Full Transcript for Anna Heyward

I did when I was a child and some of the received ideas that I carried around about that dog and about animal life in general and human-animal interactions. 00:03:21 Speaker 1: Were you one of these kids who really doted on animals or you adopted animals? 00:03:25 Speaker 2: A hundred percent, yeah. I had every... animal I could, you know, budgies, mice, rats, hermit crabs, horses, cat. No, we didn't have a cat, but I did beg for a cat. And that, I mean, that to me, it was like the most exciting thing ever. The, you know, one of the kind of drawbacks of learning, going to grad school to study animal behavior is you do see those things in a different light. You know, sometimes treasured childhood memories are replaced by, wow, I was maybe not doing the greatest thing I could have been doing in that moment. 00:04:03 Speaker 1: Did you live on a farm or did you have property? 00:04:05 Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, no. My, my, my dad, no, my dad's side of the family, they're from the Western districts and he grew up in a farming community, but we lived in South Melbourne. My mom's from the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne. And so I would go to, out to, to a place called Daylesford and, every school holidays, and that's where I would ride. 00:04:26 Speaker 1: It's famous for its spas, isn't it, at Daylesford? 00:04:30 Speaker 2: Daylesford's famous. There's a spring there, Mineral Hot Spring. So I think there have been some spas built around that. I never, as a kid, you know, doing my riding lessons and, you know, riding west and through the bush, I never did get to enjoy the spas. But, yeah, they're there. 00:04:49 Speaker 1: So what sort of student were you? 00:04:53 Speaker 2: Not a good one. I was, you know, a kind of a class disruptor, class clown. I was a student who was, you know, if I was bored by the lesson, I was doing my own thing. If I was engaged by the lesson, I was kind of calling out the answers and still doing my own thing. And, you know, definitely attracted a lot of understandable annoyance from my teachers and authority figures. 00:05:20 Speaker 1: It's amusing you say class clown. I've got a dog, I went to puppy school, he won an award and the award was class clown. So it's got a different connotation. So what ambitions did you grow with? 00:05:34 Speaker 2: Reading was very compulsory in our household. We had to read 50 pages of a book on the weekend before we were allowed to go outside and kick the footy. It was... that was a big deal. And because that was so kind of valued, I did grow up with ambitions to be involved in the world of, you know, of literature. And I thought at the time that I really wasn't interested in science at all. I thought it was kind of like beside the point and really boring. And it was just kind of, you memorize all these facts and then you regurgitate them. I now understand a that very differently, which I write in the book. I have a much more nuanced and evolved view of science than I did when I was a kid, and also the way that it interacts with the arts. And I do wish that I'd sort of been guided a little more towards science. 00:06:29 Speaker 1: What did your dad do that he encouraged you to read so frequently? 00:06:35 Speaker 2: He, at the time, so on my birth certificate, he's listed as a Latin teacher, but he had a lot of jobs all in that field. He was a journalist. He was a Latin teacher. He was a magazine editor. And now he, most of my immediate family actually work in similar fields. My older brother, my two parents, and my two younger sisters, one of them is a choreographer and one of them is a lawyer. So. 00:07:05 Speaker 1: It just makes me wonder who teaches Latin anymore. 00:07:09 Speaker 2: Well, he was one of the last ones, Graham. He's no longer employed as such. He's actually an amazing Latin teacher. They taught it at Melbourne Grammar. I mean, he tutored one of my friends who went to Melbourne Girls. They taught it at Melbourne University when he was there. It used to be like a really big thing on the curriculum, kind of old-fashioned now, but back then– if you wanted to do like, you know, serious reading, you would be led back toward reading in Latin. He also reads a little ancient Greek. So the Western canon is, you know, that's kind of, I think that's how we got there. 