Tomorrow, another chapter in my life and work,  my 25th book comes out, it is titled “Talking To Animals: How You Can Understand Animals And They Can Understand You.” It is published  by Simon and Schuster and is available anywhere books are sold, including Amazon.

My book tour begins at 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 2, at Battenkill Books on Main Street in  Cambridge, N.Y.

Maria, Red and Fate will be joining me for the kick-off,  this will be Fate’s first chance to jump on people in a bookstore despite being told not to. I will talk and answer questions. I begin every book tour at Battenkill.

Thursday, I’m off to the Connecticut Library Association meeting at the Mystic Marriott in Mystic, Conn., to talk (with Red along) at 4 p.m. The event is open to the public.

Battenkill Books is an important launch site for me, it is my wonderful local bookstore, and they pre-sold and sold 1,200 copies of my last book “Saving Simon.” I hope to do even better this time.

I will sign and personalize any book purchased from Battenkill, and Connie Brooks, the owner will give every one of the first 1,000 customers who pre-order the book a free and classy custom tote-bag. They take Paypal and major credit cards.

You can also call the store at 518 677-2515.

There are about 300 tote-bags left, we are shooting for 1,000 pre-orders by this week.

The book is an important book for me, a challenge for all of us to listen to animals rather than just project our own emotions onto them, and a sharing of the ways I have learned to communicate with my dogs and other animals over a lifetime, often in the most surprising and unexpected ways.

They are not our siblings or dependent creatures, they are our partners in the world, we need to understand their real needs and welfare. We can not only view them through the prism of abuse and rescue, they need to live alongside of us if they are to remain on the earth.

The book is faithful to the spirit of author and naturalist Henry Boston, who called for a more mystical understanding of animals a century ago. We are not there yet. We need a new animal rights movement that fights to keep animals alive and among us rather than shunting them all off to private preserves, slaughterhouses, or oblivion.

Sadly, or perhaps understandably, this view is controversial.

The early reviews are lovely,  but this is America, after all. (The San Francisco based Bark Magazine refused to even read the book, telling my publisher “absolutely not!”) I do not see myself as particularly controversial, but I also recognize that every book I have written has been seen in that way.

I think “Absolutely Not,” would make a wonderful blurb on the book, but my publisher didn’t bite.

This all tells me that I am alive, and usually, either ahead of or behind the curve.

If we want to keep animals in the world, we have to change some of our ideas about them, and soon.

The way we look at them now is proving to be a failure, a catastrophe for them, given climate change and runaway development and assaults on animals working with people or entertaining them in any way.

More than half of the animals species of the world have vanished in the last generation, according to the World Wildlife Fund. We have to save domesticated and working animals especially by giving them important and humane work to do with us, not apart from us.

Animals like carriage horses don’t need to spend their lives standing in private preserves eating hay and dropping manure. Working animals need work in order to be content and healthy, that was the message I took from my three years of writing about the New York Carriage Horses.

This will be exciting to talk about on my book tour. In the book I also describe the dogs, steers, goats, sheep, barn cats,  donkeys and ponies I have lived with, and what I have learned about talking to them, including the use of food, emotion, visualization and body language.

If you’re interested, please consider pre-ordering it. I want to get to 1,000 orders this week, and I want to support a wonderful independent bookstore, and also the very idea of books. If they are to remain among us, like the horses, we have to support them.

And thanks. You can pre-order (or just order) here. And thanks.