Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know

by Alexandra Horowitz

explain dog behavior. The recently popular dog trainers are admired for their full embrace of the wolf side of dogs. They are often seen mocking the second group, which treats their dogs as quadrupedal, slobbery people. Neither has got it right. The answer is plumb in the middle of these approaches. Dogs are animals, of course, with atavistic tendencies, but to stop here is to have a blinkered view of the natural history of the dog. They have been retooled. Now they are animals with an asterisk. The inclination to look at dogs as animals rather than creations of our psychology is essentially right. To avoid anthropomorphizing, some turn to what might be called unsympathetic