00:07:50 Speaker 1: There's so many questions I've got. He's come from the Western districts, farming community, and he turns out to be an academic. Did you ever explore that? 00:08:01 Speaker 2: Yeah, he was. He wasn't the first one in his family to go to university because his older sister did. But he always attributes it to his mother, who she came from a family family herself. You know, she would ride her horse to school. She left school when she was, I think, 14 years old. But she loved reading, loved reading. She would go every week to the library with an empty bag and then they would fill it for her and she would take it back home. And every week it would be a new bag of books. So I think it came from her. 00:08:34 Speaker 1: So when you're completing school and you're starting to think about a career, what is your ambition? 00:08:40 Speaker 2: So it was initially to be a poet. 00:08:47 Speaker 1: Do they make money? 00:08:49 Speaker 2: Which is a good thing to get out of your system, I think. 00:08:54 Speaker 1: Do you still have poems? 00:08:57 Speaker 2: The short answer is no. 00:08:59 Speaker 1: Okay, so that ambition went by the wayside. What replaced it? 00:09:04 Speaker 2: Prose, yeah. I wanted to write prose for sure, yeah. 00:09:11 Speaker 1: Well, we need to take a break because we have to get you to America. We have to introduce you to the dog, Freddie. And to me, this dog spoiled your life, but I'm not sure you agree with that. But let's explore it when we come back. My guest is Anna Haywood. She's written a book called Living with Freddie, and it's got a subtitle, How a Dog Taught Me to be Human, back after the break, folks. Welcome back,

everybody. I'm speaking with Anna Haywood. Anna's in America as we speak. Is it north of New York, Anna? 00:09:43 Speaker 2: Yep, north of New York City, yep, in the state of New York. 00:09:46 Speaker 1: Is it when you're on a farm or a property? 00:09:49 Speaker 2: We're on a former farm. It's no longer operational. It was beef cattle. The only livestock I've got here right now is three colonies of honeybees. 00:10:01 Speaker 1: That's another story. I won't go there because we'll go off on a tangent. We have to get you to New York before we start to talk a little bit more specifically about the book, Living with Freddie. So you leave school. You want to be a poet. That doesn't eventuate, so... How do you end up in America? 00:10:21 Speaker 2: There was a magazine that published a lot of poetry that I read. It's a very small magazine that's published only, well, I mean, it's distributed in a few places, but it's published here in New York. So I wrote them a letter and I asked if I could have an internship. I was working at an advertising agency in Melbourne at the time because I graduated and it was kind of like, well, what are you going to do? You've got to get a job. I was working in a call center and an ad agency and I was kind of like, wow, this is this isn't good. We've got to figure something out here. And kind of amazingly, they wrote to me. They accepted, you know, I went there to be an intern. I was a poetry assistant. I learned a lot, a lot. And then eventually got, you know, got a job at the New Yorker. 00:11:09 Speaker 1: Tell us about the New Yorker. I mean, it's obviously familiar to you, but... It's not a magazine we really see a lot of back here in Australia. 00:11:19 Speaker 2: Yeah, probably not, to be honest. Yeah, it's very ubiquitous here. It's kind of like a big flagship magazine that publishes, you know, a lot of the nation's most popularly read fiction, reporting, cultural criticism, There's lots of different sections to it, but it's kind of a it's got like a very established, important history in especially, I guess, American literature. And it was it was like a really big deal that I got to go and work there as a junior proofreader and other, you know, doing other things there. And it's kind of the reason I stayed, I guess, in in America. 00:11:55 Speaker 1: Did you get to contribute? Yep. 00:11:58 Speaker 2: Yep. Yep. Contribute. Yep. Yeah. And that, you know, that was a really big deal for me as as well. 00:12:05 Speaker 1: Poetry or magazine articles? 00:12:08 Speaker 2: No, there will be no poetry. No, no, no. It was only, yeah, you know, reporting, essays, things like that, yeah. 00:12:20 Speaker 1: How were you received as an Australian? 