories let me practice looking at situations from several perspectives with the luxury of mental distance (because I wasn’t directly involved in the story situations myself, I could set aside my own biases more easily).

As I’ve gotten older and gravitated toward nonfiction, I love the opportunity to build nuanced opinions based on multiple data points instead of just what I myself have gone through. I was once told to “be careful basing opinions off books instead of life experience,” and I’ve gotta say: I’ve scarcely disagreed with someone’s take more. The value of external perspectives and personal anecdotes are not mutually exclusive—and a true effort to make sense of the world requires more than any one being’s experiences.

So one of my favorite ways to both 1) acquire anecdotes beyond my own (what I find in a lot of fiction and memoir) and 2) put those in context with larger sets of data (yay for research-grounded nonfiction) is reading!

Dog-specific books I recommend

Dog is Love: Why and How Our Dogs Love Us by Clive Wynne

Wynne’s practical approach to understanding our dogs’ affection for us echoed some of the traits I love in Frans de Waal (my all-time favorite animal author; more on him soon). Full of research made accessible!

I wasn’t thrilled with the way the author talked about dog training tools at the very end—dismissing anything commonly considered “aversive” out of hand without nuance—but I recognize 1) he isn’t a professional dog trainer so in-depth discussions of those topics are beyond the scope of his book, 2) we’re aligned on all the important things, 3) in works for wide audiences it can be helpful (and less potentially harmful) to focus on “force free” training, and 4) his discussion on the Training Without Conflict podcast was more measured.

The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter than You Think by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods

I loved Woods and Hare’s encouragement of skepticism and sharing differing perspectives, particularly in infant fields of research like canine cognition. The Genius of Dogs overlapped a fair amount with Dog is Love. If you’ve got time for both, they’re each worthwhile!

Dog Smart: Life-changing Lessons in Canine Intelligence by Jennifer Holland

Dog Smart pairs well with The Genius of Dogs if you’re most interested in canine cognition. It’s modern (came out in 2024) with a combination of research and narratives.

I was also fortunate enough to interview Jennifer shortly after the release of Dog Smart for The Juniper Podcast! She’s lovely.

Inside of a Dog: What Does See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz

Make sure to read the updated version. This book is all about the canine umwelt: our dogs’ unique experiences of their surrounding world. It naturally delves into canine cognition too, making it a nice title to read alongside The Genius of Dogs and Dog Smart.

Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon by Bronwen Dickey

Canine and human history, breed-specific legislation, nature and nurture, and more. You can read some of my initial Pit Bull takeaways in this old Instagram post and see my full-length review article here!

Rethinking Rescue: Dog Lady and the Story of America’s Forgotten People and Pets by Carol Mithers

Rethinking Rescue is one of the most important books I’ve read in the last couple years. It’s nuanced, thoughtful, and grounded in one story—that of Downtown Dog Rescue in Los Angeles—while speaking to larger concepts critical to the animal rescue movement. The book’s focus on community and the relationship between human and animal welfare pairs well with Pit Bull.

For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend by Patricia McConnell

Despite being nearly two decades old, For the Love of a Dog is still a great read. While some of the specifics are a little outdated (just in the sense that we’ve learned more about nonhuman animal emotions in the last twenty years) McConnell beautifully touches on two of my biggest passions: 1) avoiding unproductive anthropomorphism while embracing our shared traits / coevolution / similarities, and 2) balancing accepting who our dogs are with helping them grow.

While we’re talking about McConnell: The Other End of the Leash is another oldie-but-goodie helping explain some common miscommunications between canines and humans.

Bones Would Rain From the Sky: Deepening Our Relationships with Dogs by Suzanne Clothier

Great emotional insights on seeing our dogs as more than just “robots”. You can read my initial reflections in this Instagram post. What I loved most? All the passages on living well with our dogs and the exploration of how deeply we can connect with another species!

The Happiest Dog on the Block: Canine Enrichment Activities to Keep Your Pet Young and Healthy by Taylor Finton

An accessible conversation on our dogs’ enrichment that I think works especially well as an introductory guide for people new to the idea. (Plus Taylor is a true gem of a human! You might know her as @bindisbucketlist on social media.)

A Dog’s History of the World: Canines and the Domestication of Humans by Laura Hobgood-Oster

I read this book in one sitting. It’s a lovely dive into the history of dogs and people, together, featuring fascinating mythology and more. If you’re looking for direct insight into modern dogs (say, you’re really trying to improve your training game right now) it’s not going to be as impactful as other titles on this list—but I think reorienting ourselves in our ancient canine-human bond is always prudent.

Animal-specific books I recommend

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

My favorite book of all time. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Frans de Waal changed my life. Although he was first and foremost a primatologist, his ideas have strengthened my relationship with my sensitive cattle dog and rekindled my childhood fascination with the animal kingdom in general. De Waal gave me permission to see myself in nonhuman animals—and, maybe more importantly, to see them in me, too. Because of him I am a better dog owner and trainer. Because of him I am more empathetic across species lines. Because of him I am able to fully embrace the magic of the canine-human bond without dissolving into folk nonsense.

In particular, this book encouraged me to push past strict behaviorism to see the animals around me less as a mere product of reinforcement or punishment and more as fellow creatures. You can read an Instagram post I wrote right after finishing it here as well this article that dives deeper into my three favorite De Waal books for dog owners.

The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters by Christine Webb

Oh, what to say about The Arrogant Ape?! My love for Are We Smart Enough is rivaled only by this more recent book—which was, not-so-conincidentally, penned by de Waal’s student Christine Webb. Please, please, please read it with an open mind and heart.

Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves by Frans de Waal

Also by Frans de Waal, a nuanced conversation about both human and animal emotions.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong

This book has many themes in common with Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are, with a more specific focus on nonhuman animal senses. If you’re only going to read one? I recommend Frans de Waal. But in a perfect world? Read both!

