Aug

20

Dog Days: Whose Leash Is It, Anyway?

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

August 20, 2007 |

The Other End Of The Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs by Patricia McConnell, Ph.D.

Dogs do funny things. Anyone who’s ever lived with and loved a dog probably has numerous stories of times their dogs did something strange, funny, or even even seemingly supernaturally intelligent. For anyone who’s thinking of getting a dog, or who lives with one and wants to understand their canine companion better, there are few books that are more thorough, more clearly written, and more downright entertaining than The Other End Of The Leash.

Patricia McConnell is an Applied Animal Behaviorist, with a Ph.D. in zoology, a minor in psychology, and a speciality in ethology, the study of animal behavior. Even though she’s got impressive academic credentials, McConnell writes for the lay person. The Elliot Erwitt photo on the cover probably gave that away, but McConnell isn’t just an academic: she also, at the time of writing The Other End Of The Leash, had been working as a dog trainer for more than twelve years, was a breeder and trainer of working Border Collies, a competitor in dog herding trials, and, in her own words, “a dog owner who makes no apology for being crazy in love with my dogs”–and I think we’d all agree she never should apologize.

What makes McConnell’s book really fascinating, though, is that, through both instructional passages and concrete examples, she explains the differences between simian and canine psychology, and the way we send signals that are too easily misinterpreted. Dogs don’t hug each other, and, to a nervous dog, eye contact, even if it’s accidental, can be an aggressive signal. Devoting whole chapters to “translating”, personalities, love and loss, and other subjects where we understand, or fail to understand our dogs. Our relationship with dogs goes back thousands of years, and it’s a relationship that works best when we understand each other.


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