00:12:23 Speaker 2: Kind of like this weird, odd thing to be. You know, most people here, they've heard of Australia, they know what it is, but it's not. Some people are really like kind of, oh, where is that? You know what I mean? It's kind of quaint. A lot of people just hear my accent and they go, are you from England? 00:12:47 Speaker 1: Okay. Don't insult me, please. 00:12:50 Speaker 2: Right. 00:12:52 Speaker 1: So you're working as a contributor proofreader? Yep. That's a pretty responsible job as a proofreader. 00:13:02 Speaker 2: That was, I mean, it was really, I don't think I could do it now anymore. I don't have the physical strength, but it was really exciting because it's a weekly magazine with a lot of like very kind of breaking news, up-to-date reporting that's published. So one of my jobs was to go in on Friday in the afternoon and then you stay all night until the magazine is closed and sent off to the printer. So there's a lot of like, you know, you're updating stories as new news breaks. And, you know, it was, I started kind of in the era Donald Trump was just elected and there was a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of news breaks, a lot of unexpected things happening. A lot of people kind of shifting gears and, you know, getting used to this new, the way this guy did things. 00:13:50 Speaker 1: And, you know, it. 00:13:54 Speaker 2: Was a lot of adrenaline, you know, staying in the offices until like two, three, four in the morning, you know, taking care of the proof, sending them off to the printer. It's an experience in publishing that I think doesn't exist that much anymore. A lot of things are online. A lot of standards have changed in journalism. So, yeah, I couldn't do it now. I like to go to bed a little earlier now, but it was. 00:14:20 Speaker 1: An exciting job. Tell us how Freddie came into your life. The title of your book is Living With Freddie. how a dog taught me to be human. You described Freddie as an Italian greyhound. I guess back in Australia, we call them whippets. Almost. 00:14:38 Speaker 2: It's a different kind of dog. A whippet is still a sighthound, but it's more of a hybridized, a lot more sort of vigorous mix. A whippet's often, it's a sighthound mixed with a terrier or, well, initially it was, now it's its own breed. But An Italian greyhound is usually a little smaller and a little less athletic than a whippet, but very close. If you're picturing a whippet, you're pretty much there. 00:15:04 Speaker 1: Okay. So how did Freddie cross your consciousness? 00:15:10 Speaker 2: So I had kind of all these good things in my life. You know, I had a great job and an exciting social life. And I had my boyfriend, Aaron, you know, an American guy that I'd met here. 00:15:22 Speaker 1: I'm going to come to Aaron. 00:15:25 Speaker 2: Okay. I have to really keep watching myself to not say his real name because we call him Aaron. And I thought, you know, I want to get a dog. So the way I kind of sum it up is I was in my 20s. I got a dog. The dog had these terrible confronting behavior problems and I was floored by it, didn't know what to do, changed my life to sort of try to accommodate the dog. It all really kind of went awry. 00:16:03 Speaker 1: We'll break it down step by step. But the first

thing that staggered me was, and I want to know more, you're living, firstly, how do you find accommodation in New York? But you're living in the fifth floor of an apartment. block where you've got to walk up and down stairs was there no lift no. 00:16:25 Speaker 2: No it's a very old building very tiny apartment um i don't know what it would be in in metric but it was 500 square feet so that's like um. 00:16:34 Speaker 1: What like a kitchen bedroom bathroom bedroom lounge room i suppose. 00:16:39 Speaker 2: Pretty much yeah but but very small one of each yeah it was an old um an old um tournament building in chinatown so built for like i guess I've. 00:16:50 Speaker 1: Got so many questions. So you moved to New York, you get this internship, then you find this apartment to live in. What's it like for a young Australian girl navigating her way into that environment? 00:17:04 Speaker 2: Honestly, it was so exciting. I really kind of felt like I was at the center of the world. There's actually a really big Australian community here in New York. it's not hard to meet an Australian now. There's, you know, amazing Australian businesses, there's restaurants, there's pubs, there's everything. But I guess it was a little less like that when I. 00:17:26 Speaker 1: Okay, I'm interrupting, I know, but there's so much to talk about. So you've got this small apartment on the fifth floor of an apartment block. You've got to go up and down the stairs and you decide you want a dog. Did nobody say, look, Anna, what are you thinking? 