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals by Hal Herzog

A philosophical read without as many direct applications to day-to-day dog ownership as other books here—but it really got me thinking about my relationships with nonhuman animals overall. You can read my full reflections on Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat in this blog plus some higher level thoughts on Instagram.

Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains by Bethany Brookshire

Pests is like a more modern deep dive into the “some we hate” section of Herzog’s above book. Well researched, well written, well worth a read!

Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself by David Toomey

Play has been my obsession for many years now. (It’s the single most important piece of Scout’s reactivity training and our relationship growth.) So I naturally felt like this book was written just for me… and also kind of wished I’d written it myself 😉

Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter by E.B. Bartels

This can be a heavy read—it is, after all, about losing the animals we love—but as long as you’re ready for that when you pick it up, I think you’ll love the heartfelt exploration into so many different ways people memorialize their pets. Society often takes pet grief less seriously than human loss, and it helps to know we aren’t alone.

Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats by Courtney Gustafson

This book is ostensibly about cats—but really it’s about care. You might feel like concepts centered on feral cats don’t apply to domestic dogs. You would be wrong. Poets Square will make you reflect on themes relevant to our relationships with all creatures!

Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals by Temple Grandin

You can read my full book review of Animals Make Us Human in this article. The conceptual framework of blue ribbon emotions was particularly enlightening for me as I started addressing Scout’s fear-based dog reactivity more holistically. My initial reflection Instagram post is also linked here.

Human-directed books I recommend

Psych: The Story of the Human Mind by Paul Bloom

I felt that Bloom was unfair to nonhuman animals at points (please tell me why an author in 2023 would cite a study from 1998 about chimps not having theory of mind when there have been other studies since suggesting more nuanced results??) but still find Psych worth recommending. The book leaves us with two attitudes about psychology that apply well to many other things, too: humility and optimism. It’s accessibly written, sometimes funny, nuanced, and well intentioned.

Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown

Perhaps the vulnerability conversation is overdone at this point, but Brené Brown’s work helped me develop more confidence and become a steadier guardian for Scout. I found her “square squad” idea and marble jar analogy particularly useful in my earlier (read: much, much, much harder) days with my sensitive dog’s fear reactivity.

The New Behaviorism by John Staddon

This is a lengthy, textbook-esque foray into the foundations of behavioral science. It’s not light reading. I wouldn’t recommend it across the board to every dog owner! But depending on your interest level in science, particularly operant conditioning, it can be interesting to at least skim.

John Staddon was also a guest on Ivan Balabanov’s Training Without Conflict podcast.

The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman (podcast dive)

Okay, huge disclaimer here: This book is based on generalizations, arbitrary distinctions, and questionable gender stereotypes. I hesitated to include it. But the overall ideas have helped Sean and me think more critically about our relationship (here’s an Instagram post discussing that) and I’ve been able to apply those insights to Scout.

If you need a basic intro to the concept that not everyone interprets our love the way we intend it (especially our dogs—another S/O to Patricia McConnell’s The Other End of the Leash here), maybe check it out from your local library for a quick scan. Or, better yet, listen to the If Books Could Kill podcast episode for a solid summary that also addresses its issues.

Scout was trotting along a street near my dad’s work when the Humane Society of Marathon County picked her up in late 2018. A little under a month later her stray hold had expired—no one came for her—and she lived in a kennel on the adoption floor. When my family dropped off some holiday donations, I fell in love with the “shy but sweet” blue heeler’s pointy ears and speckles. (It took her a little longer—and was less about superficial attributes, thank goodness—but eventually she fell in love with me back.)

Now we’ve been together for seven years!

But thanks to her murky past, we’ve never known how old Scout is. Our guiding pieces of information included:

• She had all her adult teeth when she was found. This means she must have been at least eight months old.

• Those adult teeth had some wear. This suggests she wasn’t a fresh adolescent.

• Aaand that’s pretty much it.

The shelter estimated Scout was between one and two years old. Our first vet guessed two to three. Our next vet concurred with the first. I decided we just had to pick something, so I accepted “one to three years old at adoption” as the overarching range and put “two years” on her official records. (Right in the middle, you know?) We celebrate her “birthday” on her gotcha day, January 13th, which means she could be anywhere from eight to ten right now.

I never thought much about how old Scout actually was until she started slowing down. She seems to have aged enough in the last year and a half that I’ve started reminding myself of our high-end estimate—it’s possible she’s already ten?—because I’d rather think she’s older than she is (and thus be pleasantly surprised by how much time we have left) than be blindsided thinking she’s younger.

Let’s test her DNA

Our first spring together, I did an Embark DNA test to determine Scout’s breed makeup. (Although it is hard even for canine professionals to visually identify dog breeds1, Scout is mostly what you’d think she is: 95 percent Australian Cattle Dog.)

Embark has since introduced a Dog Age Test (that’s an affiliate link, by the way!) that had me intrigued. “Age can be notoriously difficult to judge in dogs based on visual cues alone,” notes science writer Mimi Padmabandu on the company’s website. No kidding, I thought, wondering not for the first time how our guesses were so up in the air. Maybe this test would let us narrow our estimate down?

Well, maybe. As it stood, we had a two-year range—Scout was somewhere between one and three when I brought her home—and Embark’s methylation analysis returns a result within 18 months of a dog’s true age 90 percent of the time and 22 months of a dog’s true age 95% of the time. In short: We’d generally accept that Scout is plus or minus 22 months (nearly two years) from the estimated age of her test.

But I was hopeful that 1) Scout’s result could help us lean to one side or the other of our estimated range, and 2) her DNA methylation profile might tell us something about how she’s aging. “DNA methylation is the most well-known type of epigenetic marker,” explains Padmabandu, and epigenetic clock predictions might be associated with physical capabilities. A 2022 Frontiers in Psychology article suggests methylation might also be correlated with fear-related behavior. (More research is needed to even start drawing any real conclusions here, but of course this caught my eye because Scout’s baseline is so much more fearful than most dogs.)

