Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

I have always wanted to enter into the consciousness of a nonhuman creature. I would like to know what the world looks like to a dog, or sounds like, or smells like. I would like to visit a dog’s mind… to have another dog look at me and see not something different but something the same.

In this beautiful account of thirty years of living with dogs, wolves, and dingoes and of the ways their lives intertwined with her own, the novelist and anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas brings us a completely new understanding of dogs by writing a sort of deeply truthful ethological poem, a loving yet absolutely unsentimental chronicle of the lives of a dozen dogs based on hundreds of thousands of hours of observation.

Meet Misha, a husky who daily jumped the fence and roamed a suburban territory of 160 square miles, and Maria, his true love, who bore his first puppies and then, after he moved away with new owners, gave herself indifferently to any adequate male passerby. Meet Bingo, the anxious and asthmatic pug who risked life itself to protect what he regarded as the Thomases’ territory. Watch the Thomas dogs forming themselves surreptitiously into the domestic equivalent of a wolf pack. Read this book, and you will learn more about how dogs think, and what dogs want, than you have ever suspected. What matters most to dogs? Simple: other dogs. But since dogs have been living with humans for thirty thousand years, “dogs need us more than we need them, and they know it”.

The Hidden Life of Dogs is a poignant, entertaining, sometimes heartbreaking little book, vividly illustrated with drawings of the ways dogs behave. This is no training manual (Thomas doesn’t train her dogs, but lets them train themselves), nor an abstract disquisition on canines. But whether or not a dog is part of your life, and no matter how much you think you know already, you will learn something new about dogs here—something no other book will tell you.

January 1, 1993 by Mariner Books

MY ACCOUNT

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The Hidden Life of Dogs

The Hidden Life of Dogs

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