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nuthatch's review against another edition
2.0
I didn't realize this book would be so heavy on philosophy. I guess I should have known better. The author is a professor of philosophy. She also trains dogs and horses. I would have liked more about animal behavior and less heavy philosophy.
fallona's review against another edition
3.0
This is a hard book to rate. On the one hand, it's genuinely thought-provoking: it took me longer to read than its length suggests not because the material is particularly difficult, but because I spent a lot of time thinking about it after reading it. Whether or not I agree with it is beside the point; it makes me think, and makes me consider the human relationship with domestic animals.
A number of Goodreads reviews of this book complain that it's heavy on the philosophical and literary references, and relatively light on the actual animal training. In my opinion, this is its strength--firstly, it seems mainly intended as a philosophy book, not a training book. I don't have the background in philosophy to comment on that aspect at any length, really--but it survives as an interesting and readable book in part because it isn't a training book. It's very, very much a product of its era on its training methods--and while there are still trainers today who worship Bill Koehler's methods and advocate for hard physical corrections (positive punishment) in dog training, a lot has changed since the mid-1980s in how people train dogs and write about canine cognition.
I enjoyed reading the book and thinking about its assertions. The idea that stories and language shape the way humans interact with dogs (and horses), what we expect of them and the standards to which we hold them, is fascinating. The interplay between morality and stories, the idea that animals uphold certain moral ideals and have a sense of a sacred (if not one precisely aligned with the human) is... controversial, at the very least, but it seems the book is more a reaction against the line of thought that suggested (and sometimes still suggests) that animals don't experience emotions and that anything that smells even slightly of anthropomorphism is anathema. This is far less common these days, but the book is a relic of its own era.
And in fairness to the perhaps rather romantic idea that underpins the book, maybe there's something to the idea that my own dog (and the previous dog of the same breed I've had before) would not respond too well to many of the (now) antiquated training methods described: he's not a bird dog from generations of dogs trained with check lines to turn him end-over-end to teach attention and ear pinches hard enough to elicit a vocalization to train a forced retrieve; he's a descendant of reindeer herders with an origin legend that says dogs and humans made an agreement once, long ago, to work together for mutual benefit and ascribing sometimes supernatural importance to the treatment of dogs. And of course, those stories also deal with language--with the idea that dogs could speak, but that not all humans retained the ability to understand them. It's a different story, and perhaps these differing stories have informed the traits different groups of humans have favored in selecting for and against certain canine temperaments (setting aside the fact that most modern breeds really are very modern inventions, and that dogs exist for themselves, too--what's the informing moral tale of a street dog unselected by any conscious human choice?). But that, too, isn't the point of the book.
Which is what I mean by this being a thought-provoking book. I can't really say whether it was "good" or not, or even whether I enjoyed it in a conventional sense--but certainly, it was stimulating. It's a good exercise in listening to a voice from another era that had very interesting things to say, while recognizing that yes, this is speaking from the not-so-distant past.
It's interesting.
A number of Goodreads reviews of this book complain that it's heavy on the philosophical and literary references, and relatively light on the actual animal training. In my opinion, this is its strength--firstly, it seems mainly intended as a philosophy book, not a training book. I don't have the background in philosophy to comment on that aspect at any length, really--but it survives as an interesting and readable book in part because it isn't a training book. It's very, very much a product of its era on its training methods--and while there are still trainers today who worship Bill Koehler's methods and advocate for hard physical corrections (positive punishment) in dog training, a lot has changed since the mid-1980s in how people train dogs and write about canine cognition.
I enjoyed reading the book and thinking about its assertions. The idea that stories and language shape the way humans interact with dogs (and horses), what we expect of them and the standards to which we hold them, is fascinating. The interplay between morality and stories, the idea that animals uphold certain moral ideals and have a sense of a sacred (if not one precisely aligned with the human) is... controversial, at the very least, but it seems the book is more a reaction against the line of thought that suggested (and sometimes still suggests) that animals don't experience emotions and that anything that smells even slightly of anthropomorphism is anathema. This is far less common these days, but the book is a relic of its own era.
And in fairness to the perhaps rather romantic idea that underpins the book, maybe there's something to the idea that my own dog (and the previous dog of the same breed I've had before) would not respond too well to many of the (now) antiquated training methods described: he's not a bird dog from generations of dogs trained with check lines to turn him end-over-end to teach attention and ear pinches hard enough to elicit a vocalization to train a forced retrieve; he's a descendant of reindeer herders with an origin legend that says dogs and humans made an agreement once, long ago, to work together for mutual benefit and ascribing sometimes supernatural importance to the treatment of dogs. And of course, those stories also deal with language--with the idea that dogs could speak, but that not all humans retained the ability to understand them. It's a different story, and perhaps these differing stories have informed the traits different groups of humans have favored in selecting for and against certain canine temperaments (setting aside the fact that most modern breeds really are very modern inventions, and that dogs exist for themselves, too--what's the informing moral tale of a street dog unselected by any conscious human choice?). But that, too, isn't the point of the book.
Which is what I mean by this being a thought-provoking book. I can't really say whether it was "good" or not, or even whether I enjoyed it in a conventional sense--but certainly, it was stimulating. It's a good exercise in listening to a voice from another era that had very interesting things to say, while recognizing that yes, this is speaking from the not-so-distant past.
It's interesting.
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