Enrica Ceccarini, "Cinovagabondi"

“We need a world in which I am the murmur of the waters that wake up from frozen sleep and you are the roots of the small plants, tender bones of the wood.”

Usually the books by Facebook contacts arrive at the request of the author, who wants a review, or the publishing house, or the press office. The ones I buy on my own initiative are classics or international best sellers in English. For “Cinovagabondi” I made an exception. I met the author, Enrica Ceccarini, on Facebook, and I couldn’t help but follow her reflections. Because Enrica Ceccarini talks about dogs as a highly experienced dog educator, and I have a dog. And because Enrica Ceccarini is one of the best living writers and I’m not telling a lie, or helping a friend. In reality, we don’t know each other except by name, nor do we ever exchange messages or private information. To understand if I’m telling the truth or not, read her and follow her page.

Enrica says of herself that she is Asperger and I, as a socially anxious person, understand some, if not all, of her relationship difficulties. But I’m not interested in her relational competence, but in her unrivaled skill as a writer, both in this book and in the posts that she publishes on Facebook. Here I would like to open a parenthesis. Writer is who has a copy of his/her novel at the Book Fair or who, with the written word, touches people’s hearts? I admire Enrica with great good-natured envy. As much as I try to be engaging in my novels, to be intense, I will never be even an iota of how she is. Every time I read a piece of hers my guts get twisted and my throat gets knotted with tears. No one like her knows how to excite, no, more, how to tear your soul apart. Read the “In Memory of the Great Big Jack” chapter and then tell me if that’s not true.

But let’s come to the subject of the book, which, incidentally, has a fake aged cover and a patinated interior, as if to highlight the author’s dual soul, cultured and instinctive at the same time. The topic is, of course, dogs. The new way of understanding dogs.

Over the past 15/20 years, all the old concepts of dog lovers — dominance, the pack leader, but also gentility based on sausages and morsels — have been overturned, although in many cases they are still hard to die. The figure of the old trainer, the “dog man”, has been replaced by a multitude of young educators graduated in neuroscience and directed towards a cognitive approach, based on the concept that the dog is a sentient, intelligent and thinking being, endowed with memory, reasoning and emotions.

In this text, Enrica accompanies us towards listening to the dog, in order to build a relationship based on reciprocity, respect, understanding and trust. And while we help the dog in his cognitive and emotional path, we can also heal — by becoming aware of it — many of our inner wounds.

Since I took the first steps in the relationship with my dog, I have felt the need and the lack of authenticity of what was imposed on me by the old-fashioned dog lover. It was a feeling rather than a reasoning. It could not, I said to myself, all be based entirely on man’s prevarication over the dog, on leadership, on controlling initiatives, on centripetation. I was confirmed by the lost eyes of my Abra when I tried to impose myself on her with arrogance, mistaking it for authority. Her anxiety, her blocks, her refusals confirmed it to me.

Then, thanks to trained and aware educators, I discovered that what I felt was right, that everything is simpler than how they explain it to us, that the dog does not become a monster if he gets used to thinking with his own head, if you trust him, if you allow him to choose what is best, if you stop punishing what he cannot control, that is, his emotions. I mean, if you let him be a dog.

That the love of a dog is unconditional is a story that we like to tell ourselves, explains Enrica, the dog loves those who are able to reveal him to himself, those who do not want him different from what he is, with his phylogenetic specificities, with his experience and race. Enrica, and educators like her, do not transform the dog at the request of the owner, but rather mediate between the needs of the dog and those of the owner and the environment.

“Really at the dawn of this dizzying, rampant new awareness, do we want to continue to tell ourselves that a piece of sausage can satisfy dogs more than feeling free to live their own lives and make their own choices?”