I feel about dog stories, vis-a-vis other literature, the same way I feel about dogs vis-a-vis human beings. Give me the dogs, and their stories, any day, and let the rest of the world go by. ( )

Why Terhune, when he mostly wrote about collies (a.k.a., "standard collies", "show collies", "Lassie collies")? For one thing, I, like many dog people, grew up loving the stories. For another, I had a friend who swore that Terhune was actually writing about Border Collies, or at least she imagined Terhune's collies were Border Collies, and that is an interesting exercise. Then, the collie is a cousin of the Border Collie, developed from the same working collie stock of the 19th century. And finally, because the very prolific Terhune wrote really good stories about courageous, faithful dogs with, as he would say, "heart", and we can all use a little of that in our lives. ( )