For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend


Posted on Mar 20, 2008
By Melissa Holbrook Pierson

By Patricia B. McConnell, Ph.D.

Ballantine Books, 332 pages, $24.95

Available on Amazon.com

I really, really hope no one backs me up against a wall and forces me to choose just one book on canine behavior to recommend, because lately there have been a spate of keen and insightful explorations of what makes man's best friend tick (and bark, and play, and think). But the work of Patricia McConnell would be among the select few I would toss at my provocateur, hoping to clock him in the head and make my escape.

First in The Other End of the Leash, and more recently in For the Love of a Dog, this professor of zoology and certified Applied Animal Behaviorist explains the neurology and biology that underlies all the amazing and sometimes perplexing things dogs do, from their point of view. She covers the range of emotions dogs experience - fear, anger, joy, the impulse to learn, and, yes, love - and shows us how they're both very much like humans, but also peculiarly their own creatures. And she does so in an entertaining, personable style that is nonetheless firmly grounded in the science of predecessors such as Konrad Lorenz, Pavlov, and B. F. Skinner, as well as her colleagues Ian Dunbar, Temple Grandin, and Brenda Aloff.  

Her own pack of sheepdogs gives her the jumping-off point for discussions of what makes dogs happy (brain chemistry, and being with YOU!) and what makes dogs, say, aggressive: she goes into the origin and treatment, using examples from her own practice as a behaviorist who works with problem dogs. She describes how dogs express themselves - and offers photos that perfectly demonstrate it - and says, "The expressiveness of dogs gives them a direct line to the primitive and powerful emotional centers of our brains, and connects us in ways that nothing else ever could." Ain't that the truth.

The wonderful thing about truly loving a dog is that it can make us curious to learn everything we can about the object of our affection, an animal who at once seems so mysterious and so transparent. And the more we know, the richer the relationship becomes. This is a book that deepens that understanding. It is the first one I'll throw.
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