Bandit: The Heart-Warming True Story of One Dog's Rescue from Death Row

By Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and Vicki Hearne

A world-renowned animal trainer recounts her fight to win custody of a pit bull unfairly condemned to die in this “wonderful” true story (The Wall Street Journal).
 
Writer and dog trainer Vicki Hearne first explored the human-animal bond in her classic bestseller Adam’s Task. In Bandit, she returns to that theme, but on a more intimate scale, telling the tale of a pit bull terrier who bit three people and ended up sentenced to death by her home state of Connecticut.
 
Employing a unique combination of psychology, philosophy, sociology, and dog training theory, Hearne recounts her successful campaign to rescue Bandit from “doggie death row,” a legal battle that extended well beyond the particulars of his case. As she fought to prove that no dog is inherently vicious, Hearne quickly discovered the factors that contributed to Bandit’s behavior and set about releasing the essentially “good dog” that lay within.
 
A powerful inside account of the so-called pit bull wars that continue to rage to this day, Bandit is “simply one of the most perceptive works about the social contracts between humans and animals ever written” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
“Brilliant, fiery. Hearne captures a hundred nuances of the relation between people and animals. Anyone who likes dogs . . . will like Bandit.” —Chicago Sun-Times
 
“One cannot help coming away from this book with an utterly transformed understanding of dogs.” —The Wall Street Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781626366749

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

One of the most widely read American anthropologists, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has observed dogs, cats, and elephants during her half-century-long career. In the 1980s Thomas studied elephants alongside Katy Payne—the scientist who discovered elephants' communication via infrasound. In 1993 Thomas wrote The Hidden Life of Dogs, a groundbreaking work of animal psychology that spent nearly a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Her book on cats, Tribe of Tiger, was also an international bestseller. She lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, on her family's former farm, where she observes deer, bobcats, bear, and many other species of wildlife.