Review by Pam Marr Rybinski
You may recall author Jim Gorant as author of the well-known “New York Times” Bestseller about Pit Bulls, “The Lost Dogs.” He is a senior editor at “Sports Illustrated,” and a twenty-year magazine veteran who lives in New Jersey. This time he’s taken the inspirational story of Andrew (Roo for short) and Clara Yori’s dedication to the salvation of the Pit Bull breed’s reputation, and has created a tale of single-minded purpose linked with the downside effects of such determination.
Gorant begins with the tragedy of two guys unrelated to the Yoris, except for the fact that one’s tragic sudden death leaves two crated adult Pit Bulls and their loose litter of six maybe-six-week-old puppies untended and starving in his cottage for close to a week before their rescue. The anxious, defensive, and hyperactive puppy, who eventually becomes Wallace of world-wide fame, ends up on his shelter’s death-row due to biting and aggression, perhaps through lack of an outlet for his pent-up energy.
Enter Clara, a fellow student of Resident Assistant Roo, a fellow athlete, and fellow animal lover at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota. Slowly becoming good friends, Roo and she socialized through school together, and then worked/volunteered at a no-kill shelter in Rochester, which is where they met and championed the dog who would eventually change the world’s prejudice against Pit Bulls . . . at least a little.
Gorant’s book is kind of a two for one: the rehabilitation of a troubled, abused dog, plus the saga of a love that hits the rocks because of economic and other life stresses. Highlighted with pictures of the creative and athletic Roo in winning competitions with Pit Bull Wallace, a pair that never gives up, Gorant’s newest Pit Bull book challenges the assumption that a breed can be carte-blanche dangerous, and re-asserts that a well-trained dog of any breed should have its day in the sun.
Query for the reader, the author, and the Yoris: Could the diagnosis of severe food allergies in the mature Wallace be related to the hair-trigger aggression and hyperactivity of the immature Pit Bull? Put another way: Could a different diet have eliminated those behavioral near-death-sentence disasters?
