Shortly after dawn on October 25, 2021 — 606 years to the day after the Battle of Agincourt — an embattled warrior, about age thirteen, went to sleep in my arms. My dog Freddie was no conventional soldier, but he knew how to fight. He’d spent more than a year fending off a combination of heart disease and cancer, until his frail body could fight no more.
Rescued from a dreadful trifecta of puppy mill operator, backyard breeder, and hoarder, in the British Columbia interior, Freddie came into my life in 2010, when my partner and I met him at the BCSPCA branch in Victoria. He was at least two years old, and he was terrified of everything.
Puppy mills are work camps for dogs, places where females are perpetually impregnated in substandard settings, their pups taken away to serve as breeders themselves or sold on. These...
Grant Hayter-Menzies specializes in biographies of extraordinary women, but his most recent book is Muggins: The Life and Afterlife of a Canadian Canine War Hero.
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