00:17:42 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, a few people did, and I was kind of like, no, this is the right, you know, I wasn't going to listen. 00:17:50 Speaker 1: So how did you find Freddie? 00:17:52 Speaker 2: I just filled out some applications with some rescues. There are a lot. There is, I don't know if you want me to go on a big tangent here, but there's a lot of rescue dogs here that get sent up from the south in particular and from other states, and he was from another state. There's a much bigger market here for adopting rescues. you know, an animal than there is in some. 00:18:12 Speaker 1: Okay. So did you go to the shelter and look around and choose a dog? 00:18:19 Speaker 2: No. I want to be careful what I say here because, you know, in hindsight, I think the rescue didn't do things in the way that maybe they should have been done. But, you know, they did what they knew and what they could. The dog was kind of just dropped off to me, you know, and that was kind of that. 00:18:34 Speaker 1: You didn't meet the dog first? 00:18:36 Speaker 2: I didn't meet him, no. 00:18:39 Speaker 1: What are you thinking at that? 00:18:41 Speaker 2: Well, I had a lot of time to think about all this. 00:18:48 Speaker 1: So we need to take a break because there's so much more to talk about. I don't want to start a tangent and then have to cut it short. So my guest is Anna Haywood, and her book is called Living with Freddie, How a Dog Taught Me to Be Human. But as I'm reading it, I'm thinking, how did a dog spoil my life for a year? But Anna might have a different perspective on that. Back shortly, folks. Welcome back, everybody. Look, if you've just tuned in, we're speaking with Anna Haywood. Anna is a young lady who grew up in Melbourne, applied to get a job as an intern on a New Yorker magazine in New York, goes there with great excitement and settles in and decides to adopt a dog. Didn't see the dog, just applied and the dog's dropped off. The dog's called Freddy and Anna's written a book called Living with Freddy, How a Dog Taught Me to be Human. So The dog gets delivered to you. The guy goes to the wrong address first, does he not? Yeah, he did. Yep. Yeah. So what's your first impression? impression of Freddie? 00:19:51 Speaker 2: Oh, I mean, he was so cute. You know, he was tiny. He was kind of helpless. He was obviously very scared. And I was kind of like, okay, you know, here you are. This is, I guess you're living with me now. Here we go. And, uh, Really didn't expect what happened next, I guess. 00:20:11 Speaker 1: What happened next? 00:20:13 Speaker 2: Well, we discovered pretty early on that Freddie had, I mean, I didn't know that this is what it was called at the time, but very, very serious separation anxiety. So if he was separated from a human, he would immediately become just intractably just, he would have basically a panic attack. He would howl, scratch. circle, pace, chew. He would even harm himself in ways that, you know, I wasn't even kind of aware at the time that animals could do. And I was just absolutely floored. I was like, what is this? What's going on? I've never even, I don't know what's happening here in my apartment. 00:20:59 Speaker 1: So what did happen? You had to go to work and your boyfriend, Aaron, which isn't his real name, we understand. You've had to disguise to protect the innocent. Aaron's all of a sudden had this dog hoisted on him. 00:21:16 Speaker 2: He did, yeah. He did not ask for that, yeah. 00:21:21 Speaker 1: You weren't very kind to Aaron. Can I quote? Yeah. There he stood in his fleece vest and orthopedic shoes, unconcerned by how loud his voice was or how much he'd taken from the buffet. He was allergic to everything and he blew his nose off. What would Aaron think when you're no longer together, obviously? 00:21:44 Speaker 2: No, no, no, no. See, it's funny, Graham, hearing you read that because when I wrote that, I thought it was sort of endearing. But now, no. 00:21:53 Speaker 1: But he's left with the dog. You go to work. 00:21:55 Speaker 2: Yeah, so to sort of sum it up, this dog could not be left alone because of just the level of absolute terror that he would experience. And Aaron was sort of drawn into that involuntarily. And we had to change everything about our lives to have someone be with the dog 24-7, which was, you've got two people working, you know, long hours and, you know, busy jobs and all these kinds of other

