Pick Up The Hidden Life Of Dogs Conceived By Elizabeth Marshall Thomas Shared As Digital Copy

I found some of this book interesting being a dog lover most of it had me horrified and pissed off,
She let her dogs run loose through busy streets and highways, let them breed indiscriminately including letting one of her dogs kill another dogs puppies and threw them all in a outdoor pen when they became inconvenient to her lifestyle.

I don't agree with most of the ways she treated and raised her dogs either,
I don't recommend this book, Some parts of this book are fascinating, others are a little bizarre, On the one hand, the author has some interesting insights on animal cognition as a lay person, Her stories about her dogs and their lives, loves, and emotional connections give some powerful credence to the current arguments in the scientific community that mammals have a greater capacity for cognition and emotional complexity than what previous generations were willing to admit.
And her lovely descriptions of her dogs made me read the book with interest, and they are the bulk of the book so it is worth reading.


On the other hand she must be a real handful as a neighbor, since she flouts leash laws and actually believes that any attempts to train or reign in her dogs is "slavery".


In my opinion even though I agree with many of her arguments in favor of animal cognition, her peculiar ideas about raising pets and her lack of understanding that leash laws protect both the humans and the animals in her neighborhood including her own! sadly undercuts her stance on animal cognition.


Animals need an apologist, but she's not the one, Read Temple Grandin or Marc Bekoff instead, I added this book to my list just so I could state, for the record, that I hate this book and the author is the devil.
I think my expectations of this book were that it would be a tad bit more scientific, perhaps with some reference materials accessed, some explanation or deeper theories of dog behavior.
Alas, it was all anecdotes about the author's experiences with her own rather wild dogs, much of which bordered on the anthropomorphic, Still, the read well, the listen, since I was listening to an audio version was somewhat entertaining, and each time a dog passed, I felt sad.
Note: I listened to an abridged version, Perhaps the unabridged book is more scientific, I really liked this book, but at the same time I can understand why this book has generated a lot of unfavorable reviews, The author has some very unconventional ways of being with her dogs which upset people, Following the Husky named Misha for hours around Cambridge, Mass, as he braved traffic and other hazards is a biggie, But still, I found this book fascinating and very moving as she recounts the lives of numerous dogs in her family, Her love and deep respect for them is indisputable, Bethany and Roberta, I think you both would enjoy this book! Because I'm the kind of person who can't contemplating adopting a dog without reading a ton of books about them.
Overthinkers r us.

This seemed very slight to me I suppose I thought it would be more like her Tribe of Tiger, about cats and why they are the way they are

because yes, I overthink my kitties too!.
Hidden Life of Dogs is more Thomas just watching her own dogs, And she's rather disingenuous about it "Oh, I just wanted to see what they did if they got to choose for themselves without humans interfering," she claims or words to that effect, it's not a direct quote.
But she feeds the dogs, has some of them trained as sled dogs, and breeds one of the bitches, Mostly her handsoff policy leads to some of what I would consider irresponsible dog ownership: she lets one dog run through her suburban Cambridge neighborhood to see what he does, even though this infuriates her neighbors and violates local laws, and she allows far too many puppies to be produced and some are killed by the other dogs before spaying the females.
That said, her dogs seem pretty happy overall, receive good food and medical care, and do develop interesting relationships with each other since she doesn't offer them the emotional intimacy most pet dogs receive from their owners.
I can't say that she does badly by the dogs, although she violates a lot of the current norms about how to handle them,

Her writing style is terribly stilted and twee she constantly refers to one dog that had a rough start in an Alaskan village as having been born a slave, describes a pair of huskies who bond strongly as "married," and in general the pose seems to be straining for a kind of simple poetry but not getting there.
Her conclusion is that what dogs want is to have complex relationships with each other and almost nothing to do with humans, given the choice but in most households with multiple dogs in my experience, this doesn't seem to be true.
If she had not been so withdrawn from the dogs, perhaps they would have wanted a stronger relationship with her This is a beautiful book.
Thomas writes gracefully and forthrightly and, clearly, judging by the many negative reviews of this book, her writing is not for the faint of heart.
This is what I'd call "thick" ethnography thick in the sense that she writes from a place that is in the thick of things,

Thomas has wonderful empathy and insight into dogs' minds, She rightly challenges the alltoohuman ban on "anthropomorphism, " She's way nicer about about challenging that ban that I am, Thomas points out that humans are animals and, like all animals, we share common ancestors, have long sequences of genetic material in common, and have similar brain structures.
So why wouldn't we have similar emotions and cognitive abilities To assume that humans are somehow unique is, in my view, precisely the hubris that has allowed us to dominate the planetand to destroy it.
While I wouldn't care that we are destroying the planet if it were only a matter of humans dying out, the fact of the matter is we are taking all life forms down with us.


In "The Hidden Life" Thomas wanted to answer a relatively simple and straightforward question: what do dogs want Again, humans tend to think they know everything and to know what is best for everyone though in fact we haven't a clue.
Trained as an anthropologist, Thomas used the participantobserver method to find out what her dogs wanted, This entailed letting them, so to speak, run wild, She tracked the extent of their ranging by the calls she got from the people upon whose doorsteps the dogs ended up, They're smart: the travel far, but then let a human call home so they can get a ride,

A lot of reviewers are really upset about this, stating as if they know best that Thomas doesn't deserve pets, They're correct: in Thomas's view, pet "ownership" is a sort of slavery, That's why it's called ownership!

But I doubt the people who left angry reviews actually read the whole book, If they had, they'd have been left in a puddle of tears: the last half of this short book is very moving, tenderhearted, and full of insights about dogs' minds and hearts.


I think if you can read this book understanding that it is nothing to do with being a "pet" "owner" and everything to do with being inquisitive and empathetic, you will, as I did, learn a lot about your best friends.
I couldn't get all the way through this, The author states that it's okay to anthropomorphize dogs, since they do the same with us, I'm fine with that. What I couldn't get past was the fact that the author apparently doesn't understand the physiology of dogs,

For instance, she speaks about a male dog meeting his mate after she has had a litter of puppies, The male dog, not being able to see the puppies who are under their mom's thigh, still seems to know that the puppies are there.
The author says paraphrasing, The puppies aren't making any noise, so he can't hear them, I can't smell them, so it's not that he smells them, How does he know that the puppies are there

Dogs have much better smell than humans, I thought that was pretty common knowledge, Also, they have way better hearing than we do, And if the puppies were on the mom's teat, then you better believe they were making little sucking noises, Argh. After reading that, I just couldn't read any more,

Plus, I find the idea of letting a nonneutered male dog roam around free in Cambridge to be irresponsible in the extreme, We have enough puppies out there thanks, This was an extremely quick, but extremely absorbing, read, Elizabeth Thomas asks the question that we should be appalled more scienceminded people don't ask: What do dogs do when they're not with their people She answers the question by following a husky, Misha, as he roamed around the city.
This did bother me a bit, but she assures us that he was very canny about cars, However, that doesn't help the fact that leashless dogs alarm some people, violate most laws and ordinances, and can turn people against dogs and dogowners.
She later adopts a female husky and has a whole pack of dogs, She leaves them to themselves and observe as they slowly become less humanoriented and more like wolves, It's a fascinating story, and one that helps people cut through the nonsense and puffy anthropomorphism of many dog stories, straight through to the heart of what makes a dog a dog.
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