This Dog Will Change Your Life

This Dog Will Save Your Life is a work of nonfiction by Elias Weiss Friedman. Originally published in 2025 by Ballantine Books, the text combines memoir and popular science to celebrate humans’ relationships with dogs. Friedman is a photographer and “dogfluencer” (an internet influencer whose content centers on dogs). His popular social media presence as The Dogist provides the foundation for his nonfiction writing. Online and in the pages of This Dog Will Save Your Life, Friedman combines his personal adoration of dogs with others’ stories of canine companionship to promote community and spread joy. Written from Friedman’s first-person point of view, the text explores themes including the Transformative Power of Human-Canine Bonds, Building Community Around a Shared Love of Dogs, and Self-Discovery Through Animal Companionship.

This guide references the 2025 Ballantine Books hardback edition of the text.

Content Warning: Both the source text and this guide include discussion of animal violence, mental health concerns including anxiety, depression, and PTSD, chronic illness, death, child death, death by suicide, and animal death.

Summary

This Dog Will Save Your Life is organized into an introduction and three overarching sections. Part 1 explores how dogs can transform people, Part 2 explores how dogs can build community, and Part 3 explores how dogs can help people discover themselves. The text includes Friedman’s personal anecdotes and narrative accounts of his friends’ and photographic subjects’ human-canine connections, detailing dogs’ and humans’ reciprocal capacity to rescue, redeem, and heal each other.

Friedman argues that dogs can save people’s lives. As a toddler, his dog Oreo protected him when he wandered off from home. In the years since, Friedman has discovered countless similar stories about dog rescues online. He believes that it’s essential to share these stories because they spread messages of love, joy, and connectivity in an otherwise divisive culture.

Friedman asserts that dogs can save people emotionally as well as physically, using his friend Angus as an example. Angus lives with depression and anxiety, and his therapy and medication hadn’t alleviated his mental health concerns the way he’d hoped. Sensing his friend’s need, Friedman suggested Angus adopt a dog. Although initially skeptical, Angus eventually rescued a dog named Opal. This relationship quickly changed Angus’s life, just as Friedman had hoped. Opal helped Angus overcome social anxiety and implement routines for himself. Friedman indicates that, as Angus experienced, dogs can have a powerful influence on humans who foster healthy, life-giving bonds with their animal companions.

Friedman frames this life-giving relationship as reciprocal—just as dogs rescue humans, humans rescue dogs. Throughout his career as The Dogist—his identity on social media—Friedman has worked with countless canine advocacy and philanthropy groups, partnering with various organizations that train service dogs, connect dogs with military veterans and incarcerated individuals, and bring comfort to children with chronic illness through dog companionship. Friedman emphasizes that many dogs have difficult pasts just like humans. Humans can deliver dogs from abusive situations and offer them new lives.

Dogs can also teach humans how to be better people and to foster healthy relationships. Friedman argues that dogs have complex emotional lives that humans can learn from. While they’re capable of feeling sad or jealous, Friedman doesn’t believe that dogs are spiteful or bitter. Instead, he asserts, dogs are naturally earnest, authentic, and loving—observing these traits in dogs can help people develop similar characteristics in themselves. 

Friedman emphasizes dogs as facilitators of community and connection, citing the many people he’s encountered via The Dogist who’ve met their spouses because of their dogs. Dogs, he believes, can teach couples how to love, communicate, and support each other. Countless people, who often describe their dogs as fur babies, credit their dogs with preparing them to parent and care for human children, too. Friedman uses his relationships with his dog Elsa and partner Sam as an example. He adopted his Husky Elsa during the pandemic. She changed how he engaged with life and eventually helped him to reconnect with his high school friend Sam. Seeing Sam's love and care for Elsa moved Friedman. He viewed her as the perfect dog mom. Eventually, Friedman and Sam developed a romantic relationship—a bond that has continued to deepen as a result of their mutual love for Elsa.

Friedman explains how dogs can lead people to more realized personal lives, vocations, and identities. After he lost his marketing job, Friedman rediscovered his passion for both dogs and photography and decided to launch The Dogist. As a dogfluencer, he’s found a fulfilling career and authentic sense of self. His work has meaning because he’s spreading messages of love, joy, and connectivity. In turn, he’s been able to share this love with his brother Henry. Friedman invited Henry on a cross-country trip to rehome a foster dog named Finn. Henry soon adopted Finn and has become a dogfluencer himself. Dogs led both brothers towards happier, more fulfilled lives.

Dogs model purposeful lives for humans. Dogs have many innate and trainable skills. They can be hunters, guards, athletes, rescuers, and guides. Friedman argues that observing dogs’ determination and tenacity can inspire humans to embrace these characteristics as well.

Above all, Friedman argues, dogs teach people how to be more empathetic and caring. For him, dogs represent purity of heart. Their love is reliable and lends owners a sense of comfort and constancy. Loving another living creature, Friedman believes, is the most powerful purpose that any individual can have—be they human or canine.