things. Really, really quite difficult. Spoiler alert, it did not go well. It doesn't have a super happy ending. 00:22:31 Speaker 1: What intrigued me, like you've, got to deal with this dog 24 hours a day. You end up trying to take him to work and you don't have a very accommodating boss. Aaron's got to try and balance his life around the dog as well. And you say how the dog taught you to be human. What do you mean by that? Because to me the dog was just an interruption, a distraction and a source of constant worry and expense. 00:23:01 Speaker 2: Yeah. A huge challenge, a huge challenge. And, you know, obviously a terrible idea to try to, you know, make this work, but the subtitle is about some of the lessons that I learned about, um, evolution behavior, you know, morality, the way that we look at the behavior of others, the way that we kind of consider our own behavior, how we think about, you know, things that are inconvenient to us. What's, you know, we kind of label them as bad when, um, If you can learn to think about the causes of the animal's behavior, I think there's another world that opens up about what is really happening there and why it's happening and some of the human and non-human causes thereof. 00:23:45 Speaker 1: So you've occasionally had to put him into daycare and when you come back to Australia, he's in long-term care, is he not? Yes. You came back to Australia to renew your visa. How difficult is it to live and work there in America? 00:24:06 Speaker 2: For an Australian person, it's relatively easy, but it's still, I mean, it's honestly, it's getting a little bit harder. The current administration is, I guess, not as open to non-American nationals living in the country. You might have seen some headlines about that. So there are rules now that exist that didn't exist previously. And I'm a permanent resident. I'm married to my American husband now. But, you know, then this all happened in 2018 when, you know, it was different under the first administration. So it wasn't too hard. You know, that wasn't really the challenge. I came back to see my family to have some time there also. 00:24:51 Speaker 1: You were very complimentary to Dan on that return visit. 00:24:57 Speaker 2: I read that aloud to him. And, you know, he's a generous understanding man. And, you know, that is part of our vernaculars to make fun of each other a little bit. So, you know, thanks. Thanks, Dad. 00:25:13 Speaker 1: So I know you want us to read the book, but we are talking to you. How did you navigate all of these? it looks like almost every day there's a crisis with the dog. 00:25:26 Speaker 2: It was extremely difficult. It was, I mean, having, I never could have imagined that having a dog would create such difficulty in my mind. It was this simple, easy, fun thing that you just do, you know, you get a dog and it's like a great addition to your life. I never imagined it would turn my life upside down. You know, it changed, I changed my whole career, um, changed a lot, you know, really changed my relationship. I think that was ultimately a good thing, but, um, it was very, it was very confronting. And every day was extremely difficult in ways that I just could not have anticipated. And I know there are other people out there who live with dogs with behavior problems who are going to, I think, understand what I say when I talk about every day has its own little, whether it's a little challenge or a big challenge, you know, it can be really hard to fit these two things together, the human life and the animal life. 00:26:24 Speaker 1: Well, there's three threads there. Like it changed your career. So how did it change your career? That's thread number one. 00:26:32 Speaker 2: Well, I ended up leaving the jobs that I was working in in the book and I went to graduate school. I applied to, well, I became an animal trainer and did an apprenticeship at a dog training school in New York. And then I also went to graduate school and got a master's degree. 00:26:54 Speaker 1: How do you fund yourself when you're doing that? How do you live? How do you survive financially? 00:26:59 Speaker 2: Very expensively. 