A Dog Year: Twelve Months, Four Dogs, and Me


Posted on Feb 19, 2008
By Melissa Holbrook Pierson

By Jon Katz

Random House, 240 pages, $12.95

As I read the first half of Jon Katz's "A Dog Year," his entertaining and informative account of adopting a crazy Border

Collie (wait! that's a redundancy, isn't it??), I found myself glad it wasn't a movie. That's because it would have been the kind where I hide my eyes behind my hands every few minutes, knowing what's coming and unable to bear watching it. Initially, Katz makes every egregious training mistake one can make with an individual of the most sensitive dog breed on the planet.

Ah, but this is just the author's clever set-up for the dawning of a new morning: his desperation at his inability to get Devon (aka "Helldog") to behave in any way resembling a "normal" dog leads him to Carolyn Wilki, a sheepdog guru who gets Katz to see the positive-reinforcement light. (I can personally attest to Wilki's preternatural talents with dogs and their urge to herd sheep: she is almost mystical, on top of being kind-hearted and deeply smart; her own dogs are Nijinskys of the border collie world.)

Now, though, I hear that "A Dog Year" actually will become a movie, and I don't fear it half as much as I thought. Despite the fact that it will yield tears (there's the demise of Katz's beloved elderly labs to watch) as well as the aforementioned training mishaps, I will be one of the first in line to get a ticket.

That's because the star is going to be someone who makes my heart beat ever faster. No, I'm not speaking of Jeff Bridges, who will play Katz. I'm talking about the Errol Flynn of dogdom, a border collie. I can hardly wait.   
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