it might make a little bit more sense if

it's okay i can maybe just read like two pages about how he came into into our lives and i can talk about him a little bit more sure that's fine While my group and I were fighting to get TNR allowed in my town, the business administrator of the next town called and asked for help.

Their only apartment complex was completely overrun with feral cats.

I went to assess and encountered a situation that was a cross between Where's Waldo and a Stephen King novel.

The sprawling complex was practically carpeted with cats.

They were in every walkway, every parking lot, and spilling out of every dumpster.

Adults and kittens.

Let's talk about a little bit more about your background because you eventually went into animal law and you also helped establish one of the nation's early animal law programs at Harvard, right? How did you do that? Why was that important for you?

So tell us about him and tell us about how law intertwined with attitudes about wild animals, intertwined with the value of the individual, all sort of play a part in this story.

The monster story is that I volunteered at a cat rescue in central Massachusetts that was run by an individual.

It was at her house and All kinds of animals that were not cats ended up at this rescue and I ended up with a bunch of them.

But one of them was a squirrel that she had found hit by a car on the road and she was not a rehabilitator and she tried to do everything herself.

I have used wildlife rehabilitators a lot.

She did not.

And she thought that she had nursed him back to health and tried to release him behind the shelter.

worked

horses thought like she would take me and I would get riding lessons and

we weren't really able at the time because we didn't know anything about horses to see what kind of a place it was but The very first day I was there, I met a horse named Shire, who I thought was really incredibly funny.

And he had been a police horse who had been injured on the job and had been sold at auction and was kept in a straight stall where he couldn't even turn around.

And I didn't ride him.

Only the advanced riders could ride him.

He was very difficult to ride.

But I fell in love with him and would visit him all the time.

Here we go.

If you could offer writers one piece of advice, what would it be?

Well, I would take this with a grain of salt if you're a genre writer, because I'm not.

But my advice would be to not be afraid to break conventions.

Hmm.

I have two books out and I don't think I would have written either of them probably if I hadn't read a Susan Sontag essay that was written in the 60s but felt radical to me when I read it maybe five or six years ago.

Yeah.

where she talked about how novelists specifically hadn't really kept up with other art forms in terms of challenging the rules and the conventions and throwing, you know, that a lot of what we consider to be what a novel is, is just historical accident and that people really should be willing to throw out backstory and chapters and things like that.

Ring, right? Ring,

If it's okay, I can

maybe just read like two pages about how he came into our lives and I can talk about him a little bit more.

Sure, that's fine.

While my group and I were fighting to get TNR, that's Trapneuter Return, allowed in my town, the business administrator of the next town called and asked for help.

Their only apartment complex was completely overrun with feral cats.

I went to assess and encountered a situation that was a cross between Where's Waldo and a Stephen King novel.

The sprawling complex was practically carpeted with cats.

How did you do that? Why was that important for you?

I mean, it took you, th- it took you, this journey took you to where you are, obviously.

obviously.Yeah.

So, um, I mean, w- when I was young, I grew up with, uh, two dogs and a, and a bunch of cats, um, who were definitely equal parts of the family.

In fact, I often, you know, felt like the dogs were sort of the preferred siblings.

I was an only child, um, human.

Um, but when I was eight years old, my mom took me to the local hack stable.

We lived out in the country, and there was, you know, a, a, uh...

But let's do that, and then we'll get into some of the non-person, non-human person legal stuff 'cause I think it's fascinating, and I wanna, I want us to get better at what we're doing these days.