SAVED. Rescued Animals and the Lives They Transform

What is it humans receive in return for cherishing and caring for needy animals?

When a human saves a dog from death on the highway, a castaway cat from starvation in the woods, a tropical bird from a tiny cage in a dark, lonely room, a horse from the meat market auction   and takes the animal home, is it the dog, the cat, the bird, the horse that is saved?  

Who is really rescued? Who is actually a rescuer?

SAVED   answers those questions, movingly and with variety. It takes the reader into the homes, camps, farms, shelters and hospices where animals that have been saved return the favor with interest.   The men and women and families who take in injured or lost animals certainly save lives, but it is the animals that make their rescuers' lives worthwhile by their devotion, their sense of joy in the moment, their quirks and their kindness.  

We entered the old Maricopa County Jail and spoke to inmates who now work with dogs and cats sheltered there--while the inmates themselves live in tents in the desert behind razor wire. We roved the elite polo fields of Indio, California , the cotton fields of   Camden, South Carolina, the devastated ninth ward of post-Katrina New Orleans, a comfortable suburban home outside Washington, D.C. , a hospice in the Midwest and a farm house in Minnesota, being equally welcomed   everywhere because animals are our common ground. We sat on a porch and drank beer in the weedy backyard of a rented bungalow in a half-drowned Louisiana parish, and we sipped champagne on the verandah of the splendid Arizona Biltmore. Wherever we went we were trusted with personal histories because we talked about   animals and listened to their stories about their animals.

SAVED    is a coast to coast journey about the relationship between the saved and the saviors. It   is about how   "we are responsible for what we have tamed" as one woman told us, and how the lives of people are forever changed for the best by saving the lives of animals.