PUBLISHING YEAR: 2012
SUMMARY: Lively essays on critical dog questions through popular science.
AUDIENCE: If you are an owner struggling with inconsistencies with traditional training methods, this book has your name written all over it. It’ll be the launching platform you need to discover the fascinating world of dog fact, so you can, once and for all, leave dog fiction behind.
CONTENTS
- Dominance and pack theory
- Projecting emotions vs. observing them objectively
- Dogs not getting along: the signs, and how to interpret them
- Examples and theories of canine humour
- Little known dog body language signals
- The story of fostering a traumatized dog
REVIEW: Organised in a collection of themed essays, the book gives you the low down on every conceivable canine stereotype and runs them past the latest and greatest science popularization sources.
Eric Brad is the host of Canine Nation, a well-respected podcast. He also writes for magazines and websites, and his dogs are agility trial champions. But above all, he is clearly enamored with all thing dogs, and this passion shines through every line.
Many of us share his traumatic story of re-education. It all starts when your dog crosses some unforgivable line. Then you desperately work your way through the traditional dog training tips, but it gets worse. So you start digging through the technical literature yourself and, if you’re lucky, you’ll hit gold and get to one of the greats (Ray Coppinger, Jean Donaldson, Alexandra Horowitz,…). You’ve opened that door, and knowledge just keeps pouring in. Hopefully, you’ll be working your way through increasingly challenging material –with your dog’s problems far behind you– until you feel emboldened to share your discoveries in that journey of learning in a book. And that’s just what Eric did.
Clearly a gifted writer, Eric Brad’s prose is vanilla-smooth on top, rock-solid at the bottom. The background research is near impeccable, as he showed me the perfect three’s:
- a good grasp of
- a wide array of
- recent references.
His literature research is a welcome relief from the flurry of apocryphal writings about dogs.
A couple of things need to be polished to make this book perfect in my eyes: availability in hard-copy, pictures, more fleshed out examples and more in-text references.
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