I don’t usually read non-fiction. I am a fiction-person all the way -- the more complicated the plot or unusual the characters’ name, the more I like it. However, I am also a dog-person as well as a book-person and so when I saw A Good Dog: The Story of Orson, Who Changed My Life on the 3-for-2 table, I just couldn’t help myself. Jon Katz has written no less than six books and innumerable columns about dogs. This book is about the dog that broke his heart.

Katz’s dog Orson was a border collie, adopted by Katz at the age of two after flunking out of the obedience competition circuit. Katz had always had dogs -- gentle, clunky Labrador retrievers as well as intense border collies -- but nothing prepared him for Orson, a complex and needy dog. All border collies are highly instinctive with a fervent drive to work; this makes them less than ideal city dogs, despite their seemingly manageable size. Bred to drive flocks of sheep, they have, in lieu of woolly minions, been known to herd cats, other dogs and small children.

When he adopted Orson, Katz knew his new project would need training to do his herding job; after many frustrating failures, he realized that Orson was too tense and excitable to be a good herder. After winning one participant’s ribbon in a beginners herding competition, Katz packed up his dogs and moved to a farm in upstate New York to give himself and Orson the peace they both needed: “…on our own farm Orson could … have all the space even a demented border collie could want.”

Orson was clearly a head-case (soon rocketing from placid to vicious at no provocation), but despite all the dog’s issues, Katz doted on Orson and believes that Orson loved him back. The dog always stayed within inches of him, riding in the car with his head on Katz’s shoulder, lying on his feet when Katz was writing. Katz was determined to help his dog, regularly visiting a holistic vet for acupuncture treatments and warily establishing a relationship with a shamanic healer. But poor Orson spiraled down and down until he attacked three different people in separate instances, injuring two of them quite badly.

Katz knew he had three choices: give Orson away to someone else who had less contact with people than he did; keep Orson a virtual prisoner, secluded from all other people and dogs, or put the poor boy down. Although none of the victims ever asked him to do so (and, in fact, many of his friends told him not to), a heartbroken Katz made the hardest, most horrible decision a dog owner will have to make, feeling he’d failed his dear, troubled friend. Afterwards, Katz went into a deep depression for months, kept going only by his other two dogs, until he finally decided to write Orson’s story.