The Social Lives of Dogs

For those who are already fans of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and her fine anthropologist's approach to studying animal culture, THE SOCIAL LIVES OF DOGS may be the finest jewel in her crown of works. This book chronicles an approximate fifteen-year study which included, in the order that they came to live in the Thomas household, Sundog, Misty, Pearl, Ruby, and Sheilah--dogs of varying breeds and mixes. Thomas tells, in her own beautiful and compassionate way, the story of each dog's incorporation into the lives of the other dogs, people, cats, and birds in her home. She succeeds beautifully in her sincere effort always to explain her animal observations and then to try to understand and interpret from the animal's point of view. What more could one ask of an anthropologist/ethologist?For me, Thomas taps into something very deep and important--something that's difficult to find words for. But I know that it has to do with a message that says it's okay to feel deep emotions about your animals, to talk to them and hear their answers, and to sense and acknowledge their deep feelings. Even though many of us have known and felt this intuitively, it is neither the message that our Judeo/Christian tradition nor our Linnean scala natura science of classification has wanted to deliver to us.In the introduction she poses the questions: "Can we understand the mind of an animal? . . .[do] animals have consciousness?" and then proceeds to say that for some scientists . . . "the view that animals are incapable of conscious thought, or even of emotion, has acquired an aura of scientific correctness, and at the moment is the prevailing dogma, as if some very compelling evidence to the contrary was not a problem." This reader is happy to say that her own experiences with animals have certainly provided "compelling evidence to the contrary."On a final note, THE SOCIAL LIVES OF DOGS, even though written around the lives of the canines concerned, reads a little bit like Thomas's personal memoir. She puts a lot into perspective in the excellent epilogue, which I found to be the real icing on the cake. Even as Thomas finds "grace" in canine company, so does she tell their story with much grace. This book is a wonderful read!

Dogs, cats, birds and humans all co-exist in relative harmony in Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' household. Although the humans are the dominant species in the home it seems to be the dogs who orchestrate much of the social interaction. By so eloquently describing how her dogs interact in her home and by describing the history of the dog she shows us what an amazing creature the dog truly is, and how truly blessed we are as a species that they have chosen to associate with us.

A savvy TV producer once invited New Hampshire author Elizabeth Marshall Thomas to host a local cable show for the Humane Society. Her job was to introduce four animals in need of homes; an unruly dog with an incontinence problem, two feral kittens and one normal cat. Thomas adopted all four of them.Anthropologist, novelist, and animal lover, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes of dog behavior with sympathy, insight and considerable humor. Following her bestseller, "The Hidden Life of Dogs" (which explored dog-with-dog culture), "The Social Life of Dogs," examines dog adaptation to human households, or, in the Thomas case, a multiple-species household.At the time the book opens, Thomas and her husband, Steve, had three old dogs left from "The Hidden Life of Dogs" pack and didn't want any more. Steve "didn't want another animal of any description" and Elizabeth, while "always open to another dog," plans to wait until the old dogs died before getting an adult dog she can learn from, an Indian dog from Northern Canada, say, or a pariah dog from a Third World village. What she doesn't want is the white dog who quietly appears and won't leave - an American purebred cross.Thomas does not approve of purebreds. "The important features of a dog are his brains and his persona," not looks. Still, unable to find the dog's owners, after a few days Thomas begins to ask herself, "what, after all, is really so wrong with a few purebred strains?"And so begins her relationship with Sundog, the animal whose ashes will someday be mingled with her and Steve's. Her descriptions of Sundog's adoption of human mannerisms (the three old dogs rejected him totally) - his sharing of food, for instance, are touching and fascinating. Although Sundog did not like popcorn, the ritual of sharing was important to him - a kernel for Sundog, a kernel for Steve - until the bowl was empty. One evening Steve wanted to read without interruption. When Sundog took his usual chair at the table, Steve said "no" and put a handful of popcorn on the floor. Sundog, hurt, left the room. Although they swiftly followed him with the bowl, entreating him to return, Sundog never touched popcorn again and never returned to the table to share.The next dog was a purebred (for what reason Marshall does not explain) purchased as a companion for Sundog. Having spent her first year of life without stimulation in a crate, the dog is a mess and Thomas buys her out of pity. Sundog rejects her. Misty's difficulties teach Marshall a great deal about the importance of early learning and Misty's insecurities about keeping "place two" lead to behavioral difficulties with visitors (canine or human), incoming cats and, especially, incoming dogs.The third dog, Pearl, came from Marshall's son in Colorado and furnishes much of the book's hilarity and color. Protective, kindly and dignified, she disarms aggressive Misty by respectfully ignoring her furious antics. Over a period of fou

While I agree with other reviews I've read of this book, I don't think they convey how enjoyable the read is, nor how funny parts of it are. I find myself laughing out loud a lot. I think it is great, and I will certainly look at my dogs differently now.

Who could be better qualified to write about the hearts, minds and souls of dogs than Elizabeth Marshall Thomas? Not only is she the celebrated anthropologist who was the first to chronicle the lives of the Bushmen; not only has she studied and published scientific and popular articles on animals from African elephants to Arctic wolves; but she quite literally grew up among dogs. As we learn in the first captivating sentences of this splendid, surprising book, one of her most attentive caretakers as a child was a Newfoundland dog, whose job, as the dog saw it, was to keep the helpless human child from drowning in the sea while the dog's group, her family, lived at the beach. The dog was actually her nanny, writes Thomas--the sort of insight that at once makes perfect sense and yet takes one's breath away, and the sort of insight that characterizes this book. The Social Lives of Dogs is as wide-ranging and as deep as Thomas' best-selling The Hidden Life of Dogs. That book asked the simple and profound question: What do dogs want? The answer: other dogs. But the social grace of dogs is such that they are capable of forming deep, lasting, complex and highly individualized relationships with many species other than their own (including birds, who are, as Thomas points out, more closely related to dinosaurs than to dogs), and this is the fertile ground explored in this riveting new book. In it, we meet a great new cast of characters: brave, stoic, soldierly Sundog, a former stray; Misty, a victim of AKC breeding who grew up in a crate and didn't understand grass; curly-tailed Pearl, who made an art of barking. The Thomas household is, as she writes, a "churning cauldron" of (at its high point) five dogs, a dozen cats, five parrots and a varying number of people. There's a dog-chasing cat named Rajah and a cat-biting cockatoo named Carmen. These animals don't always behave in the ways we think they "should"--they are far too creative, inventive and individual. And that's the delight of their keenly-observed stories--stories which collectively form a rich biography of their relationships with one another. Although The Hidden Life of Dogs was highly praised by some of the world's top animal behaviorists, including George Schaller, in some circles the book was controversial, as The Social Lives of Dogs will surely be. A few scientists still consider the mere suggestion that animals think is "anthropomorphic." But for the rest of us, who know that non-human as well as human animals may enjoy rich inner lives, this book offers profound evidence that our closest animal friends still surprise us--and have much to teach us about social graces.