So we decided to do the test. We picked the small package up from a post office in California (S/O General Delivery services for van-life nomads like us!), swabbed Scout a couple days later, and sent it off in the mail.

Her results came back surprisingly quickly. Based on email updates throughout the process, Embark received Scout’s DNA sample on 12/10—and they had the reveal ready for us on 12/23. (A fun lil’ early Christmas present!)

When I clicked through, though, I did end up having to stifle a laugh. Scout’s estimated age is 7 years, 2 months, the website proclaimed. Scout’s estimated birthday is: October 21, 2018. (Below that was an “orient yourself with the times” tidbit: In the year 2018, the song “God’s Plan” by Drake was topping the U.S. pop charts.)

When Scout was picked up as a stray on November 28th, 2018, she definitely wasn’t five weeks old! 😉 But we knew we’d be getting a prediction interval with this age test—not an end-all-be-all accurate calendar date—so it was easy enough to shake off the initial shock. “The test is designed to predict calendar age and is most helpful when interpreted alongside what’s known about a dog’s background and history,” Embark reminded me. “There can still be a natural margin of uncertainty from dog to dog, influenced in part by biological differences and environmental factors that may affect methylation patterns.”

Based on Embark’s statements of accuracy:

• 77 percent of dogs have a true birthday within 12 months of their Embark Age Test result. Scout could have been just over a year when she was found.

• 90 percent of dogs have a birthday within 18 months of their result, which could make her as old as eight years and eight months.

• Or she could be in the 90 percent who have a true birthday within 22 months, putting her at nine years old when she was found.

• And it is unlikely (though not impossible) that she is already ten. You know I love seeing that!!

If I was really determined to narrow down Scout’s age, I’d want to run a bunch of these tests and graph how all the results came back. Of course, that is cost prohibitive (not to mention just plain unnecessary even for someone as over-the-top as me) so this is good enough! Her test largely matches our initial estimates, and I’m feeling pretty content to stick with our initial range: Scout was probably between one and three at the time we adopted her. Plus I’m not complaining that her methylation profile potentially looks like that of an even younger dog than we’d expect.

I think this age test is most beneficial for dogs who were adopted as fully grown adults in situations where vets had a particularly hard time estimating how old they might be. If your existing guess is around a two-year range, the test won’t tell you much more than you already know (unless that initial estimate happened to be way off to start with). If you’re working with a much wider spread, though? It could be fun (and useful) information to have!

There are a couple affiliate links to Embark in this post. They sent me their Dog Age Test in exchange for me sharing my experience—it’s a product I’d have bought, and a post I’d have written, regardless (a core tenet of any partnerships I partake in). Importantly, the brand had no creative control over this blog. All thoughts are my own!

As always, I am here for any and all questions you may have. And as always, please don’t feel pressured to buy anything you don’t actually need. You will never find a hard sell here (unless I publish my dream Paws and Reflect memoir someday, in which case I will be begging you to preorder in all capital letters 😂)

Around 9 am on January 13th, 2019, I walked into the Humane Society of Marathon County to complete adoption paperwork for a “shy but sweet” blue heeler named Zip. With me I carried a yellow floral-patterned collar and a basic black nylon leash and a custom-made metal tag with my phone number inscribed. I signed and initialed and promised to do right by this creature; I paid a modest adoption fee to support the shelter’s operations; I attempted to get my new dog to pose for our first family photo.

Then I led Zip—now Scout Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird—outside, convinced her to jump into my car, and put on the “calming classical” playlist I’d planned a week earlier. (“Studies show that shelter dogs benefit from slow-paced music in the background,” I explained to my boyfriend of five months, “particularly jazz and classical.”)

And then, I sometimes think, I finally started growing up.

That first afternoon I brought Scout to a third-story apartment in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. We shared the space with one of my old college roommates, and it was thanks to him that the living room was adorned with a dramatic poster of Nicolas Cage (a sight that made it into the background of hundreds of our early-days training videos). Here, in this little home, I started trying to Do Everything Right as a dog owner: I hand-fed Scout her meals through engagement exercises and began teaching door manners and started conditioning her to be comfortable wearing a muzzle, just in case. Despite my best efforts at (read: my desperate insistence on) perfection, my new companion developed severe fear-based reactivity anyway. Another dog attacked her on a walk just a couple weeks in, pinning her to the sidewalk while she screamed, and our lives changed all over again.

That summer we moved across town to the first apartment I’d ever lived in on my own (except I wasn’t alone, of course, because I had her now). It was here that we started to make some real training progress in a quieter neighborhood. It was here that we started to catch glimpses of what a life could look like with more joy than worry. Every day at lunch I came home from my marketing job to take Scout out and practice her skills: down stays, loose-leash walking, lots of impulse control.

Come spring the world found itself in a global pandemic and Sean—now my boyfriend of almost two years—found himself with a job offer he couldn’t refuse. Scout and I followed him across the country in a rented SUV packed with all our worldly belongings, complete with a portable toilet so I wouldn’t have to go inside a single gas station on the drive down. At the time, it was the scariest and most thrilling adventure of my life. I watched Scout sleep in a sunbeam on the passenger seat for thousands of miles, from Wisconsin to Florida, until we settled on the Space Coast.

Here we got to live with Sean for the very first time. What a treat! I imagine both my dog and I thought when we fell asleep that night, all three of us together on the full-sized bed. The warmer weather offered easier training opportunities—and the support from a “bonus human” enabled Scout to experience her most consistent dog reactivity wins. Sean and I pioneered Wacky Training Wednesday in this apartment. We fell in love with sunrise beach trips. When it seemed safe, Scout and I attended morning workout classes at a nearby outdoor mall to practice her ability to settle in public. Soon she was confident enough to play outside, too, to truly let loose. I felt our world expanding.

