Living with Freddie

LIVING WITH FREDDIE is New Yorker writer and animal behavioural science student Anna Heyward's extraordinary memoir about learning to see the world through a dog's eyes - for readers of RAISING HARE, H IS FOR HAWK or MY BELOVED MONSTER. When Anna Heyward adopted a rescued Italian greyhound, she was thrilled to bring a dog into her life. But Freddie, she quickly realised, had severe separation anxiety, unable to be left alone for more than thirty seconds without crying uncontrollably, biting his own tail or scratching at his body. While some would have given the dog back, writing him off as a 'bad dog', Anna transformed her life. She took Freddie to work and hid him from her boss. Her social life withered. Her relationship with her fiancé began to flounder. She dedicated her life to entering the mind of her dog. As Anna observed Freddie's behaviour, she began to experience the world as he did: the quality of light, the timbre of sound; a leaf falling from a tree. And she changed - but not in the way you might expect. This is a meditation on what it means to be bad or good, on how much we can - or should - try to alter another being's behaviour, and on what is possible to know about another mind. But at its heart, LIVING WITH FREDDIE is a beautiful, heart-wrenching portrait of the relationship between a human and a dog. And at the end of Freddie's story, you, too, may find yourself changed.