The Hidden Life Of Dogs

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Enthralling!
Review: A beautiful and compelling book that celebrates dogs in all their uniqueness and glory.

The book's main flaw is Thomas's tendency towards New Age pseudoscience (for instance, by alluding to animal ESP). Other reviewers also point out Thomas's irresponsibility by allowing her dogs to roam free, violating local laws and endangering their (the dogs') safety. I agree, and I'd like to add breeding to the list of complaints - as someone who studies dogs, she should know better than to allow her dogs to reproduce when millions of animals are being killed annually in shelters due to a lack of loving homes.

Overlooking these obvious shortcomings, though, the book is a must-read for anyone interested in our canine companions!

Rating:
Summary: The Hidden Life of Dogs
Review: After reading at least 200 books about dogs in an effort to understand mine more fully I found this book. It was enthralling.

Everyone who reads about dogs already knows all the old ideas of: sit, stay and the overused "my-dog-is-a-dominating-alpha" theory. This book goes deeper than that, this books explores dogs and their relationships to humans in a non-evasive way.

It also questions our society in ways that the majority of dog books never touch on. For example: why do we castrate male dogs rather use the option of vasectomy?

If you want to read a regular dog book there are plenty of them out there. If you want to examine human and dog relationships more closely this is the book for you.

Rating:
Summary: Refreshingly truthful
Review: After reading at least 200 books about dogs in an effort to understand mine more fully I found this book. It was enthralling.

Everyone who reads about dogs already knows all the old ideas of: sit, stay and the overused "my-dog-is-a-dominating-alpha" theory. This book goes deeper than that, this books explores dogs and their relationships to humans in a non-evasive way.

It also questions our society in ways that the majority of dog books never touch on. For example: why do we castrate male dogs rather use the option of vasectomy?

If you want to read a regular dog book there are plenty of them out there. If you want to examine human and dog relationships more closely this is the book for you.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting blend of prose and observation
Review: Jane Goodall studied chimpanzees in the wild, Dian Fossey studied gorillas, and the lesser-renowned Birutai Galdecas-Brind'Amour studied orangutans. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas attempts to emulate these pioneers in ethology by studying domesticated dog behavior. I think, mostly, she succeeds. Thomas studies her own dogs, as well as several other dogs with whom she has frequent contact. She also incorporates knowledge she gleaned by studying wild wolves on Baffin Island.


Ms. Thomas faced the same balancing act as did Goodall, Fossey, and Galdecas-Brind'Amour: to become intensely familiar with her subjects by living with them, while retaining scientific objectivity. In many ways, this mirrors the early efforts of amateur naturalists like Darwin and Linnaeus and, later, Conrad Lorenz. Did Thomas succeed? For the most part, she did, although I am not sure how many of her observations are scientifically valid, as in reproducible by others, and how many observations and interpretations simply sound right, whether they are or not.


The bottom line, though, is that this book makes very interesting reading.


One warning, though -- if you have, or have had, dogs as pets, and you tend to treat them as small children who grow old but never quite grow up, this book will hit you very hard, especially near the end. Thomas hides much of her affection for her dogs, in the attempt to remain objective, but when you tell the life-stories of over a dozen dogs, from beginning to end, you cannot anticipate a happy ending.

Rating:
Summary: Very Interesting
Review: No star, really, but that wasn't an option. Ms. Thomas gives herself away very early in the book, wondrous that a dog would cross a street without looking both ways. The most elementary knowledge, kindergarten level, of canine anatomy allows for less wonder; a dog's eyes are placed much further to the side of the head than ours, which face forward. A dog has a 270 degree field of vision. The pages which follow that street-crossing revelation, pages which I was dumb enough to read, contain nothing but twaddle.

Rating:
Summary: How To Alienate Your Canines For Fun and Profit
Review: Recipe for Disaster:
Get a dog for every member of the family.
Don't spay or neuter any of them.
Allow them all to run free for a year while you follow along, observing them as they run through traffic, fight, and place themselves in danger of death or injury with regularity.
Don't establish a relationship with any of them, work with them, and train them in any way.
Watch and take copious notes as they withdraw from the family and revert to survival behavior.
Write a book about the experience and make a lot of money. Fool the masses into thinking that this was a fascinating experiment and therefore any irresponsible behvior on the part of the author was somehow justified.