The night Sean proposed to me—a question I knew he was going to ask but was still delighted to answer, heart pounding and hands shaking like all the clichés—we came home and held Scout and felt more like a family than ever. The next morning we played three-creature tug on our favorite stretch of beach and laughed about how, when I first adopted our cattle dog, Sean wasn’t sure he could ever be a dog person. (“But it didn’t take me long to become a Scout person,” he said.)

A year after we arrived in Florida, we had the opportunity to buy a house and give Scout a yard of her own. It was here, in this home, that we built a makeshift wall climb for her to scale. We set up food searches in the living room and designed obstacle courses outside and filled the freezer with frozen enrichment toys. When we got married, our blue heeler joined the celebration, staying in a rental house with 30 of our loved ones and jumping on the floor for our first dance.

We fostered five dogs in that house of ours, and hosted dozens of bonfires, and earned Scout’s Canine Good Citizen and Advanced Trick Dog titles. We read books on the back porch with our feet in a yellow kiddie pool and our dog baking in the sun between rounds of fetch and tug. We treasured that property because of how much work we put into it, because of the joy we filled it with, and because it was Scout’s.

But a couple years later we made an even bigger dream come true. On January 26th 2023, almost exactly four years after I first welcomed a timid Australian cattle dog into my who-knows-where-it’s-going life, we backed out of our driveway for the last time—no longer our driveway, really, soon to belong to a mother and two kids we hoped would love it as much as we had—and hit the road in our converted campervan.

It’s been three years since then. We’ve been to 49 states and 9 Canadian provinces and 30-some national parks. This is the longest Scout has lived in a single housing unit—and the longest Sean or I have either since we were baby-faced high schoolers beneath our parents’ roofs, ages away from first meeting.

This spring, in our eighth year all together, we’ll tackle a new adventure: acting as campground hosts (and protecting sea turtle nesting areas!) in the Florida keys.

“The dog you get in your 20s,” I’ve heard, “is with you through everything: the job changes and the moves and the heartbreaks.” I can’t help but think that Scout has been with me through even more than most.

And oh, I love you for it, cattle gal. I love you, I love you, I love you.

“She’s the very best dog nowadays,” Sean agreed. The words were nothing new—we probably have a version of this conversation two or three times a day—but my heart still swelled.

Now, a couple hours later, Scout has started huffing under her breath when other dogs go by. She’s regulating her reactions pretty well overall, but we’ve needed to intervene twice. She is undoubtedly more on edge than she was at 8 am.

What changed? We had a couple unpleasant experiences—“campground chaos,” I call it—and as a herding-dog pattern-mapper extraordinaire, Scout can’t help but hold onto the stress.

The first was when the adorable-but-should-not-have-been-off-leash corgi from across the road darted into our campsite. He thankfully wasn’t too intent on actually greeting Scout, and both Sean and his owner stepped in to grab him quickly. I was able to tell our heeler to jump on the table out of the way, and following a couple under-her-breath growls the whole thing was over. (Totally appropriate when you are surprised in your own space.) She watched the corgi and his Australian shepherd sibling more closely after that, but soon we all moved on.

The second was when Sean and I had started our work days. I smiled over my computer screen at an older man walking by with his two dachshunds; I think he took it as an invitation to come say hello. He and his dogs walked into our site toward the rug where Scout was lounging. I wasn’t able to step in soon enough—she huffed at their approach then progressed to a few full barks. Still, the man and his dogs kept moving closer. “Is she friendly?” he asked me over her growls. (I did not find this funny at the time, but in hindsight, the sheer obliviousness holds some hilarity.)

“No, she isn’t,” I replied. “She’s scared.”

“Okay, I won’t come closer,” he said. But he also didn’t leave. He stood there, dachshunds pulling at the end of their leashes, waiting for who knows what to happen.

Eventually Sean (who is much better at any sort of socially awkward situation than I am) said politely but firmly: “If you don’t mind, I’m on a work call.” The now-visibly-disgruntled man dragged his dogs away.

And after that—two separate experiences of unfamiliar dogs coming all the way into her space—Scout stayed wary. I’m confident she’ll return to her baseline soon. (As I write this, she is flopped on her side in the dirt next to my lawn chair, seeming to settle more fully under the late morning light.) But I’m also not surprised those situations shook her. Usually we prioritize lots of repetitions of “dog walks by, nothing happens, all is calm”—and those stack atop one another, year over year, enabling her to continue feeling comfortable in the presence of triggers. Once in a while, though, we can’t avoid the chaos—and then those experiences stack atop one another too, threatening all our confidence just a bit.

No one meant any harm this morning. The corgi’s owner was apologetic; they’ve diligently kept both their dogs on tethers ever since. The older man probably thought he was being friendly; although I stand by the fact that walking directly into someone else’s campsite is rude, it is plenty common to say hi to new folks in campgrounds.

For my part, I’m feeling a familiar mixture of emotions: Proud of Scout! While these situations do stress her out, I don’t expect the effects to last longer than a few hours at most. Frustrated? by the unpredictability of the world we live in. Bewildered, a little, by some people’s very different expectations of social norms. And hyperaware, all over again, of how easy it is to impact someone else’s experience in a shared space—even, and maybe especially, when you don’t think what you’re doing is any big deal.

Related reading

• Why I’m extra proud of Scout and how her annual vet appointment went

• Details of our converted van’s heating issues

• Dispatches from driving 27 hours across the country and sleeping in seven different states seven nights in a row

• My December reading log

• A request to help me pick books for a dog rescue’s foster home library

• My big secret project is secret no more: Next year I’ll be a published author!

• How I set up a DIY writing retreat the week before Christmas

• Additional bits and bobs!

In an attempt to be more organized, I also link to about a dozen past posts here on the Paws and Reflect blog (most from before I converted it to a Substack nuance-letter). This email might be a little long to read in your inbox, so I recommend clicking the headline to open it in a browser instead if you can!

🐺 Scout shenanigans

My timid dog fell asleep at a truck stop

Once upon a time we spent hours each week working on Scout’s comfort and confidence and calmness in public. In the middle of December, she took a proper nap at an interstate truck stop.

