PAWS dog Tara 'writes' her own book!

(and gives half the profit to PAWS)

Published as an E-Book, price £1.50 it is available to download from Amazon here. After publisher's commission, 50p from every sale will go to PAWS.

The Shepherd Girl's God is a novel written from the perspective of a Spanish street dog who followed a route familiar to all PAWS volunteers - abandoned, ill-treated, starved ... moving through fear and distrust to eventual rescue and redemption in a shelter ... to a final home where she was loved and cherished until the day she died.

It is a familiar route because the story is based on an actual PAWS dog! Named Pastora in the shelter (she was a Spanish Shepherd dog) she spent nearly two years with PAWS before being adopted by the author Jane Seigal in 2003. "And my love affair with her was instant," Jane told us recently.

She was re-named Tara. Although Jane Seigal lives in France she has spent a lot of time in Spain gathering material as a travel writer, so she had seen close-up the callous abandonment and cruelty which so many animals suffer here. She began to create an imaginative version of what Tara's life might have been like before she came into the PAWS Shelter, and before she found herself settling, much loved, in Jane's home. And she determined to write the eventual book entirely from Tara's point of view.

The book is already attractiing warm reviews from readers who have already downloaded it - among them PAWS volunteer Margaret Roberts: "What a wonderful read, I loved it. It made me laugh and cry. The abandoned dogs I work with show such love and affection and most of them have been very badly treated by 'humans'. The beautiful German Shepherd, Tara, in this story has had an incredible journey so far in her young life. Look forward with anticipation to the next tale as told by the dog herself!!!

Jane Seigal and Tara - "We had to be photoshopped together because I was always behind the lens!"

Now well into 'free bus pass' territory, Jane is a survivor of London's original Fleet Street journalistic community. She was there from 1965-1978, working for the Press Association and several other journalistic outlets before taking time off to raise a family. And despite publishing an E-Book she is no natural 'techno-freak.'

"I'm struggling to learn all this new technology, and having to find my way around Facebook and all the other new forms of marketing. But my son is picture editor for a New York glossy magazine so I've got some very good help at hand!"

But she advises fellow animal lovers not to be put off by having to read Shepherd Girl's God on yet another screen. "I was sceptical about it until my other son gave me a Kindle for Christmas. But it is not like a computer screen, they have made it so that you are almost reading the printed page - no back lighting etc., and really it is not too bad. It is also so light - good in bed when one drops off in the middle of a paragraph! And it is great when I travel, it saves me having to take heavy books with me."

Click here for Jane Seigal's own website, and a fuller synopsis of the book - or become a friend of Jane Seigal on Facebook - she is already a Friend of PAWS.