Hiking With Your Dog: Happy Trails

Rating:
Summary: Not just a walk in the park
Review: This is a basic guide to taking a dog into the wilderness. There is plenty of commonsense advice about first aid, supplies, and
outdoor etiquette (i.e. yield to horses and clean up if your dog poops on the trail). The downside is that it assumes that you can take your pet just about anywhere--like across rivers and onto ledges--and that leashes are optional. For seasoned outdoorsfolk and dogs that are both suited to and trained for such adventures, fine, but that's probably not most of us.

Also distracting is the sheer number of spelling and grammatical mistakes. "Dogs," for example, is consistently used as a possessive form, while apostrophes are used to designate the plural. And I won't even go into "its" and "it's." Any decent editor should have found these in the draft stage. Rightly or wrongly, such errors undermine the reader's faith in the writer's expertise.

Rating:
Summary: Poorly written, unhelpful
Review: This is a very disappointing book. Almost anyone with dog experience and an 8th grade education could do a better job. The author states in his foreword that he makes no apologies for spelling or grammar mistakes. No excuse! There are errors of punctuation, grammar, and spelling throughout. This might be excusable if the information were of any help, but it's not. About 80% of the information is self-evident, 19% is speculative personal opinion, and only 1% is anything I was unaware of (and I'm not exactly a dog expert). The number of pages is misleading, as there are many blank pages or pages with almost no text, silly cartoons, or big type. The material could fit into about 20 pages of double-spaced text.

Don't waste your money on this book! I recommend Charlene Bell's book instead.

Rating:
Summary: No so bad
Review: This is the first "Dog hiking"-book I've seen that has something for the more difficult situations. The book has even short chapter about things like fording and bouldering. It still has the basics too.

No photos, just drawn pictures. Not very informational ones, except the ones about first aid.

Good book, but a bit short. Especially if you do longer, overnight hikes in difficult terrain. LaBelle's book "Guide to backpacking with your dog" is definetly better if you do shorter walks that last only a day. If you decide to buy it, avoid 1st edition. The 2nd edition is definetly improved version.