I would love to see “glow ups” like this be as widely rewarded as fun, flashy trick videos. My dog fell asleep here? On a long day of driving where she had basically zero fulfillment?! Past Me, setting up relaxation protocols in places where we wouldn’t see another person or pet for hours at a time, would have shrieked with joy.

Annual vet appointment

We also had Scout’s vet exam with the incredible team at Rolling Paws Pet Care. Sandra and Garrett drove their mobile clinic to my parents’ house (where we reliably find ourselves at some point during the holiday season) for the third year in a row.

• Scout did not enjoy her vet appointment—no surprise there—but everything went as smoothly as expected. Our vet thought it was the best yet. I’d say it was much like last year’s.

• Sean and I restrained Scout for the exam and bloodwork, and he administered her oral vaccine. Being trusted to handle her ourselves—as her people, her teammates, the family she moves through the world with day in and day out—makes a massive difference for everyone. (I can never thank our veterinary team enough for giving us that trust.)

• She had her first seizure in a while at the beginning of the month. It sucked as always, but she came through it well and her blood work looked solid. We aren’t making any changes to her epilepsy treatment. (Still twice a day phenobarbital.)

• We finally got some as-needed pain medication for Scout’s sorest days. (A low dose of gabapentin to start.) I don’t plan to use it often at this point, but having it on hand is peace of mind: She’s aging, she’s slowing, and I don’t want her to also be hurting.

🚐 Life on the road

Hydronic heating system headaches

After multiple attempts to fix our hydronic heating system, we dropped Hermes at an RV mechanic on December 1st. They insisted the issue was a dud fuel pump (even though it was brand new). We ordered another pump to pick up along our route. Woohoo, we thought! We’ll have heat by the time we’re in the midwest, no problem.

Except installing that pump (which we tested beforehand to ensure it was not also a dud) didn’t fix our issue. Instead, the newer brand-new part also broke. (In hindsight, we were a little naive not to push back more on the mechanic’s assessment.)

Long story short: We had a hard deadline to arrive in Illinois so couldn’t take the van in again, temps were plummeting, and despite our best efforts—purchasing a small space heater and waking up at set intervals to run the engine/cab heat overnight—our water pump froze. So did Scout’s water bowl. (That layer of ice is what finally made me cry.)

Although no heat or running water is about as fun as you think it is (the opposite of fun), I am over-the-moon proud that we handled the whole thing like the team we are. Generally high morale. Zero arguments. Taking turns feeling despair so the other could play the role of comforter. And then, finally—after weeks of struggle and three-creature nights piled into the bed sharing warmth—Sean managed to fix our system while in the morning’s wee hours at a highway rest area. (He also opened up the top of our gas tank from inside the cab, which I did not know you could do.)

Our giddiness lasted a full week. Actually, I still feel it bubbling up! At the time of writing, everything is functioning beautifully—as it ought to, given that we basically replaced the whole system part by part 😅

And December still brought some lovely adventures!

We started the month on the outskirts of Los Angeles before spending a glorious week in Joshua Tree National Park. (One of my favorites now.) Despite the no-heat thing, hiking and marveling—and letting Scout become her Feral Desert Dog alter ego—was exactly the recharge we needed.

Then we drove from southern California to southern Illinois, sleeping at rest areas and Walmarts in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri along the way. After a week near a landfill for Sean’s work (he did indeed come home with a bit of a stench 🤪) we arrived in Wisconsin to embrace the holiday season with family.

Having my house within reach is worth repair stress

I have two nieces now—Elsie Lucille arrived in the world in September, joining her sister Olive Elizabeth—and although I do not share their faces or much else about them publicly, I feel strongly that I was made to be an aunt. Olive gave me a stuffed puppy for Christmas who I will now proudly carry around the country. (I cried into said puppy’s fur for ten minutes when we drove away after a final goodbye.)

One of the things that enables me and Sean to go Full Auntie and Unc Mode when we visit is the fact that our own private home is parked in the driveway. We routinely step out to love on Scout (who would rather not be inside our relatives’ houses), meditate, organize, and otherwise reset. I realize this opportunity is niche to van life but can’t recommend it enough.

Our December overnight stay stats:

• 12 nights parked on friend’s or family’s property

• 7 nights at campgrounds (a record, I think—thanks, Joshua Tree!)

• 6 nights in hotels or Airbnbs (another record… sarcastic thanks, heating issues!)

• 6 nights in parking lots or rest areas

Aaand I finally updated our overnight-stay map for the first time in nearly a year!

📚 Reading

Books I read this month

2025 was my slowest reading year since I started keeping my massive tracker spreadsheet. And that’s okay! I rounded out December with:

• No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity by A Kendra Greene: An eclectic and engaging and empathetic read about… well, about a lot of things. In a good way!

• Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts: Pulitzer-prize-winning account of two men competing to classify life on earth.

• Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself by David Toomey: A lovely nonfiction exploration I can’t help but feel was written for me (and wish I’d written myself).

• Juniper’s Christmas by Eoin Colfer: I continue to stand by the fact that adults should read children’s literature!

• And, of course, more rereading of The Arrogant Ape by Christine Webb.

Noteworthy essays and other pieces

• Everything Off Assignment publishes is gold, and I particularly loved ’s Letter to a Stranger from November. (I then went down a rabbit hole of Hart’s other writing. This short piece deserved its Narratively grand prize!)

• It was otherwise, again, a slow reading month. But just a few newsletters I always open when they arrive in my inbox include: Unresolving by author Emily J. Smith, The Auntie Bulletin by Lisa Sibbett, Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum, Half Life by Courtney Bowers, AF WKLY by Ann Friedman, Months to Years by the MTY lit journal team, and everything under the Chill Subs umbrella.

Question for you: Titles for a dog rescue’s foster library?

