The Social Lives of Dogs : The Grace of Canine Company

Rating:
Summary: Charming and thoughtful
Review: This is an excellent book about dogs, readable even by those who do not like them. Elizabeth Maxwell Thomas writes fascinating stories about daily life with her pets, anecdotes both humorous and sad. As I read about her wonderful dogs--the incredibly intelligent Sundog, sweet Pearl, confused Misty, and goofy Ruby--I found myself looking at my dog, wondering why she wasn't nearly as interesting as Thomas's. (If I had to choose a favorite dog from the book, the human-like Sundog would be my choice.) There are also scientific bits about how wolves gradually became domesticated and why, dogs of Third World nations, and so on. This is a great book, one that everyone should read.

Rating:
Summary: a peaceable kingdom
Review: This is one woman's story of living with (besides her family) a houseful of canines, cats, and other assorted critters and how they managed to co-exist peacefully (most of the time). Basically, it is a series of revealing anecdotes and stories, most of them heartwarming, a few heartbreaking or even astonishing (including two very different accounts of encounters with large wild cats). As with Lorenz's MAN MEETS DOG or Masson's DOGS NEVER LIE ABOUT LOVE, read this for the stories and not the science.

Rating:
Summary: a peaceable kingdom
Review: This is one woman's story of living with (besides her family) a houseful of canines, cats, and other assorted critters and how they managed to co-exist peacefully (most of the time). Basically, it is a series of revealing anecdotes and stories, most of them heartwarming, a few heartbreaking or even astonishing (including two very different accounts of encounters with large wild cats). As with Lorenz's MAN MEETS DOG or Masson's DOGS NEVER LIE ABOUT LOVE, read this for the stories and not the science.

Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly enjoyable read
Review: While I agree with other reviews I've read of this book, I don't think they convey how enjoyable the read is, nor how funny parts of it are. I find myself laughing out loud a lot. I think it is great, and I will certainly look at my dogs differently now.

Rating:
Summary: Her Nanny Was A Newfie
Review: Who could be better qualified to write about the hearts, minds and souls of dogs than Elizabeth Marshall Thomas? Not only is she the celebrated anthropologist who was the first to chronicle the lives of the Bushmen; not only has she studied and published scientific and popular articles on animals from African elephants to Arctic wolves; but she quite literally grew up among dogs. As we learn in the first captivating sentences of this splendid, surprising book, one of her most attentive caretakers as a child was a Newfoundland dog, whose job, as the dog saw it, was to keep the helpless human child from drowning in the sea while the dog's group, her family, lived at the beach. The dog was actually her nanny, writes Thomas--the sort of insight that at once makes perfect sense and yet takes one's breath away, and the sort of insight that characterizes this book. The Social Lives of Dogs is as wide-ranging and as deep as Thomas' best-selling The Hidden Life of Dogs. That book asked the simple and profound question: What do dogs want? The answer: other dogs. But the social grace of dogs is such that they are capable of forming deep, lasting, complex and highly individualized relationships with many species other than their own (including birds, who are, as Thomas points out, more closely related to dinosaurs than to dogs), and this is the fertile ground explored in this riveting new book. In it, we meet a great new cast of characters: brave, stoic, soldierly Sundog, a former stray; Misty, a victim of AKC breeding who grew up in a crate and didn't understand grass; curly-tailed Pearl, who made an art of barking. The Thomas household is, as she writes, a "churning cauldron" of (at its high point) five dogs, a dozen cats, five parrots and a varying number of people. There's a dog-chasing cat named Rajah and a cat-biting cockatoo named Carmen. These animals don't always behave in the ways we think they "should"--they are far too creative, inventive and individual. And that's the delight of their keenly-observed stories--stories which collectively form a rich biography of their relationships with one another. Although The Hidden Life of Dogs was highly praised by some of the world's top animal behaviorists, including George Schaller, in some circles the book was controversial, as The Social Lives of Dogs will surely be. A few scientists still consider the mere suggestion that animals think is "anthropomorphic." But for the rest of us, who know that non-human as well as human animals may enjoy rich inner lives, this book offers profound evidence that our closest animal friends still surprise us--and have much to teach us about social graces.