About Me

I write about how animals are treated in the U.S.

 

My family had a couple of dogs when I was growing up young and we adopted a number of stray cats, but I really became interested in the lives of animals after my husband, Steve, and I acquired two Shelties. I was fascinated by the intelligence and emotional complexity of those beloved dogs.

 

As a newspaper reporter, I began to write about horse slaughtering and animal hoarding, and I covered the bust of a horrific puppy mill. My interest in the underbelly of the animal world deepened.

 

I studied Animal Law as a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 2004 and afterward began work on my first book: Saving Gracie: How one dog escaped the shadowy world of American puppy mill (Wiley, 2010.)

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Next came Last Chain on Billie: How One Extraordinary Elephant Escaped the Big Top (St. Martin’s Press, 2014) and Twisting in Air: The Sensational Rise of a Hollywood Falling Horse (Bison Books, 2024). Striped Reckoning is my fourth book.

 

A native of Tennessee, I now live in Montana with my husband and two rescued dogs.