PUPPY LOVE

Call it her autobi-dog-raphy — a Toronto writer’s tribute to the many four-legged friends who changed her life.

When Elizabeth Abbott was a little girl, her mother would not let her have a dog, no matter how much Elizabeth nagged. Dogs were dirty; they needed too much tending. When Abbott grew up, she showed her mother — not just by having one dog but by having many, and cats too! Toronto author Abbott, now a grandmother, has raised dogs in many difficult situations. She writes about her love for and life with them in Dogs and Underdogs: Finding Happiness at Both Ends of the Leash. Our interview has been edited for length. You got a dog immediately after you left home.

I went to the Humane Society and my first dog was a male mutt I named Sam. I had no understanding of rescuing dogs. I had no money. But having Sam in my life was every bit as good as I could have imagined. I knew I was meant to have a dog. Since then I’ve had over two dozen dogs.

You are a historian who has written about many things: celibacy, marriage, Haitian politics. Why a book about dogs?

One of my goals was to write about the life of dogs I had known. That didn’t mean I wanted to anthropomorphize dogs. I wanted to write about their lives much like I had written about human lives. I wanted to give dogs a voice in a real way. That was one of my goals.

The other was that I wanted to look at people who had been in the dog rescuing world. That came out of my experience with Bonzi, a rescue dog who had been trained inside a prison in Ohio. They had inmates who were dog trainers. I already had three dogs of my own, but they were older dogs who had difficulty walking. I needed to walk; that is one of the things I do when I am writing. In my search for an adult dog who could walk with me, I met Bonzi, a dog who had lived in prison.

It was just after Hurricane Katrina and there were thousands of displaced people and dogs and they were hard to relocate. Petfinder was inundated. When I put in what I wanted, an adult beagle, I didn’t care about gender but I wanted a dog who walked. I noted that I was from Canada.

When I saw a picture of him I knew he was the dog I wanted. Then I saw he was living in Ohio and I thought maybe I had mistyped the abbreviation for Ontario and put an H instead of an N in my application. So I let it go for a while but kept checking to see if he was still available.

I applied again for him, noting I was in Canada and hoping that wouldn’t be a problem. I got an email back saying we love to send dogs to Canada. They phoned my vet, checked my references and arranged for me to come and get him. That’s when I learned he had been trained by inmates, and I went to meet them.

You brought your own dogs to live with you in Haiti but then you had to leave them there.

I had written a book about the Duvaliers (the father and son dictators) and the book was leaked and caused some scandal, so I needed to leave Haiti quickly and that meant I had to leave Suki and Sir Thomas Tom behind in Port-au-Prince. I ended up being away for two years. I tried several times to get Tommy to Canada, but my Haitian husband wouldn’t send him to me or even give him to a friend.

So you went down to get him two years later.

There was a fuel embargo on at the time and it was difficult to get around, to get Tommy to the vet so I could get papers to get him back to Canada. I finally got him to the vet three days before I left Haiti. When I got him to Canada he had to go into quarantine for 27 days because he had only just been vaccinated for rabies. It was terrible to be forced to put him into quarantine because he was so thin and old.

When I had left him in Haiti, it was like leaving a child behind. He was my dog. He remembered me. When I came back he looked at me and you could see he remembered. He hadn’t been fed properly, he hadn’t been taken to the vet; he had cancer, which we didn’t know at the time. But he was so happy to be with us. He wagged his tail constantly.

You also rescued dogs in Serbia after you were invited by the Canadian government to speak at the Belgrade Book Fair in 2006.

There were all these dogs roaming around, but it wasn’t just a Serbian problem; it was an Eastern European problem. I understood for the first time the link between poverty and dogs. After the (Bosnian) war there was so much dislocation. People had to move but they couldn’t bring their dogs. The dogs are left to fend for themselves.

There were enough people of goodwill to feed these strays. The dogs would also stroll through garbage or hang out around restaurants. I saw an old lady come and feed them from a little bag that held sausage. They all went up to her and waited and she handed out the sausage and then went off somewhere. When she came the next morning they were back.

I met a woman in the city of Nis and she told me about someone who ran a shelter and she arranged for me to go there. It was simply a field that had hundreds of dogs. The woman fed them when she got donations. I then met the wife of the Canadian ambassador in Belgrade and she asked if I could bring a dog back to Canada. She said she could get a pet passport. So we were able to bring dogs from Serbia to Canada.

You also helped start a program at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto where dogs were brought in to visit patients.

I was teaching at Trinity College, at the University of Toronto. A program to bring dogs to Mount Sinai had just started but there weren’t enough dogs.

I showed up with my dog Rachel and we just clicked with the woman who had headed the program.

I had a lot of students who wanted to be doctors and here was a hospital they could volunteer at. A lot of these students had dogs at home. They loved dogs, they loved the idea of bringing dogs to visit patients. We were able to get dogs from our downtown community.

The dogs helped the patients regain health or improve their mood, especially the patients in the psychiatric ward.

The program went on for 12 years and it expanded over that time. There were hundreds of volunteers, both people and dogs.

Dogs have really changed your life.

I’ve never been lonely. I’ve always had animals to look after. I’ve met a ton of great people who also love dogs. It has brought me into a community of dog lovers and rescuers. Today my daily social life revolves around dog parks. Dogs have added a special dimension to my life.

Elizabeth Abbott, shown with Bonzi, a rescue dog she adopted that had been trained inside a U.S. prison. Abbott is a historian who has previously written about celibacy, marriage and Haitian politics.

In this book, Abbott says, she wanted to describe the lives of dogs she’s known, as well as people in the dog rescuing world.