There’s nothing like a good dog story, and a New Jersey author tells two heartwarming stories about dogs from Southwest Florida in her new book.
Liz McCauley and her dog Sammy and Ralf and Anke Sturm and their dog Sunset are featured in “Magical Dogs 3 — On the Road,” by Patti Kerr.
Kerr didn’t get her first dog until she was 47. She was apprehensive about dogs because she remembers hearing that her brother had been bitten by a dog.
“To say that she changed my life is an understatement,” she said about her dog Brooke. “She changed my perception of dogs, and she also changed the trajectory of my life because after she passed, I ended up starting to write books about dogs.”
Kerr’s third book is dog stories she heard about while traveling to book signings.
“There are so many people out there doing amazing things for dogs and likewise there are so many amazing dogs they deserve to have their stories told, too,” she said.
McCauley, executive director of theCape Coral Animal Shelter, is connected to three stories in the book. The main story is how her dog Sammy changed her life.
She was working with nonprofits in Pennsylvania when she and her husband adopted Sammy, from an animal shelter, in 2005.
She began volunteering at a shelter and getting involved with animal rescue. Then the executive director of the shelter retired.
“I threw my hat in the ring and got the job,” she said.
She started working at Gulf Coast Humane Society when she moved to Lee County, and when Cape Coral opened its shelter, she became executive director.
She also talks about how Sammy and a second dog helped her when her husband died at age 46.
“They got me through the worst time of my life,” she said.
She’s not mentioned by name in another story about a dog named Franklin that was left abandoned in a home and nearly starved to death. McCauley was the animal control officer who prosecuted the Pennsylvania case.
McCauley met Sunset and the Sturms when they would visit Gulf Coast Humane Society.
“When I got the book, it was unbelievable that there were three stories in the book I was connected to,” she said.
The Sturms told their story about Sunset to Kerr in 2016, a year after they adopted the pitbull.
The dog was found in a ditch in Lehigh Acres, possibly a bait animal for dogfighting.
The Sturms saw the story on the news and visited the Gulf Coast Humane Society soon after.
The dog became a celebrity thanks to the media coverage. It still has a Facebook page with 3,000 followers.
She died in 2019, but not before having an impact on the Sturms’ lives.
“We have five pit bulls, they’re all rescues and it’s all because Sunset came into our lives. This is how the pit bull rescue thing started for us,” Anke Sturm said.
The book can be purchased at https://www.patti-kerr.com/.../p/magical-dogs-3-on-the-road. It costs $19.95 and a portion of the money goes to a shelter of the purchaser’s choice.
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