00:27:00 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:27:03 Speaker 2: Yeah. That was, yeah, that was, it cost a lot. You know, I had selling. 00:27:11 Speaker 1: The thing that kept crossing my mind with rent and all the other, were you earning enough money? in the jobs you were doing to sustain yourself. 00:27:21 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I was working multiple jobs in the book and work multiple jobs now. It's, I mean, not to be a, you know, a broken clock or to repeat myself, but I mean, quality of life in Australia is much higher. Wages are better. You know, you can afford to live a lot more. It's a lot harder here, just in terms of the wage to cost of living ratio. It's kind of crazy here. 00:27:48 Speaker 1: And the second thread was Aaron left. He just left. 00:27:52 Speaker 2: Aaron left. Aaron had had enough, which I don't blame him for because it was not an easy proposition. At the time I was just devastated because it, you know, everything kind of fell apart. I, it was impossible to care for this dog without him. And then it felt like a massive failure. It felt like I just really made a mess of this whole situation. And that was kind of, I mean, that was him leaving. Wasn't, The hardest thing, I think the hardest thing was dealing with the fallout of the failure in my in my mind. And, you know, I look back and I have a different view on it now. 00:28:26 Speaker 1: But I think he did you a favor, though, didn't he? 00:28:31 Speaker 2: I think he did. Ultimately, it was it was very hard to sort of confront at the time the way that everything turned out quite chaotically. 00:28:40 Speaker 1: Anna Haywood is my guest, folks. Her book is called Living with Freddie, How a Dog Taught Me to Be Human, back after the break. My guest on Conversations is Anna Haywood. Anna is an Australian young lady who left

Melbourne to go to work in America and stayed there. She worked as an editorial assistant on New Yorker magazine and contributed. She had this great ambition to foster a dog, and she did, and it was... life-changing in several different ways, whether it's positive or negative, you'd have to read the book and decide for yourself. But to me, it seems like it did really impact negatively on your life, Anna, but the book's called Living with Freddie. You mentioned in the book, Anthony Hudson, the commentator, one of our favorite, where does he, how does he fit into your life? 00:29:32 Speaker 2: So one of Anthony Hudson's most famous calls is the epigraph for one of the, the book is in four sections, and I think it's section three is introduced with, I see it, but I don't believe it, which is one of his... Like. 00:29:49 Speaker 1: A commentator saying, I see it, but I don't believe it. 00:29:54 Speaker 2: Well, it's, it's, he said it, it was the 2005 qualifying final between Sydney and Geelong and Nick Davis kicked this goal out of a pack, just kind of defying the laws of physics. And Anthony Hudson, who's, he's a massive Geelong fan. He's watching the game and he was just flabbergasted. And he said, I see it, but I don't believe it, which has become, you know, this one of his most famous calls along with, um, the miracle on grass. Another, which in my mind, um, The fact that his most famous calls came when he was watching his team lose was kind of connected to the way that my dad barracked for Geelong growing up. So it was really important to me to include this in the book because of some of the discussions of Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution and having to change your mind when you're confronted with new ideas and new evidence. And I have to say, every editor said, we've got to take this on. Nobody knows who Anthony Hudson is. Nobody knows what Sydney is. Nobody knows what Geelong is. And I said, no, no. 00:30:51 Speaker 1: Well, that moment was amazing. If you go back and watch that three or four minutes of football, you couldn't script it, seriously. 00:31:00 Speaker 2: No, it's frantic. You don't know what's going to happen next. Every moment appears to be on the cusp of, you know, something really big happens. And then it's like it's out of this sea of bodies that he kicks this incredible ball. 00:31:12 Speaker 1: So who do you bat for? 00:31:14 Speaker 2: Geelong. 00:31:15 Speaker 1: Of course you do. Anyway, you have to give Freddie up. What were your emotions as you're going through that process? 00:31:26 Speaker 2: Oh, excruciating, destabilizing, just totally devastating. I mean, it kind of felt like a choice, Graham, in that it was something that I had to kind of voluntarily do. But in other ways, it really wasn't a choice because being able to keep Freddie depended on two things, which is me having an apartment, a place to live, and me having a job. And in the book, I kind of detail the ways that he was threatening those things

