Gavin Ehringer's "Leaving The Wild"

Gavin Ehringer is an investigative reporter who has covered the companion animal beat for 25 years. He’s written thousands of articles and six previous books on animal-related subjects.

Ehringer applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Leaving the Wild: The Unnatural History of Dogs, Cats, Cows, and Horses, and reported the following:

From page 99:

I recall the heroism of a cowboy I knew who walked into a shelter in Texas. After he’d looked at all the dogs, the clerk asked him which one he’d like to adopt. “I’ll take the next one in line to die,” he said. Danger, a spunky Jack Russell terrier plucked from death row, rode shotgun with him for a decade. Sadly for the dogs, cats, kittens and puppies of that generation, there simply weren’t enough cowboys to go around.

In the 1970s, a time when fewer than ten percent of Americans spayed or neutered their pet animals, public shelters euthanized as many as eleven million dogs a year - about one in every 10 dogs. Shelter managers began using the phrase “pet overpopulation” to describe the rivers of puppies, kittens, dogs and cats flowing through their doors in cardboard boxes and on leashes, only to exit through the backdoors in trash bags.

That was when we had a serious, serious dog overpopulation crisis...

I wrote Leaving The Wild to take a critical look at the often unexamined act of animal breeding. Page 99 begins to call into question the prevailing myth of dog overpopulation. While certainly a problem until very recently, the book shows that today, demand and supply are in balance. In 2016, for the first time, fewer than 1 million dogs were euthanized in shelters while 2.6 million found new homes. Eliminate old and infirm dogs euthanized for humane reasons, and the vast majority killed come from one breed: pit bulls. If pit bull breeders took more responsibility, neutered or spayed their animal and stopped overproducing, we could put “dog pounds” out of business overnight.

Dr. Emily Weiss, who writes an ASPCA blog for shelter professionals, says in the book that she loses sleep not over how many puppies are getting euthanized, but over where we’re going to get enough puppies to meet consumer demand.

Whether it’s dogs, cats, cows, or horses, I turn a critical eye toward myths, beliefs and misinformation, using data, expert opinion and personal anecdotes  to see which hold up and which fold up.

Many answers I discovered through five years of research challenged and changed my own beliefs and prejudices about the plight of domestic creatures.

I’m sure whichever animal interests you, you’ll be stunned, alarmed or pleasantly surprised by the dead-right facts and amusing tales found on every page of Leaving The Wild.

Visit Gavin Ehringer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue