"The Lost Dogs" author Jim Gorant to pen memoir of Wallace the pit bull

When Sports Illustrated editor Jim Gorant set out to cover the story of Michael Vick and his dogfighting crimes, “I was not involved in any sort of rescue or animal welfare causes,” he told me by email. “I stumbled into the topic and was really guided by a simple desire to find the truth and tell it.”

That desire for the truth led to the best selling book, The Lost Dogs, the story of the 51 pit bulls taken from Michael Vick’s dogfighting operation and how they were redeemed despite prejudice and misconceptions about their breed.

Now Gorant has been tapped to pen the story Wallace, a pit bull rescued from certain euthanization who has gone on to become an international flying disc champ – and loving member of a loving family.

What lessons has Gorant learned from the dogs he’s met in his journalistic travels? Many are in The Lost Dogs, and, he says, “it would probably take another book to fill in any blanks.”

But the big ones, he says, are “that every dog is an individual and should be treated as such, that to achieve anything worthwhile you must give something of yourself, and that all the creatures on the planet are connected in ways that are easy to forget but impossible to ignore.”

Nowadays, Gorant spends his time with a mixed breed dog his family rescued about a year ago. He’s “part schauzer (we think) and part who knows what. He’d been taken out of a high-kill shelter in South Carolina, where he was days from being euthanized. He’s been awesome and we’re so happy to have found him.”

Watch for Gorant’s book about Wallace to be in bookstores sometime next year. You can learn more about Jim Gorant and the book The Lost Dogs on his website, and more about Wallace the pit bull on his website.

You can read my review of “The Lost Dogs” here.