because, you know, I was getting in trouble at my job. My neighbors were complaining and it was kind of closing in and it was just getting clearer and clearer. I should probably have realized a bit sooner. This is just not sustainable. And I did. I had to give Freddie up. It was excruciating. 00:32:11 Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we don't like Aaron in the book. Obviously, you must have liked him at the time because he's leaving, left your heart broken. But the one line that really impacted me, you said, I never saw Freddie again. 00:32:26 Speaker 2: No, yeah, to this day, I haven't seen him since. I don't know where he is. 00:32:31 Speaker 1: You don't know where he is? Do you wonder? 00:32:33 Speaker 2: I don't have any updates. 00:32:34 Speaker 1: Do you want to know? 00:32:36 Speaker 2: You know, think about it. sometimes decently often he's probably no longer alive he would be very very old if he was alive and he did have a lot of i didn't have the space to get into this as much in the book but he was medically complex and had a lot of he had cancer and a few other things so that was also really hard to manage really expensive um but he's out there somewhere you know whether it's in the universe or. 00:33:02 Speaker 1: Not aaron's left but you but you're happily married you got kids and animals around you these days. 00:33:10 Speaker 2: No kids just animals and yes happily married to to my husband Marnif who I guess makes a little cameo at the end of. 00:33:17 Speaker 1: The book well I see that but what does he make of Aaron's starring role in the book. 00:33:25 Speaker 2: Um I mean my husband's a really good sport and he read the book and kind of gave me his feedback on it um he didn't like Aaron but I was kind of– you know, he's got his– he's maybe a little biased. 00:33:40 Speaker 1: Well, I don't like Aaron. 00:33:44 Speaker 2: Okay, yeah. 00:33:46 Speaker 1: But you must have because you pined for him after he left. 00:33:49 Speaker 2: That's true, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, he's a good guy. He's a nice guy. He was the wrong guy for me, but, you know– I'm kind of torn about hearing that readers don't like Aaron because I think he was in a really tough position. But of course, from my point of view, it was hard. So I think that's kind of human relationships, right? 00:34:10 Speaker 1: So you went off in this new career as an animal scientist. Is that the word? Animal behaviorist? 00:34:16 Speaker 2: Behaviorist. 00:34:17 Speaker 1: Yep. 00:34:17 Speaker 2: I am technically an animal behaviorist. Yep. Which is. 00:34:20 Speaker 1: So what did you learn in that role, in that period of education that you didn't know, the things you did wrong that you might not have done had you had the knowledge? 00:34:31 Speaker 2: Wow, a lot. A lot of my approaches, especially when Freddie first arrived, were really kind of wrongheaded and really misguided and maybe even were making things worse. But I mean, it's been nearly a decade since the events that happened in the book and the learning, unfortunately did not happen overnight. It was a slow, long journey with lots of different kinds of lessons picked up along the way. I would absolutely have approached the situation sort of 180 degrees differently if I had my time again, but you know. 00:35:08 Speaker 1: So why did it take so long to write the book? 00:35:12 Speaker 2: It, It was a little emotionally raw in the first time period after. And then it really took me a long time to go and do my apprenticeship, get my degree, learn the science of the field. And then writing just kind of takes a long time sometimes, especially if you're working full time as well. You've got to do your mornings, your evenings, your weekends. 00:35:41 Speaker 1: It seems that's what it's like in America. People work so hard. Yeah. 00:35:45 Speaker 2: Australia is a really good place to live. 00:35:49 Speaker 1: But you didn't learn your lesson. You went and adopted another dog. 00:35:55 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:35:55 Speaker 1: Little chihuahua thing. 