Old Dog
A Traveler’s Tale
- Fiction
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2022
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Publisher's Description
Old Dog is an elderly rescue dog with extraordinary insight, and an urgent message for humankind. As his current caretaker works on various writing projects, Old Dog reminisces about his own past: his joyful youth, bleak years chained to a porch rail, a heartrending abandonment on a remote highway, life among the homeless, a formal education by a woman struggling with mental illness, his time with a pack of feral dogs, his capture and confinement in a pound, and his eleventh-hour rescue by the writer. While recounting these events, Old Dog reflects on what it means to be a dog--and, along the way, what it means for humans to be entangled in the web of an all-consuming civilization. Old Dog takes us on a journey into the very heart of the human condition, highlighting the mismatch between modern life and our evolved expectations as a foraging species. Destruction of the natural world, loss of authentic connection with each other, crushing dependence on technology, the outsourcing of morality--these problems are all consequences of a civilized lifestyle that we were never meant to live. And the answers, according to Old Dog, are staring us right in the face.
Endorsements (3)
“Old Dog is a very moving, beautifully written book. Seely deeply and sensitively explores what a dog’s perspective might be. It is a bit like Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael but richer, more powerful.”
“In Old Dog, Mark Seely has enlivened a canine’s consciousness with a lucid and compelling critique of human civilization. Yet, the critique is not without legs and teeth of its own—with probing analysis of psychology, philosophy, and history, Seely shows that the most achievable future for humanity is through rewilding. This debut work of fiction is not only a mesmerizing read; it is a clarion call for civilized people to begin liberating ourselves from domestication.”
“Through the eyes of a charismatic canine companion, Mark Seely casts his virtuosic gaze over modern civilization as we know it, leaving virtually no stone unturned. With wit and wisdom, he dismantles the great Western shibboleths, from technology to mental health to symbolic language, and much more besides. Reading this book is like taking the ‘red pill’—you will never be able to see modern industrial society (or dogs, for that matter) in quite the same way again.”
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