I threw this book in the garbage, where it belongs.


Rating:
Summary: The Hidden Life of Dogs
Review: The hidden life of Dogs by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas was disappointing to me. I am very interested in dog behavior, as I am a certified canine obedience instructor, and this book failed what it claimed to be. There are some interesting stories that support other behaviors we have already known to exist. There are no new findings in this book. And as the author admits, there is no science involved- just her observations. I was hoping for a lot more, and I would not reccommend this book unless you have extra time to kill. It is 138 pages long with a fairly large font. There are nice illustrations at the start of each story. Basically the book is a bunch of short stories about her dog's behaviors. I think at one point she has 13 dogs. She claims that she only provides food, shelter, and water for them. She does not train them in any way because she wants them to act naturally and not "become robots." In the end I think she only has 2 females spayed, and that is after they have a litter or two a piece. I admit that some of the stories spark my imagination, but quite a few of them upset me. I agree with other raters that she is an irresponsible owner who puts her neighbors, their animals, and her own dogs in danger. She reports often that she has been confronted by the police many times throughout the book. Well, she lets her huskies roam at night all over town! Just because she follow behind them on a bicycle some nights does not make it legal. She talks about them crossing highways and major intersections- does she really care about these dogs? Also, her dogs have attacked a neighbors horse, went after a poor yorkie who was walking by on the sidewalk- on leash- with its owner, and killed one of the other dog's entire litter of puppies. If she was responsible she would have moved out in the middle of nowhere, set up a sanctuary type environment for these dogs- one that they can not escape from- and observed that way. If she had done this it would have been a lot more courtious to everyone around her and safer. I was not happy with the book- do not pay more than a couple bucks for it, it's not worth it.

Rating:
Summary: For True Dog-lovers
Review: This book is an exploration into the social life of domestic dogs. The author, Elizabeth Thomas, kept a large group of dogs in her family house near Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1980s. This group, which numbered as many as 11 dogs at one point, included a pair of pugs, some huskies and sled dogs, and a dingo. Thomas was fascinated at the interactions between the dogs in the group and decided to conduct a formal study of their behaviors. This book represents the results of that study.

Thomas spent some time on Baffin Island observing a family of wolves to get an idea about what kinds of wild instincts the ancestors of her own dogs might have had at some time. She saw how only the alpha female in the wolf pack bred, and the remaining adult members of the pack all assisted in finding food and caring for her puppies. In her own group of dogs, an older female husky took on the alpha female role, a source of great conflict when other female dogs in her group were bred and she was not. Many of the behaviors that Thomas witnessed with the wolves could also be found, sometimes in modified forms, with her own group of dogs. But her own dogs also displayed some particular behaviors that she never saw with the wolves. Through her thousands of hours of observation, she has documented in this book new ways of understanding dog behavior.

After reading this book, it is now much clearer to me why people who have dogs often find that keeping a pair of dogs is in many ways easier than keeping only one. They are clearly social animals that are influenced strongly by instinctive behaviors. Thomas and the rest of her family are very much dog-people- -she relates the story of how her husband shared an ice cream cone with one of the dogs, lick for lick down to the last crumb, and how she treated her dogs for diabetes and took them for specialist veterinary care at Cornell when they became infirm. Thomas, perhaps because of her great fondness for the animals, frequently goes over the line in anthropomorphising them. She speaks of dog consciousness and dog morals. For me though, her arguments aren't convincing. Many of the behaviors that she describes are instinctive, and show no semblance of greater awareness on the part of the dogs. She also abuses terminology, repeatedly referring to animals she cared for as being husband and wife, and she discusses a case of what she terms dog rape. Using such terms when referring to dogs is rather bizarre, since husband and wife involve much more than procreation and child raising- -these are legal concepts preceded by ceremony and they involve extended family ties. And rape is not simply forced sex, but it involves violence and domination, factors that were not present in her example at all. Despite these flaws, the book is quite informative and interesting, and would certainly be useful for dog owners and those contemplating getting dogs.