00:35:57 Speaker 2: Yep. She's outside the room, right? 00:36:00 Speaker 1: Yeah, outside my house. Was that a happier outcome for you? 00:36:06 Speaker 2: Much. Yep. 00:36:07 Speaker 1: Much. Describe the big girl for us. 00:36:11 Speaker 2: So I think the way I describe her in the book is I call her an objectively bad dog because she has a lot of very antisocial behavior. She's kind of mean. She had a lot of, you know, she came to me basically because she was kicked out of a bunch of other homes for biting, not getting along with other animals, not getting along with people. She hated men. But luckily by the time she was, you know, she came to me as a foster, I had developed a lot better approach to those kinds of things. And we, I mean, she lives here in beautiful harmony with me now. She is, you know, she doesn't bite. She doesn't, she's, it's, that's the happy story of the book, I think. Yeah. 00:36:53 Speaker 1: And does she like your husband? 00:36:56 Speaker 2: No, not initially. 00:36:57 Speaker 1: Okay. Well, how did you meet your husband and what prompted the move to the country out of the city? 00:37:07 Speaker 2: Oh, great. So when people ask how we meet, I usually say all the stories to scandals because the truth is we actually just met on Hinge, which is a dating app. The old-fashioned way. 00:37:20 Speaker 1: You know. Is that old-fashioned now? 00:37:23 Speaker 2: No. And he's actually from the countryside. He's from a rural area here in this region. We live along the Appalachian mountain range. So that's he, you know, we kind of came back to an area pretty close to where he grew up. 00:37:37 Speaker 1: Was it much of a cultural shock for you? 00:37:41 Speaker 2: It's much less of a cultural shock here than it was in the city. Life is a little more similar to back home here than it is in New York City. New York City is kind of like, you know, it's like nowhere else really. 00:37:54 Speaker 1: In the epilogue of the book, you describe one of your neighbours walking with a baby raccoon on a leash. Now, we don't really know what a raccoon is, but it seemed to me it's a wild animal. 00:38:06 Speaker 2: It's absolutely a wild animal and not one you should bring into your home. 00:38:11 Speaker 1: So what was he doing with it? 00:38:14 Speaker 2: So I tried to use the most diplomatic terms when I described raccoons. He captured this wild animal, which, by the way, is one of the rabies vector species. We don't have rabies in Australia, so I guess a lot of the viewers won't kind of understand what that means. And he was just kind of raising it. It would be like kind of bringing a kangaroo or a wallaby or something into your home and just going, oh, you live with me now. 00:38:42 Speaker 1: People do that. They rescue kangaroos in the lake. 00:38:47 Speaker 2: I think there is a long conversation to be had about the term rescue. And if you're just taking it from its home for the sake of your own entertainment, or if there is some kind of wildlife crisis and you're working with a registered wildlife rehab person, whether or not you can call it rescue. His case was definitely the former where you just catch an animal either in a trap or just with your own hands. And then you say, you're my pet now. which is a really kind of problematic thing to do to a wild animal. And I guess I use that little example as a discussion for some of the human-animal interactions. 00:39:27 Speaker 1: So as we come to the end of this really, interesting chat and amusing chat, is your future in animal behaviour or is it in journalism or writing? 00:39:39 Speaker 2: I hope it's in both, you know. Yeah, I hope it's in both. 00:39:45 Speaker 1: So as we come to the end, Anna, is home... going to be America or Australia? Will you convince that American husband of yours to move to Australia if it's so much better than in which to live? 00:39:59 Speaker 2: Yeah, he says he's open to it. I hope so. That's the short answer at some point. 00:40:09 Speaker 1: Well, good luck with it. Thanks for chatting. It's been a great chat and good luck with the book. 00:40:14 Speaker 2: Thank you, Graham. So good to talk to you. 00:40:17 Speaker 1: And we hope Freddie... is having or had a happy life. So all the best. Yes. Anna Haywood was my guest, folks. The book is called Living with Freddie, How a Dog Taught Me to be Human. It's a Hachette publication. Thank you so much for joining us.