| | Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog |  | Author: Ted Kerasote
Publisher: Harvest Books
Category: Book
Buy Used: $29.03
Avg. Customer Rating:  178 reviews
Sales Rank: 2386369
Format: Import
Media: Paperback
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
ISBN: 0156034808
Dewey Decimal Number: 636
EAN: 9780156034807
ASIN: 0156034808
Publication Date: August 2007
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| Customer Reviews: Read 173 more reviews...
Wonderful Story Masterfully Written July 5, 2007
163 out of 172 found this review helpful
"Wow. What a book." These are the words that I breathed out when I reached the end of Merle's Door.
Ted Kerasote is to writers what Mozart is to composers. His writing is that good. If he were to write about how the grass grew in his yard over summer, I have no doubt it would be a page-turner.
But that's not the story he wrote. This story is so much more. This unforgettable story begins when a big golden dog emerges from the dark to introduce himself to a small group of people camping in the desert. One of those people was Ted Kerasote, and the dog went home with him. As the story unfolds, we are taken on an amazing journey that goes well beyond "a boy and his dog."
Good relationships are built on mutual respect, and this relationship was better than most. This book is the story of that relationship. These two were the best of friends, and this account of their life together shows how each grew and learned from the other. Love, patience, and understanding are evident throughout the book.
At times, this book is humorous, and at other times it's instructive. But always, it's interesting. One of the lessons Merle taught Ted was that great things can happen if humans will change their behavior instead of always trying to change the behavior of their dogs. The prevailing wisdom is that dogs must be trained and molded a certain way, and treated as though they have no independent powers of judgment. Merle proved this isn't so wise.
The problem is that people don't let their dogs grow up. They make the dog into a perpetual child, and then are surprised when anxiety surfaces in the form of behavior problems. But how would you feel if you always had someone telling you what to do, and not letting you make any decisions on your own? This treatment, while often well-intended, disables a person. It disables dogs as well.
Ted suggests loving in a different way, one that provides more personal freedom and is less about controlling the dog. He says, "His (Merle's) lessons weren't about training, but about partnership. They were never about method; they were about attitude."
The partnership between these two took them on a far different path from one they would have taken if, for example, Ted had decided to make a bird dog out of Merle. Rather than make Merle into something to fit a desire of his own, Ted allowed Merle to be himself. And in so doing, Ted would eventually find his own deep needs met in ways that he could not have predicted. This made for a story worth telling and one definitely worth reading.
In addition to providing us with a wonderful story masterfully written, this book presents an impressive amount of science and technical information on a range of subjects. The list of sources runs 15 pages (in small print, at that). Yet, none of this seems out of place. Whether it's a quote from a biologist, an explanation of cognitive maps, or a summary of experiments with dolphins and mirrors, it's all good and it all fits. The wolf research is especially interesting. For anyone wishing to look up those facts after finishing the story, the extensive index will prove helpful.
This book has 18 chapters spanning 364 pages. Not a single one was wasted.
 hard to apply October 15, 2007
112 out of 147 found this review helpful
As a dog biography, Merle's Door is both humorous and tear-jerking. The ending definitely calls for tissues.
But Merle's Door is not simply a dog's biography and can't be judged merely on that score. It also attempts to be something of a treatise on dog behavior, and the biography is excerpted and annotated with reports on dog behavior and research. And the title of the book itself "Lessons from a Free thinking dog" implies this isn't a mere dog's tale, or the reader isn't supposed to take it as such.
The book tries to be two things, then, and one tends to hamper the other. The behavioral treatise on dogs interrupt the flow of the biography, and tend to be a little boring. And this is from someone who read all of Konrad Lorenz as a teenager. The behavioral asides seem somewhat cherry picked -- that is, rather than be a true behavioral treatise on all dogs, they are used to support some point that the author wants to make toward his own theories based on his one single dog, and all other evidence to the contrary being ignored. To generalize from a sample of one never makes for good teaching or good lessons.
The point of the "open door" policy in a nutshell seems to be that if dogs had their freedom to roam, and make their own decisions, that would resolve a great deal of the undersocialization, underexercised, overly frustrated aggressive dog behavior we see in many dogs. He uses Merle as an example of this perfect dog. But aside from the fact that very few people can live in a purported dog utopia like Kelly, the reality beyond Merle himself wasn't quite as rosy, if you read beyond Merle. And Merle himself was just very, very lucky.
The first day that the author brings Merle to Kelly, he lets this dog, that he doesn't know an awful lot about, out free to roam. Two hours later the dog returns. In that time, Merle could have been shot by a rancher for cow or sheep running, as other dogs later were, and as Merle would have done. He could have been hit by a car, as other Kelly dogs were. Merle proved to be car smart, but the author didn't know that when he let him roam. He could have gotten into fights and injured -- or even killed. He was later taken to a vet to be stitched back together after one of these fights. He could have been picked up by the dog catcher as he also later was. Nor did he know how good the dog was with children, and a dog that had run down other prey animals might need to be evaluated in that regard. These are all dangers that could happen to dogs everywhere, and that some fall prey to. Isn't that what we protect our dogs from? And they do happen to dogs in Kelly.
For the open door policy clearly doesn't work for all dogs in Kelly, the ones who were hit by cars, picked up by the dog catcher, killed for harassing livestock, or who were caught up in dog fights. Merle was lucky, particularly in the beginning. But Kelly was also small enough that he managed to scrape by.
