All my life I wanted a dog. After all, I was an only child. To a child without neighborhood friends, without sisters who could become eternal confidantes, without brothers as co-conspirators in life, a dog was the only obvious substitute for companionship. Or at least it was obvious to me. It was not at all obvious to my mother. Our house, my mother insisted, was not the kind of place where dogs belonged—a walk-up in a northern city given to lake-effect snowstorms. And further­more, the landlord agreed with her.

But my mother could deal with the idea of my having a bird. On Good Friday, Billy, a blue parakeet, became the Easter gift of my life. Nothing has ever quite matched it since.

I couldn’t take a bird for a walk, of course, as I had seen so many children my age do with their dogs. And we couldn’t play ball together. But, on the other hand, I learned that having a bird meant having a companion where the interaction was more intense than it was with a dog. Dogs, at least to some extent, had a life of their own. Billy’s whole life, on the other hand—every drop of water, every bite of food, every ounce of attention, every bit of play—depended on me. It was an amazingly warm and personal thought. It grew me up in ways I could never have expected.

“Joan,” my mother said, “you taught that bird to eat out of your hand. Now you get home here and feed it.” So, I quit the swimming lessons that were not half as important to me as Billy was, and did. Billy became my playmate, my ally, my first guide into the depth and meaning of the animal-human bond.

Billy came and filled my empty hours, learned to talk to me a little, flew to my finger when I called her off the curtain rods, woke me in the morning—and then, several years later, simply disappeared one day. And broke my heart.

No one knew how it had happened or where she’d gone. I only knew that, at the age of thirteen, I had lost something irreplaceable.

All over the world, everywhere, humans and animals form great bonds that give them both another kind of gift of life. Which is one of the reasons I’m writing this book. Neverthe­less, I hesitate to begin it. A book of this nature brings with it a kind of intimacy and spiritual insight that seems to demand a special kind of privacy. After all, if you begin to talk about your pets as if such talk merits some kind of genuine attention, spiritual as well as psychological, what will people think?

So, this book has been in process for a long, long time. Years. In fact, I had to go through several levels of spiritual growth myself before I realized that it was, indeed, a book worth writing.

This is a book about the role of animal companions in the development of our own spiritual lives. It is written for those who have pets and already understand that. It is also written for those who do not have pets and wonder why so many peo­ple do. It is a book about reestablishing the human-animal relationships Creation meant us to have. So, I am starting at the personal end of the subject—because my animal friends drew me out of myself and made me aware of another whole level of what it means to be alive. They gave me a muchTwo Dogs and a Parrot:What Our Animal Friends Can Teach Us About Life broader vision than it would have been if I had shaped it for myself out of nothing but work and time and things. In them, I have seen another face of God.

—From the “Introduction” to Two Dogs And A Parrot: What Our Animal Friends Can Teach Us About Life by Joan Chittister (BlueBridge)