I’m helping a friend set up a library for her dog rescue’s foster homes. Please take a look at the books we’ve collected so far and let me know what you would add below!

✍🏼 Writing life

THE DOG LOVER’S BUCKET LIST

I got to announce the big, exciting project I kept secret (but hinted about) for six months!! I wrote a book with Quarto’s Epic Ink Imprint. My education-inspiration-journal, THE DOG LOVER’S BUCKET LIST, hits shelves May 19th.

Other publications

New pieces coming out in Kinship and Insider soon!

DIY writing retreat

The week before Christmas, I set up a mini creative retreat for myself at a 200-square-foot cabin. (I had planned this before we knew the van’s heating system would still be broken when we arrived in the midwest. Thank goodness I did!)

For four days, Scout and I hung out in a room composed entirely of wood. I bought a holiday pack of Ghiradelli chocolates, put them in a mason jar, and treated myself to one whenever I felt accomplished (and also when I did not feel accomplished but wanted a taste of Christmas). I used the big-screen TV exclusively to play hours-long videos of crackling fireplaces (and possibly also the Phineas and Ferb Christmas Vacation special, which I love, earnestly). I listened to so much Cozy Christmas Jazz. I journaled about 2025 by a pine-scented candle. I had to walk outside every time I needed to use the bathroom, which was terrible overnight but delightful during the day, when it’s all too easy to sit slumped at a desk for hours at a time.

Was I as “productive” as I hoped? It depends on how you define productivity. I did not finish my PAWS AND REFLECT memoir proposal and manuscript revisions. I did collage the most epic six-panel Christmas card for my niece. I reached out to friends. I painted my nails with tiny Santa hats.

I let myself rest.

(I hope you were able to let yourself rest some this month, too.)

I’m taking more writing courses!

In 2025, I tried to put myself out there to become a better literary citizen—finally submitting to lit mags, volunteering as a reader, attending in-person workshops during our time in Portland, reaching out to authors I admire, shouting out more writers publicly—and I want to take that further in 2026.

Thanks to support from loved ones who also believe in gifting experiences more than physical stuff this time of year, I’ve signed up for two courses through Off Assignment: “Generating the Personal Essay” with Brian Benson (a fellow Wisconsinite and UW-Madison grad) and “Writing Essays for Magazines” with Jessica Ciencin Henriquez (and guest authors like Daniel Jones from Modern Love).

In case you missed it

Last month’s roundup below.

Thanks for being here

As I finish this post (recovering from a terrible head cold, dark chocolate mocha poised to my right) I’m struck by how much joy I still get from rambling to you all on the internet. My online engagement has changed drastically over the years—both that I give and that I receive—and I can’t say enough how much I appreciate you signing up for these emails and reading all the disparate thoughts I put together.

I go through every comment and message you send. I cried when so many of you shared that you preordered THE DOG LOVER’S BUCKET LIST even though it’s not the dream memoir I’ve been working on (and yapping about) for so long. I won’t pretend I know exactly what Paws and Reflect will look like in the future—I’ve never known, really, what any of my internet sharing will become!—but I absolutely know how much your connection and support means.

After a little more silliness in the form of GIFs, we collected a smattering of titles:

The most on-the-nose guide

• How to Foster Dogs by Pat Miller

Enrichment-focused books

• The Happiest Dog on the Block: Canine Enrichment Activities to Keep Your Pet Young and Healthy by Taylor Finton

• Canine Enrichment for the Real World by Allie Bender and Emily Strong

General canine insight

• The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs by Patricia McConnell

• Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (updated) by Alexandra Horowitz

Separation anxiety

• I’ll Be Home Soon! How to Prevent and Treat Separation Anxiety by Patricia McConnell

• Be Right Back! How to Overcome Your Dog’s Separation Anxiety by Julie Naismith

Training-specific titles

• Beyond the Basics: Unlock Your Dog’s Behavior by Denise Fenzi

• Control Unleashed: Creating a Focused and Confident Dog by Leslie McDevitt

• Control Unleashed: The Puppy Program by Leslie McDevitt

• Control Unleashed: Reactive to Relaxed by Leslie McDevitt

• Rocket Recall by Simone Mueller

Aaand one for my fellow creature nerds

• Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal (I fully realize this is less directly applicable than the others… but come on y’all. You know me. I could not resist!)

What would you add?

This is just a start. I’m trying to think about what would most benefit someone who is 1) volunteering their time to help rescue dogs with varying behavioral and health needs, which means 2) they probably don’t have a ton of extra free time and also 3) need information to be accessible.

Hit me with your other recommendations in the comments, via direct message, or in an email to haley@pawsandreflect.blog!

Speaking of fostering…

I miss it terribly. Scout never loved being a foster sibling (and she very much loves her converted van—we made the right choice) but one of the saddest parts of full-time travel has been my inability to keep volunteering in the rescue world.

So please join me in reminiscing on our year of fostering!

Although Sean, Scout, and I don’t have plans to leave van life any time soon, we do know we’ll foster again when we’re able. A big ol’ thanks to those of you fostering, volunteering, donating, and otherwise supporting the ethical future of the dog-human bond right now 💛

I got to announce the IP project on Instagram (if you’re reading this nuance-letter, know you’re my very favorite—my audience there is just still larger) and stamp final thank-you cards and send preorder links to those who’d been asking.

And although it’s feeling much more real, I’m still in a mild state of disbelief. I had set the summer aside for my PAWS AND REFLECT manuscript—my dream-of-all-dreams hybrid memoir of emotional realizations, training insights, and core values from seven years helping fearful Scout enjoy our shared life—and into my lap fell a different but wonderful and related opportunity.

What are the odds?

After working to complete the first draft of THE DOG LOVER’S BUCKET LIST in less than two months—and learning so much from my editorial team along the way—I look forward to getting to don the title “published author”. To holding in my hands a real, tangible book with my name on the cover. To most of all reaching more fellow pet lovers with the message to “go play with your dog, if you’re able.”

