“The Dog Who Ate the Vegetable Garden & Helped Save the Planet” by Margaret (Meg) Hurley (vegan), Part 1 of 2

Margaret (Meg) Hurley (vegan) is an American writer, eco-feminist, and animal-people rights activist whose work centers on compassion for animal-people and environmental justice. Published in 2019, “The Dog Who Ate the Vegetable Garden & Helped Save the Planet” is a unique and imaginative novella she co-created with her dog companion, Dorothea (Dori) (vegan), who serves as the narrator. “I incorporated the vegan message in that. Because I was teaching English, I had my students research farmed animals and then write stories from the animals’ perspective. And a number of them did go plant-based.” “The idea came to mind: maybe humor. Nobody’s using any kind of humor to pull people into the story of what we are doing to the environment, and to animals, and making all the connections with that, with social justice.”

The book is written from a dog-person’s perspective, offering a humorous, thought-provoking “dog’s-eye view” of the world. “And I realized that I was talking in pieces because a dog is not like the two of us where we can have a long, extended sentence. I mean, we’re constantly anthropomorphizing animals and trying to make them look and behave and sound human, and they are their own beings.” “In the years Dori and I were together, we walked something like 20,000 miles together. There were always adventures and things to see. And that’s where a lot of these themes came from. But really, life presented the events that would allow Dori to talk about the connections with all the oppressions that are intersected in this book.”