Old Dog (Paperback or Softback)

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.

Mark Seely is a psychologist and a professional educator. He is author of Civilization Heresies (2020) and National Indie Excellence Award-winning Stones: Meditations on Human Authenticity (2017).