The Page 99 Test: Peter Zheutlin's "Rescued"

Thursday, October 5, 2017

Peter Zheutlin's "Rescued"

Peter Zheutlin is the author of Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride and Rescue Road: One Man, Thirty Thousand Dogs and a Million Miles on the Last Hope Highway, a New York Times best seller.

Zheutlin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rescued: What Second Chance Dogs Teach Us About Living With Purpose, Loving With Abandon, and Finding Joy in the Little Things, and reported the following:

From page 99:
In the morning Albie hobbled to the top of the stairway. He was shaking and absolutely refused to come down the stairs… Never since he’d been with us had I seen him in so much pain and, it seemed to me, confused by what he was enduring. As I hugged him and tried to reassure him, I felt tears well up inside me. My empathy for Albie was total. His pain became my own. I could only hope that even if my words made no literal sense to him my closeness, my tone, and my feeling for him would somehow pass directly across the language barrier and into his brain, that he would somehow take comfort in my compassion for him.
Albie was our first rescue dog, a yellow Lab mix, who had been found wandering alone and frightened on a road in rural Deville, Louisiana. He spent five months in a high-kill shelter before joining our family in Massachusetts in 2012.

A couple of years ago while running on the beach he suddenly pulled up lame and was in obvious pain. Though we took him to the vet that day – I carried all eighty pounds of him down the stairs and to the car – it took a few weeks to learn that he was suffering from advanced arthritis though he was still only about four years-old.

If you asked me what Rescued is about and gave me only one word to describe, the word would be “compassion.” So, in this case the page 99 test is 100% accurate.

There are millions of dogs in the U.S. and the Caribbean suffering on the streets or languishing (and dying) in cold, concrete shelters. These dogs just need a second chance at life and a family to call their own. Give them that and the overwhelmingly majority will repay your love a hundred times over.

It took my wife more than 20 years to persuade me to get a dog and when we did we went the rescue route. Rescued is partly about our life with our three rescue dogs, and the lives of many others who have opened their hearts and homes to a second-chance dog. And it’s about the life lessons and emotional rewards of sharing your life with a dog that once was lost but now is found.