Dogs Used to Live Longer. This Book Asks Why.

Rita Hogan’s The Herbal Dog Handbook Won’t Sell You on Anything — It’ll Just Show You the Truth

You Already Know This — You Just Forgot

You don’t need another book telling you what to do.

Not for your dog. Not for yourself.

And yet, here we are — always looking, always searching, as if the answers are somewhere out there.

They’re not.

They’re in the way your dog stretches when they wake up. The way they bury their nose in the dirt like it means something. The way they eat, rest, move — without hesitation, without questioning.

They don’t need a research paper to confirm instinct.

You do.

That’s what The Herbal Dog Handbook reminded me of. Not in a heavy-handed, let me educate you kind of way. Rita Hogan doesn’t write like that. She writes like someone who’s been around long enough to know that most of what we call “new information” is just old wisdom repackaged for people who forgot how to listen.

She doesn’t need to convince you. She just tells the truth.

I wasn’t even three pages in when I felt it — something I knew, deep down, but had been too distracted to hold onto.

She wrote about growing up in Michigan, about her family planting gardens where the plants supported each other — companion planting, they called it. No chemicals. No overthinking. Just the natural order of things, working because that’s what they were meant to do.

I sat with that for a while.

Because that’s what health should be. Not isolated treatments. Not quick fixes. Just a body, whole and intact, knowing how to heal — if we stop getting in the way.

She doesn’t come out and say that, though.

She just tells you about her childhood dog, Susie, who lived to be 24 years old.

And then she lets you sit with that fact.

No dramatic call-out. No here’s what they don’t want you to know.

Just a quiet, undeniable reality:

Dogs used to live longer.

Now they don’t.

And you have to ask yourself: why?

That’s the thing about this book. It doesn’t try to hammer a point into your head.

It just leaves the door open.

Like when she talks about how funny it is that science keeps “discovering” things herbalists have known forever.

Like how milk thistle works best as a whole plant, but medicine keeps isolating the “active ingredient” and wondering why it doesn’t work as well.

Like how modern pet care is obsessed with treating symptoms instead of looking at the system.

She calls the body a spider web — pull on one thread, and the whole thing moves.

“Health ebbs and flows; it is a process, not solely the absence of disease. Almost all holistic modalities embrace a focus on the underlying cause of imbalance or illness, rather than symptoms. Why? The body wants to heal itself; it’s always looking to achieve balance.”

And I had to stop reading for a second because that landed harder than any textbook explanation ever could.

Because of course.

Of course, you can’t just fix one thing. The whole body is connected. The whole world is connected.

But we act like it isn’t.

We act like we can just medicate, isolate, control.

And then we wonder why everything keeps breaking down.

I don’t do book reviews.

Not really.

But this isn’t a review. It’s a reckoning.

Because reading this book didn’t just give me information. It made me remember.

It made me want to step outside, take a breath, and actually look at the world again.

It made me want to stop asking, what’s the latest science say? and start asking, what has nature been showing me this whole time?

Rita Hogan doesn’t need to sell you on anything.

She just nudges you toward the truth.

And once you see it — you can’t unsee it.

As Rita would put it,

“Breathe. Don’t obsess. You are doing the best with the knowledge you have. At the end of the day, all your dog needs is to know you love them.”

Truthfully, this isn’t about convincing you — just sharing something that genuinely helped me. Rita Hogan did something special here with The Herbal Dog Handbook, and I’m glad she did.