Better Together: how the animals we love can inspire our creativity and transform our shared lives

By Christine King

How the animals we love can help us transform our lives

In her wonderful new book, veterinarian Dr Christine King explains, with stories from her own life, how the animals we love can inspire our creativity and thereby transform our shared lives.

The key is this:

“Loving them, and being loved in return, makes us feel good — and that changes everything…"

You’ll learn HOW in this very personal look back at her friendship with her own beloved dog, Miss Lilly, as Dr King shares her wit and wisdom with the rest of us.

Those who struggle with self-worth, anxiety, depression, or any such feelings will appreciate the honest discussion of her own struggles, which included repeated thoughts of suicide, and how she found her way with the help of her "furry soul friend."

For all that, this is a joyful book, filled with love and curiosity, warmth and humor; and it is a guidebook for creating the life you want, aided and abetted by the animals you love.

The final chapter, Better in Return, describes how our animals’ lives are also made better when we are happy and tapped into our own creative genius.


"This is a book of love. It is written with honesty, determination and wonderment. It is about love, expresses love, explores love, shares love, and gives a glimmer of insight to the meaning of love from the perspective of the other side of the veil. If there is a veil.

... this book came at the right time for me.... as it will for many people who will pick it up. You have expressed in words what so many of us feel and carry in our hearts.

And OMG: 'I love my family and friends. I love my dog more'. :-) You said it out loud!!"

Shauna Cantwell, DVM, MVSc, DipACVAA
Medicine Wheel Veterinary Services, Ocala FL


From Dr King:

“I wrote this book for animal lovers everywhere. Part memoir, part instruction manual, it’s the book I wish I’d read 20 years ago!”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781446661444

Book preview

Prologue

I wasn’t looking for a dog. I wasn’t in the right place in my life; I wasn’t settled enough, and a dog would have further disrupted my rather unmoored life. What I most wanted was to settle somewhere and put down roots. But where? And doing what?

Wandering had never suited me. I hated change, yet I could never settle to anything for very long. I would inevitably outgrow what I thought I’d most wanted and where I’d most wanted to be. ‘Wanderlust’ was a foreign concept to me — a character flaw, in fact. Yet wandering was what I found myself doing for what ended up stretching into decades. So, at the time, I didn’t want to commit to as much as a house plant!

I first met Tiger Lilly in the summer of 2002, when I was visiting my friend Linda. She and her husband had a lovely little farm on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, surrounded by woods and fields. I was there late one afternoon to do some bodywork on her horse. It was early evening when I was finishing up and getting ready to leave. As Linda and I stood chatting in the doorway of the barn, her neighbor Brenda came over with a skinny, flea-infested, brindle (tiger-striped) dog on the end of a piece of old rope.

The dog was a young bitch who’d evidently just weaned a litter of puppies, because a pendulous udder hung down beneath her toast-rack of a body. Brenda asked if Linda knew the dog, who’d turned up a little while earlier. No, Linda had never seen the dog before and had no idea where she might have come from. Kind soul that she is, Linda offered to post some flyers around the neighborhood if Brenda would take care of the dog until someone claimed her or they found her a new home.

The dog was quite an odd-looking creature. Imagine what would happen if you crossed a Greyhound with a Staffie (Staffordshire bull terrier)… That was Tiger Lilly, who later came to be known simply as Miss Lilly. (Her full name was The Splendid Miss Tiger Lilly. Good name for a drag queen, right? ) Being brindle, there was only a handful of things she could have been; but other than her striped coat, she didn’t look like any of them.

Rural North Carolina is notorious for getting… shall we say, creative with dog breeding, so I never did get any closer to unlocking the mysteries of her heritage — and as dog-fighting was as popular there as hunting, I didn’t even want to know! Instead, I variously called her a Carolina Truck Hound (sounds official, but I made that one up), my Stripey Dog, or a Bitza (that’s Aussie slang for a mixed-breed dog, one that’s made up of bitza this and bitza that; also known as the Heinz 57).

The poor thing was covered in fleas and ticks, and she looked like she hadn’t had a good meal in months. Her teeth showed her to be a young dog, and her subsequent development put her at about 12–18 months of age at the time. What stood out to me most, though, was her sweet temperament. She was lovely! As I later got to know her, I came to realize just how stressed she’d been when we first met. Still, she was obliging as I looked her over and examined her teeth, and as we humans stood around talking about what to do with her.

As I said, I didn’t want a dog at the time. I was an Australian veterinarian, living in the United States for the time being. I’d moved to the US in 1993 to do a large-animal internal medicine residency at North Carolina State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. It was a two-year program and the plan was to complete the residency, sit the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine board exams, and then return home to Australia as a specialist in equine internal medicine. But life had other plans, and 9 years later I was still there.

Whenever anyone asked what had brought me to the US and what was keeping me there, I would always answer the latter by shrugging and adding,

I don’t know. I just know that this is the place for me to be right now; and when that changes, I’ll move.

To me, it was as clear as day that I was in the right place; but for what reason, I didn’t know. It never seemed all that important for me to know why. It was enough to know that there was where I was supposed to be for now.

As the two neighbors had a plan, I drove home, confident that the dog was in good hands. But as the days went by, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Unbidden, that stripey dog would pop into my mind at odd times through the day, and I’d wonder where she was now and who was looking after her. When I went back to Linda’s place the following week, I asked her what had happened with the dog.

Oh, I’m so upset about that! she said. Brenda had Animal Control come and take the dog away.

Brenda had been keeping her outside, but the dog wanted to be in the house, and in an effort to get Brenda to let her in, she’d accidentally torn a small hole in the screen door with her nails. Later, I came to know this scratching at the door as a sign that Miss Lilly was very anxious and needed to be inside, where she felt safe. Perhaps there’d been a storm coming; she was always very anxious during thunderstorms. Anyway, without mentioning it to Linda, Brenda had simply had the dog picked up by Animal Control and taken to an animal shelter.

I fretted about that for days. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the dog off my mind. She was such a strange-looking thing! I wish I had a dollar for every time we were out on a walk and a stranger said to me,

Is that a hyena?

Yes, I wanted to reply matter-of-factly, I have a hyena.

I’m pretty sure they were mixing up their African animals, because she looked more like the Cape hunting dog, also known as the African wild dog. As she was no longer a puppy, I was sure she’d be euthanized because no-one would want her, and the county animal shelters are always full to overflowing and running on shoe-string budgets.

But still I resisted adopting her. I had a ‘green card’ (US permanent residency status), but I had no firm plans to stay in the US indefinitely. I loved living there, yet I expected that I would return to