If you’re so inclined (and please don’t feel pressured) you can preorder from Bookshop (which supports indie bookstores), Barnes & Noble, Indigo, Amazon (if you must), or your other favorite bookseller.

If you missed my first announcement, I shared more details in my last post!

And as always, I’m here for any questions you have. Go play with your dog! 😉

Now that we’ve been on the road for a bit, I thought it would be fun to compile a visual map of everywhere we’ve slept in our converted van. This is both for us to look back on over time and for anyone else who might be looking for boondocking or camping recommendations.

Here are the dog-friendly overnight spots we’ve found!

🗺 Map of all overnight stays

This article originally started out as a typed list… but as time went on, that became ludicrously unsustainable. Thanks to Google Maps, I’ve pinned all our overnight spots on one map! (The only locations not included are family and friends’ private properties.)

View interactive map

I’ve been updating this on a roughly monthly basis with a slight lag for the sake of internet privacy. I’m always happy to answer questions if you’re looking for more details on a particular stay.

Read more

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that my first thought was this is fake. Anyone who’s spent a couple hours around me knows my greatest dream is to publish a book—specifically one about dogs. It wasn’t until I realized the editor had followed me on Instagram that I accepted this possibly-very-exciting reality.

The next morning we hopped on a call. Nicole pitched me an idea, I liked the idea, we worked out the logistics—and now, not quite six months later, we’ve wrapped up final manuscript and design revisions. Which means I’m going to be a published author!

By next spring, my name will be on a book. A tangible, physical book. A book you can buy from a major store. A book you can give to a friend. A BOOK!

It’s called The Dog Lover’s Bucket List (I got to give a lil’ input on the title) and is part inspiration-education and part journal. Pub day is set for May 19th. That’s less than six months away. Pinch me!

This book is what’s called an IP project. The publisher owns the idea and contracts me to execute it, with similar terms to my other freelance writing work (a flat fee for a clear deliverable). Although it’s not a traditional book deal—I do not have a literary agent or paved path to publish my hybrid memoir—I am thrilled. The Dog Lover’s Bucket List is all about encouraging fellow guardians to do more with their companions. (Heck yeah!) The Quarto team is lovely and professional, plus they let me infuse the project with my own voice. (Heck yeah times two!) And a thoughtful inspiration-education-journal is both different and similar enough to my Paws and Reflect manuscript to feel like a great complement.

I’ve only gotten more excited.

Naturally, The Dog Lover’s Bucket List has taken over my recent schedule and brain space. I’m still working on my dream book—before we left Portland I finished a multi-week writing workshop hosted by Emma Reynolds where my top goal was to finalize a chapter organization I’m happy with, and I’ve since kept revising the manuscript/proposal ad nauseam—but I’ve shifted my target timeline. Such is life. (“Change is the only constant,” they say. To which I respond: “change… and pushing back deadlines.”)

I will have plenty more to say about The Dog Lover’s Bucket List up until—and let’s be honest, long after—pub day next spring. Looking forward to sharing it with you!! The final cover and preorder links are coming soon.

Now that I’ve announced the jump-up-and-down-yay thing, I want to be honest that I’ve still felt plenty discouraged about my writing and traditional publication hopes and *gestures broadly*.

I overthink my skills and work ethic and plans. I get jealous seeing other people living what I imagine as my dream. (I then feel guilty for feeling jealous because I do not want to lug around a scarcity mindset—but dammit I am a human with such messy edges.) I sit in front of a blank white page and beg the words to come and then give up and make a second mug of coffee to sip while reading other writers’ work and asking myself why I didn’t write their perfect sentences myself.

This fall has fulfilled its promise to be busy—my second niece was born in September, we’ve since been on the road full time again, we keep running into van issues—and protecting time to write for myself, beyond the work that pays the bills, has been harder than I expected.

It’s left me feeling insecure.

But I am realizing, over and over again, that I am the only one who can ever 1) affirm that I am a Real Writer with valuable things to say and the necessary talent/effort to say them, and 2) give myself permission to move through life as such.

None of this is novel, I know. The world is full of artists doubting their work, struggling with jealousy, buckling under rejection, telling the same story. But although it’s not a remotely unique feeling, it is a present one—currently (and maybe forever) part of my life. It’s mine and I’m trying to face it.

And I can hold space for the doubt while celebrating the affirmation.

Mostly, though, today I am celebrating. Maybe go play with your dog to join in? 😉

In case you missed it

November’s monthly recap is full of good books (and some cute Scout photos).

I think I’m bringing back dedicated monthly roundups! I’ll continue to include a little “notes and news” section at the end of standalone posts when the occasion calls for it, but my priority will be making sure all those tidbits live in one place—here—at the end of the month.

The goals are 1) avoid exciting updates getting lost in the shuffle and 2) make it easier for you to sift through what interests you.

Read on for:

• Scout shenanigans

• Van life travels

• Recent reading and book love

• Writing life updates

• A silly surprise

🐺 Scout shenanigans

Scout’s section comes first, because she still always comes first.

• We met up with a friend and her dog in Los Angeles, and Scout was zero percent reactive (and also zero percent interested in going on a walk while Sean stayed in the van… oops). Sometimes I almost forget how far we’ve come, and then she reminds me.

• She’s also been an absolute dream as we’ve navigated van maintenance. (More on the unusual amount of things breaking in our house below.) It’s always a little nerve-wracking when we have to vacate our home to let strangers drive it away, but again: She reminds me not to sell her short.

• It’s been six years since an old coworker painted me the below portrait of her, and the photo flooded me with nostalgia. Look at that impossibly young dog.

• Speaking of age: Embark offered us an Age Test to try with Scout. (I did her breed DNA test shortly after adopting her back in 2019.) Regarding the margin of error, this might not tell us much more than we already know—we’re pretty confident Scout’s age falls somewhere within a two-year range—but I’m anxious-excited to get the results regardless. Will share more soon!

