Cat Warren is the author of What the Dog Knows and What the Dog Knows: Young Readers Edition, books about training her German Shepherd, Solo, as a cadaver dog. She is professor emerita at North Carolina State University, where she taught science journalism, editing, and creative nonfiction courses. Before starting her academic career, Warren worked for newspapers across the United States, reporting on crime, poverty, and politics, from California to Wyoming to Connecticut. Warren lives in downtown Durham, North Carolina, with her husband, David Auerbach, a retired professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University, and their two dogs, Rev and Brio.

CW: I have to say, before this I was reading your interview with Erica Berry, and I can’t wait to read Wolfish now.

EB: Oh my gosh, it is so good. You’re going to love it.

CW: You know, there was this dream I had when I was going through a really dangerous health scare. In the dream, I was on the top of a mountain, and there were boulders strewn around and it was night. But on either side of me, steadying me, were my German Shepherd on one side and a wolf on the other, helping me down the mountain. I have never forgotten that dream because it was so powerful. Reading an excerpt of Wolfish I was thinking about fear and our relationships with animals, but also how all these women I know, all they ever wanted as a child was a pet wolf.

EB: I wanted a pet wolf too!

CW: It was a fantasy of so many women I know who became dog trainers and dog handlers. And I sort of poo-pooed it, but what kind of dog did I get? A black German Shepherd—the next closest thing to a wolf.

EB: [laughing] So how did you begin writing about animals? Was it your German Shepherd, Solo, that started it all, or had you written about them before?

CW: I ran across some of my childhood writing recently, and I realized that my writing was always all about animals.

EB: Same.

CW: For example, I wrote this long story about a young pioneer girl who is friends with a white deer. But as an adult I went through a classic journalism career. When I think about some of the other people who do animal science writing, many of them are biologists, or there’s this generation of brilliant young science journalists who are women—like Brooke Borel and Michelle Nijhuis—but I had been all about newspaper reporting. I did a lot of investigative reporting, often on crime and politics, though whenever I could fit an animal into a story I was working on, I would. I began to do more environmental writing and reporting, which was my entrée into formally writing about animals.

What the Dog Knows was born out of a real desire to write about my dog. I actually was fighting against doing a book because I was an academic—writing journalism pieces and opinion pieces. I was also the editor of an academic magazine and writing about higher education.

But I had this whole other life where I was training with Solo and learning how to work with him, and to work in this very new area for me—this world of search and rescue, though there’s actually no rescue; just recovery. And it combined all these things I love: mysteries, nature, dogs, getting out into the woods, which I really needed when I felt constrained by my academic life. Doing this other thing was pretty magic, and there was a good portion of me that never wanted to write about it, because I was a little superstitious about it. I thought that if I wrote about it, I’d kill the thing I love.

But then I had this moment when I realized that writing about it would help me preserve it and understand more about it. I realized I wanted to write about what Solo was doing after a day-long search for a woman who was missing and presumed dead—we were out in the swamps and forest all day long. I was covered with seed ticks; it looked like there was black pepper all over my legs. And Solo had worked really hard. He got injured early in the search by running into a barbed wire fence, and he had ripped his nose. He kept working. I realized how much I admired him. I am not usually saccharin about working dogs, but when we got home, I turned to my husband and said, “He’s my hero.” I realized I never wanted to forget Solo, or any of this work we had done together, and I said I will forget if I don’t write about it.

At one point I was talking to one of my gruff mentor trainers. I told her I was thinking of writing about Solo but I was worried about what it would mean for the work we were doing. She shrugged and said, “You’re a writer. Writers write.”

EB: Ha. Sometimes it’s so obvious to everyone but us.

CW: I began to think about it like long-form journalism—I kind of think of the book as one long narrative journalistic piece with me added.

EB: What was it like writing about yourself? I am guessing you didn’t do a lot of that before in newspaper reporting or in academic writing?

CW: It was hard. But I knew I had to put myself in as a character, even if my journalistic sensibilities wanted it to be as truthful and objective as possible—I just knew that some of the best animal writing is about the relationship between people and animals. Like Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. It’s so powerful because of deep grief over the death of her father, contrasted with the rural/urban landscape and her wonderful insights about goshawks.

I wish more books like Helen Macdonald’s were around when I was a kid. I was born in 1956, and my mother would read to us at night books like the Ring of Bright Water trilogy by Gavin Maxwell and Rascal by Sterling North and Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat.