I'm not seeing any magical lesson there for the dogs or dog owners of Kelly, or for those of us outside of Kelly. Further, there were property owners in Kelly who were apparently bothered enough by free ranging dogs to call in the dog catcher. If you look at the total picture, and not just Merle, the lesson of Merle's Door is thus hard to see. Merle was a stable dog, probably partly because of his breed as much as his upbringing. Labs and retrievers aren't very territorial, and are bred to be social around a "camp". The open door policy that worked so well for Merle and the author and sounds so tempting, didn't work so well for all the dogs in Kelly, or for all the people in Kelly. But it probably wouldn't work for all dogs even as well as it worked for Merle, even if they had his genetics. And as you expand in size of towns, you exponentially increase the interactions and the problems. Take the other case of the tiny village in France who also had very social free roaming dogs. The author makes friends with the "mayor" dog of that town and compares him to Merle and uses him as a similar object lesson and example. Yet when he goes back, that dog is no longer there. We don't know his fate. The author doesn't seek to find out his fate. He's only used as an example when he fits the premise the author is painting -- when that dog disappears, the author uses the next dog in that village as a perfect example.
In addition to the risky lessons Merle learns for himself, unsupervised, we also get some rather horrific recountings of the author teaching him not to run cattle. And even more disturbing was the use of the shock collar to teach him not to accept filet mignon handouts from a neighbor who was over feeding him. I won't debate the use of a shock collar, and clearly the author felt it was justified. But the recounting of how he used it for this purpose sickened me.
So Merle's Door inspired a jumble of reactions in me -- humor and sorrow, disgust and at times, sheer disbelief in some of what was purported. At one point the author implies that because Merle eats bits of elk and meat (though he seems to live largely on kibble) he has higher status than other dogs in the village. But that's just the author's impression, and I think, fed a bit by his own ego. My dog is entirely raw fed, prey model fed, no kibble at all, but I wouldn't make that supposition for her. I feed my dog that way for health reasons, I don't get any egoboo out of it. I don't know of any research or science that supports the claim of higher status on prey fed dogs. Those sorts of claims permeate the book and leave me skeptical of all of it, even though I really enjoyed the tale of Merle's life.
But that's Merle's Door, a mixture of dog biography, cherry picked quotes from dog behaviorists, and personal assumptions. It's interesting and at times heart-rending, and sometimes hard slogging through the excessively scholarly parts. It's not one to swallow uncriticaly. But if you can't whole-heartedly love the book, or accept the author's claims without a grain of salt, you can love the dog. As the author did, even if you can't agree or could ever follow his methods of caring for him. Or believe there are any great lessons there for other dog owners. As a dog biography, it works for me. The lessons were harder for me to divine. And because of that, I give it 3 1/2 stars.
Even if you have never loved a dog, read this book June 29, 2007
73 out of 78 found this review helpful
First, the cold facts. Ted Kerasote has an uncanny ability to mix the sociology and history of dogs with humans and the very personal story of his life with his extraordinary Labrador mix, Merle, and makes it work like no other dog book I've read (and that's a lot of books). He is such a good writer that it's fun to read science part. But what really makes Merle's Door sing, or howl, is the poignant love story of Ted and Merle as they get to know more about each other over the years. Merle's story as told through Ted, who can put the words on the page since Merle could not, rings so true. When you read this book you are reading the story of two friends who share a life of adventure and love that is simply all too short. Millions of humans have had loving relationships with our canine halves, and never has it been so eloquently distilled in a single volume as this book. Read it, shed some tears of joy, give it to your friends, this is a magical book.
 Writing 4, content zero. October 6, 2007
40 out of 76 found this review helpful
There is no doubt that Kerasote can write (though the "Mozart" reference in the featured review is more than hyperbole -- it's absolutely absurd). But this tribute to his dog should have been half its nearly 400 pages, or even less. He's padded it out with excerpts from some very mediocre source books (Masson's book, which Kerasote quotes on the first page, is the only dog book I've ever thrown in the trash), and offers nothing new to readers who keep up to date on dog research and theories about dog behavior. It's all old information, probably gleaned from the Web and his own library. Furthermore, the man is a hypocrite and a windbag. He takes his dog camping in subzero weather at 12k feet without training Merle beforehand to sleep in a tent. When the dog panics at being confined, Kerasote leaves him outside in blizzard conditions. He takes his dog bird hunting and shoots a shotgun right over Merle's head (again, no previous training), and is surprised when the dog freaks. He pontificates about how we all ruin dogs by leashing them, then blithely mentions dogs that are shot for chasing livestock. He puts a shock collar on his dog to train him to avoid a neighbor that gives the dog treats. Think about that one.
The fact is, I found myself hating this man, even as I grew fond of his dog. Jackson Hole is rife with his type of arrogant, he-man, gotta-eat-wild-animals, gun loving, opinionated jerks. He even goes so far as to say that vegans are responsible for the destruction of animals and insects because farming supplants wildlife habitat. Yet it's somehow okay for him to go out and blast away at elk, antelope, deer, various birds, and God knows what else. He is downright irresponsible with his wonderful dog. As for the idiotic idea that dogs should run free, I live in a rural area where people let their dogs do just that, and people do get bitten, and dogs do attack other dogs and livestock, and they do get hit by cars and shot by people who have had it with dog owners just like Kerasote.
Yes, he does write well about what it feels like to love and lose a once-in-a-lifetime dog, but as a lifelong log lover, I take issue with his lack of protection of his friend. The deal we make with dogs is that they take care of us and we take care of them -- which includes using our bigger brains to keep them safe.
Skip this book.
Read This Book June 18, 2007
34 out of 41 found this review helpful
This book is superb. The writing is flawless, the information is solid and the story is powerful. It is funny, unselfconsciously honest and touching, but never maudlin. I didn't want this book end.
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