🚐 Life on the road

We made it to California, which means we’ve officially been to 49 out of 50 US states in our yellow home on wheels! In November we crept (mostly) down the coast with a detour to Pinnacles National Park to see some condors.

We’ve also experienced quite a few van-related mishaps recently, including:

• Our first-ever police knock in the middle of the night (not because we were parked somewhere we couldn’t be—I’m unduly proud that’s still never happened—but because the officers were responding to a nearby distress call… which made it an extra wild experience)

• Our hydronic heating system still not working after multiple fix attempts (read: no hot water or heat)

• Needing to replace our alternator controller after a torrential rainstorm shorted it out (and laughing through a whole post-office saga when we tried to go pick up the necessary part)

• Our ceiling fan breaking for good measure, because at this point why not?

Even so, I continue to love living like this. We’ll be returning to the midwest for Christmas with family but can’t imagine “settling down” for real any time soon.

📚 Reading

Books I read this month

• Reckless Girls by Rachel Hawkins: An engaging tropical thriller.

• Nowhere for Very Long and Never Leave the Dogs Behind by Brianna Madia: I’ve long been critical of how Madia influences online—particularly the way she handles her dogs in shared public spaces—and felt it was only fair to finally give her books a chance. (If someone ever disagreed with me, I like to think they’d at least try to sit with my own work.) She can be a superb storyteller. I’d also hate running into her dogs while out with my own.

• Users by Colin Winnette: I can’t remember which recent bookstore featured Users in their staff picks, but that’s how it ended up on my TBR. (I love staff selections!) It’s a strange little novel officially recommended for fans of Severance, but the ending felt like a particular Black Mirror episode.

• Before and After the Book Deal by : I never regret revisiting this gem for motivation! (And laughter. Much laughter.)

• Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak: I picked this spooky story up from a Substack notes recommendation. (Thanks !)

• The Arrogant Ape by Christine Webb: This book will probably stay on my “recently read” list indefinitely, because I am rereading parts of it every week. It. Is. So. Good. Have I mentioned how good it is? I fear you might not understand, yet, how good it is.

Books I’m cheering for this month

• I just preordered Alan Opts Out, which hits shelves next summer. I am especially excited for this after getting to watch Courtney Maum’s process more in the last year. (I first subscribed to her Substack when she was in the early stages of sending this manuscript’s draft to her agent.) A fun full-circle moment and what sounds like a helluva fun book.

• Maya Williams, the wonderful host of the weekly writing workshop I attended during our time in Portland this summer, published her latest poetry chapbook!

• In case you missed it, Good Grief by E.B. Bartels is out in paperback! The books are gorgeous and E.B. is lovely.

• Isabel Klee’s memoir, Dogs, Boys, and Other Things I’ve Cried About, is available for preorder. Isabel may be a social media powerhouse, but she is also generous and kind and so deserving of this milestone.

• Sarah Kay has been one of my favorite poets since my mom discovered her while I was in high school. (It is thanks to both of these women that, at 17 years old, I performed a spoken-word poem of my own at Busboys and Poets.) Sarah is offering personalized inscriptions in her latest collection, A Little Daylight Left! If you order through today, your copy should arrive in time for Christmas.

• And I keep thinking about (and noticing) feral cats more than ever after reading Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats by Courtney Gustafson. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend!

Plus a few noteworthy essays and newsletters

• I loved this piece called “My Friend Wrote a Book, and I Have *Feelings*” by here on Substack.

• E.B. Bartels wrote a beautiful essay about grief and the sometimes-reality of living with a sensitive dog and the magic of Dog Mountain (which we have yet to visit in our travels but need to extra now).

• I connected with Emma Vivian of Attempts at Optimism at a virtual writing workshop. She’s stellar.

• My obsession for The Auntie Bulletin continues. (You rock, .) I especially liked her recent post on not giving gifts.

• My friend Allison Medina (who I worked with at Juniper before The Quality Edit acquired the brand this past summer) launched a new newsletter called Analog Baby.

• I’m lucky to be a CNF reader for Months to Years, and the lit mag is ramping up on Substack! Their initial focus is grief-related reflective readings and writing prompts.

✍🏼 Writing life

• Remember the Big Exciting Project I’ve been hinting at since July but haven’t shared publicly? Well, unfortunately today still isn’t the day. But I finished my very last round of edits at the beginning of this month—which was a milestone—and there will be much more to say soon!

• I signed up to take “Generating the Personal Essay” with Brian Benson (a fellow Wisconsinite and UW-Madison grad!) through Off Assignment early next year. This was big for two reasons: 1) It’s the largest sum I’ve been able to set aside to spend on a writing course and 2) the topic could not be a better fit for my current hangups.

• I had a great time at Juliane Bergmann’s workshop with literary agent Tess Callero, getting answers to a few of my lingering questions about book proposals. (Which means I have zero excuse to not go polish my book proposal for querying the Paws and Reflect hybrid memoir.)

• I recently put a recurring task on my to-do list to send a “friendly writer note” each week. At first I was worried this would feel forced or fake, but it’s actually been wonderful.

• And because of that commitment, I reached out to Christine Webb, author of The Arrogant Ape, in October via an email that was so long I felt compelled to include a “TLDR” version at the top. (Oops.) She not only replied but did so in the absolute kindest way you could imagine, and although I guess I could have seen that coming from someone who is wonderful enough to thank the birds in their acknowledgements… I was still gobsmacked and deeply touched. If I ever needed reinforcement to keep telling people I love their work (even when I am rather in awe of them and feel socially awkward) that was it.

For fellow writers

• Calling those between 15-21: Roxane Gay wants your short fiction and essays! More info here.

In case you missed it

All of November’s posts here in the Paws and Reflect nuance-letter.

You’re the best!

Please enjoy one of my favorite silly photos of Scout as a thank you for reading 😉 Then go play with your own dog, if you’re able! (Or whatever creature(s) you share your life with.) And then maybe send me a photo of them.