Since the publication of the best-selling Merle's Door, Ted Kerasote has received thousands of e-mails asking two questions: "Have you gotten another dog?" and "Are you writing a new book?" Pukka: The Pup After Merle answers both, in the most heartwarming way.
Told in Pukka's charming voice and accompanied by more than 200 photos, Pukka: The Pup After Merle tells the story of how Ted found Pukka, recounting the early days of their bonding as they explore Kelly and the wider world. Walks become hikes and hikes become climbs, their adventures culminating in a rugged wilderness journey that teaches both Pukka and Ted something new about the dog-human partnership.
Filled with stunning images of the West, Pukka is a love story as well as Ted's take on raising a puppy. It will do pictorially what Merle did with words—show how dogs thrive when treated as peers while illustrating the many ways that any dog opens the door to our hearts.
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Now including a wonderful new photo insert chronicling Merle's life, this national bestseller explores the relationship between humans and dogs. How would dogs live if they were free? Would they stay with their human friends?
Merle and Ted found each other in the Utah desert—Merle was living wild and Ted was looking for a pup to keep him company. As their bond grew, Ted taught Merle how to live around wildlife, and Merle taught Ted about the benefits of letting a dog make his own decisions.
Using the latest in wolf research and exploring issues of animal consciousness and leadership and the origins of the human-dog relationship, Ted Kerasote takes us on the journey he and Merle shared. As much a love story as a story of independence and partnership, Merle's Door is tender, funny, and ultimately illuminating.
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WINNER, 2004 NATIONAL OUTDOOR BOOK AWARD! (Outdoor Literature)
Who hasnt wanted to get away from cell phones, e-mail, roads, and traffic? And what better place to escape our wired world than the far northwestern corner of Canada's Northwest Territories and a river that flows through uninhabited country, 400 miles to the Arctic Ocean. But what if your canoeing partner brings along a satellite phone to use in case of an emergency? And, struck by the novelty of anywhere-on-earth communication, he proceeds to use the phone to check in with his law office, his wife, kids, sisters, father, and friends?
Noted wilderness traveler and author Ted Kerasote deals with just such a situation as he journeys along the Horton River through the largest ice-free, roadless area left on Earth, a stunning wilderness of grizzly bears, caribou, and migrating birds. Between navigating rapids, slipping around musk ox and grizzlies, and being pinned down by Arctic storms, the two friends prod each other into a finer understanding of love, marriage, parenting, and the meaning of solitude in an increasingly wired world.
Contrasting his own experiences with those of the regions earliest explorers—Sir John Franklin and Vilhjalmur Stefansson—Kerasote provides a compelling and humorous take on how travelers from any age adjust to being away from their civilizations and how getting "out there" has inevitably changed but has also remained the same—especially if you shut off the phone.
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For all readers who are perplexed over humanity's proper relationship to animals, Ted Kerasote's provocative exploration of the ancient human urge to hunt will dramatize the issues that fuel this controversial debate. In his opening section, "Food" the author travels to the frozen shores of coastal Greenland, living and hunting with Inuit villagers—true hunter-gatherers—who are utterly dependent for sustenance on the seals, polar bears, and narwhal that they can wrest from their punishing environment. In "Trophies," Kerasote accompanies the first Western sportsmen permitted into a remote stretch of Siberian wilderness, one of whom uses unethical stratagems to bag the worlds most coveted hunting trophy. In "Webs," we meet a hunter caught between these two extremes-the writer himself. Stalking elk near his home in Wyoming, seeking a winter's worth of meat, Kerasote encounters the pall of himself that yearns to make the kill and take the wild creature's life force into his own body.
Nearing the end of his odyssey, the author attends meetings of the Fund for Animals with the organization's director, a vehement opponent of hunting. Kerasote also examines the ecological consequences of eating food produced by our agri-business system and transported in fossil fuel-consuming refrigerator trucks; next he considers the environmental impact of the death of the prey that has given its life to the hunter. Scrupulously balanced, Bloodties is a memorable book for all lovers of the outdoors—both hunters and nonhunters—and a landmark in the evolving discussion of our proper relationship to the animal world.
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Is home a place, a state of mind, or a way of participating in the natural world?
In Heart of Home, Ted Kerasote makes the case for all three. These thoughtful, provocative essays and stories showcase Kerasote at his best, probing the evolving relationship between humans and nature. Whether fly-fishing for trout, frolicking with coyotes, gauging the costs of logging, agriculture and hunting, or fantasy-camping with the fathers of conservation, John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, Kerasote eloquently illuminates an engrossing central theme; how we stay connected to the Earth's cycles of life and death through mindful participation. Kerasote discards the easy labels of hunters versus vegetarians, loggers versus environmentalists, and zeroes in on the interconnectedness of all human beings and their home, the Earth. In twenty reflective pieces, half of which have never before been published, Heart of Home solidifies Ted Kerasote's place among the best of American nature writers.
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Navigations, Ted Kerasote's first book, introduces the themes that occupy much of his later work: an intimate view into the lives of wild animals; the friendships that form when people depend upon each other in wild places; and a wry look at our own failings. Crossing the length of the western hemisphere, from the high Arctic to the high Andes, Kerasote takes readers back to a time when adventure travel was being born when an entire generation put on their backpacks and, without Lonely Planet guides or Google, set off to see what they could find.
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Merle and Ted found each other in the Utah desert. Merle was about ten months old, surviving on his own, and looking for a human to hang his heart on. Ted was forty-one, liked to write about animals, and had been searching for a pup whom he could shape into a companion. The training went both ways. Ted showed Merle how to live around wildlife, and Merle reshaped Ted's ideas about the complexity of a dog's mind, showing him how a dog's intelligence could be expanded by allowing it to make more of its own decisions.
Acting as Merle's translator, and using Merle's life and lessons as a door into the world of dogs, Ted takes us on the journey they shared. He explores why the dog-human bond is so intense and how people and dogs communicate so readily with each other. He also uses the latest wolf research — showing that wolves treat maturing pups as partners rather than as subordinates — to explain how sharing leadership with your dog, rather than being its alpha, can help to create a healthier, more self-reliant, and better-socialized companion.
Funny, fascinating, and tender, Merle's Door is a moving love story that reveals how the partnership between dogs and humans can become far more than we have imagined.
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From the bestselling author who offers "the most utterly compelling translation of dog to human I have ever seen" (Jeffrey Masson), a joyful chronicle of a dog that is also a groundbreaking answer to the question: How can we give our dogs the happiest, healthiest lives?
When Ted Kerasote was ready for a new dog after losing his beloved Merle — who died too soon, as all our dogs do — he knew that he would want to give his puppy Pukka the longest life possible. But how to do that? So much has changed in the way we feed, vaccinate, train, and live with our dogs from even a decade ago.
In an adventure that echoes The Omnivore's Dilemma with a canine spin, Kerasote tackles all those subjects, questioning our conventional wisdom and emerging with vital new information that will surprise even the most knowledgeable dog lovers. Can a purebred be as healthy as a mixed-breed? How many vaccines are too many? Should we rethink spaying and neutering? Is raw food really healthier than kibble, and should your dog be chewing more bones? Traveling the world and interviewing breeders, veterinarians, and leaders of the animal-welfare movement, Kerasote pulls together the latest research to help us rethink the everyday choices we make for our companions. And as he did in Merle's Door, Kerasote interweaves fascinating science with the charming stories of raising Pukka among his many dog friends in their small Wyoming village.
Funny, revelatory, and full of the delights of falling in love with a dog, Pukka's Promise will help redefine the potential of our animal partners.
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