EB: All great books.

CW: Yes, but all by men, all following a particular formula. I think one of the joys of thinking about what good animal nonfiction looks like these days is how it really spans genders and race and class—and all of these things that give me hope about the future.

EB: I agree. I love Sabrina Imbler’s unique take on sea creatures and how they use them to explore their life and identities. What else do you think makes for great animal writing?

CW: I love the sense of awe and surprise and delight that you get from good writing about animals. The unexpected makes for the best writing—I mean, once you read great writing about rats, you will never look at this at them in the same way again, right?

EB: Totally. I felt that way after reading Pests by Bethany Brookshire.

CW: Those kinds of books can make such a difference. Crows and coyotes really need this work that people are doing, around learning to appreciate what they are, and how complex they are, and how they can survive within a human-made and changed world. I think some of the good work that animal writers do is creating a new worldview for a creature—even one we think we already know so well, like dogs.

EB: Did writing What the Dog Knows change your relationship to dogs specifically or animals in general in any way?

CW: Yes, absolutely. I think one of the joys of doing deep research into anything you have intellectual curiosity about is getting to peel away the layers and realizing how much we still don’t know. Even with a creature like a dog—there are so many things we think we know are true or assume are a given. Even people who are deeply experienced dog people still make assumptions.

EB: What do you think are some of the challenges when it comes to writing about subjects you can’t interview directly? I mean, you couldn’t sit down with Solo and directly ask him about his experiences working as a cadaver dog, right?

CW: Solo was still alive for the writing of the book—he passed about a month after the paperback came out—but no, I couldn’t interview him directly! I think this is a really interesting issue. There’s something Ed Yong wrote in An Immense World about animal senses: animals perceive things so very differently partly because of their physiology. We can try to understand what a hawk sees or what a dog smells by studying their behavior, but very often it’s impossible for us not to overlay our own experiences as humans. I think the biggest challenge is respecting another creature enough not to make assumptions about their world view. But we also do this all the time with other humans and populations who are different from us—we make stereotypes to understand.

I think Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus was so beautiful because she thinks so deeply about difference in that book. An octopus is a great example of this—they are truly alien beasts compared with humans. Their senses and intelligence are so different from ours. But they’re so wonderful, right? I can’t eat octopus anymore after reading that book. Sy Montgomery captured a creature that is so different, yet she makes the reader understand and care so much. Like who knew you could have a romance with an octopus? That moment when she first meets Athena and the octopus’s arms boil up to the surface around Sy Montgomery’s arm—it’s worthy of the very best bodice-ripper you can imagine.

EB: What do you think are some of the challenges of writing nonfiction in general, not just nonfiction about animals?

CW: Finding that balance between writing science and writing stuff that will pull people in and engage them is really challenging. You want to be truthful, but in a compelling way. I mean, there is some adventure linked to science writing: working with Solo to find the dead was something I’ll never forget.

I think it is important to be able to write accessible and compelling nonfiction about nature. We may all be lost anyway, but writing about what happens on earth and to other species because of our presence here is incredibly important. I think it’s really important to have hope, despite the odds, and really good nature writing does that. We’re at a crucial moment with climate change.

EB: Are there some specific writers you admire, who write about nature and animals?

CW: So many! Elizabeth Kolbert is one of my favorite writers—her books The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes from a Catastrophe. I love Patricia McConnell’s book The Other End of the Leash—that changed how I think about dogs. I love Wesley the Owl by Stacey O’Brien and Animal Wise by Virginia Morell. Oh and of course Carl Safina, Frans de Waal, Barbara J. King, and Deborah Blum. There are so many people doing wonderful work. I think science writing is in a golden age right now.

EB: Finally, who are the non-humans in your life right now?

CW: I have two non-humans!

Rev, who just turned five, is a huge German Shepherd. I wanted to train him to do human remains detection like Solo, but dogs have other plans for what they’d like to do in their lives and it’s not work he is suited for. So, I’m doing other things with him. He really enjoys various kinds of obedience sports. He is lovely and unique, kind and shy, and remarkably gentle for an 88-pound high energy shepherd.

Brio, who is a Boykin Spaniel, just turned a year old. I got him intending to do historic remains detection, but he has hip dysplasia and a bad knee, so right now I’m working on doing physical therapy with him. We adore him. He’s funny and smart, and makes us laugh. And the two dogs have such entirely different personalities and ways of being in the world. They make everything feel fresh again.