Sunday, December 19, 2021

Five of the best books on how dogs love people

Clive D.L. Wynne is the founding director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University. Previously, he was founding director of the Canine Cognition and Behavior Laboratory at the University of Florida, the first lab of its kind in the United States. A native of the United Kingdom, Wynne has lived and worked in Germany and Australia as well as the United States and gives frequent talks to paying audiences around the world. The author of several academic books and of more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles that count among the most highly cited studies on dog psychology, he has also published pieces in Psychology Today, New Scientist, and the New York Times, and has appeared in several television documentaries about dog science on National Geographic Explorer, PBS, and the BBC.

Wynne's latest book is Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You.

At Shepherd he tagged five of the best books on how dogs love people, including:
Darwin's Dogs: How Darwin's Pets Helped Form a World-Changing Theory of Evolution by Emma Townshend

So (so) much has been written about Charles Darwin but this short book captures a side of the great man’s life that had been hiding in plain sight: his love of dogs. When Darwin was a youngster his father complained he “care[d] for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching.” There was only one period of Darwin’s adulthood when he was not living with dogs and that was the five years he spent going 'round the world on a boat named – ironically enough – the Beagle. A love of dogs informed Darwin’s thinking on everything from marriage to his epochal theory of evolution by natural selection.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue