Amusing, erudite and very informative. I was skeptical when I picked this up, fearing it would be another touchy-feely "love your doggie" sort of book. It's not. Coren is a scientist, pure and simple. He's also an unapologetic, unreconstructed Darwinist of the Dawkins school, which gets huge points from this reader. Highly recommended for dog-owners. ( )

Not as good as Coren's The Intelligence of Dogs. The book had many, many amusing anecdotes in it - Nixon's Bouvier de Flanders bit him on the butt when he wasn't moving fast enough - but it seemed to lack focus. I've read many, many dog training and dog development books so the information about early socialization was nothing new. I tend to rate dog books a bit low because I'm looking for something new and beyond introductory. The most interesting part of the book, to me, was on brain stimulation/potential growth in older dogs. I haven't heard a lot on how to keep your older dog active and sharp, and since my own boy is really an elderly dog now, that is an issue close to home. Worth reading of course, but I have great respect for this researcher/author and was hoping for more. ( )

I read Coren's How Dogs Think earlier this year, and there's a fair degree of overlap between that tome and this. Which is not to say that material's repeated (although it is, to an extent), but is, perhaps, to suggest that the two might have more sensibly been amalgamated into a single book.

The most interesting/fun bit of this book, for me, was the dog questionnaire buried in the central section. This consisted of six sets of ten questions that attempted to give your hound a grading for six attributes (energy, dominance, problem solving, sociability, emotional reactivity and anxiety). The book then includes, as an appendix, a ranking of the purebred breeds on this scale, so that you can, allegedly, see how your dog compares to the 'norm'.

Whilst, as I said, this was fun, it didn't really tell me anything about Mali that I wasn't already aware of (for example, he's very sociable, and has high energy). And whilst I was expecting that the book might then go on and discuss the ramifications of this, it didn't. Instead it went on to talk about selective breeding programmes (including an uncomfortable diversion into the world of dog-fighting), and then finally closed with tales of heroic acts by dogs, and how these might be explained in terms of a gene's-eye-view of evolutional theory.

So, it was a fun read (for the most part), and informative, but ultimately proved something of a 'frothy' read. ( )