Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
thought-provoking, but some points overstated, January 12, 2003
By A Customer
The first half of the book was quite enjoyable and thought-provoking. The authors describe how dogs evolved from scavenger village dogs, rather than directly from wolves. They argue that dogs are a distinct and extraordinary creature, not an inferior subspecies of wolves, with behavioral traits that are different from and often surpassing wolves. I found the second half of the book, however, to be a bit preachy, pessimistic, and overstated. One main premise seemed to be that keeping dogs as household pets (as opposed to working dogs) is a lose-lose situation for the dog and the owner. Humans lose because pet dogs take valuable resources, time and money, away from our species, resources we should be investing in our offspring. Pet dogs rarely give back to us in terms of affection or whatever enough to make up for what they take from us. Dogs lose because they are slaves to our every whim, often subjected to inadequate care and boredom, and purebreds are being bred for appearance at the expense of their own health and genetic vitality. The author lashed out at showdog breeders. Point taken, but I think the authors overstated their case, throwing the baby out with the bath water. I don't believe dogs tap us out of resources to an unhealthy degree. If anything the huge dog industry (food, supplies, vet care...etc.) benefits our economy. I know many families who find great joy in owning a dog as a pet, and I think dogs add to a parent-child relationship rather than detract. I also thought it quite hypocritcal, given the author's use of dogs for sled racing, when the author ripped on the use of dogs to assist people with special needs, such as people bound to a wheelchair. The author argued that it is unhealthy and unnatural for the dog, but that sled dog racing was somehow exempt from the criticism.
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33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Prepare to be annoyed and fascinated, February 12, 2002
By A Customer
This book blew me away with its insights and made me want to throw it across the room many times. It is simply the best evolutionary and biological look at dogs around, while at the same time is seriously marred by the authors' excursions out of science into a weird pseudo-ethical debate about "what's REALLY best for dogs."
As the owner of a young Great Pyrenees (now 20 months) brought home at 5-1/2 weeks as a pet out of a litter of working livestock guardian dogs, I was fascinated by the Coppingers' description of the "predatory sequence." I could suddenly understand the behaviors I'd observed at the dog park, the startling differences between my dog and the border collies there. The very idea that there are literally millions of the type of dog I own--a breed that seems unusual if not rare in the U.S.--out there in central Asia even today migrating with herds of sheep as they have done for millenia...this just gives me chills. As humans we like to tell ourselves stories about our breeds: how they developed, why they have this or that characteristic that was "bred into them" for some special purpose. And yet the story the Coppingers tell about the livestock guardian "breeds" rings so true in a historical, scientific and geographical context that it is awe-inspiring. All of this part of the book is well-argued and based on convincing evidence.
While I do agree that human breeding of dogs according to strict, but essentially fanciful, "breed-types" should be subject to serious ethical discussion, I wish the Coppingers had simply made their effective points about the underlying nature of breeds and left it at that. The cloudy discussion of whether or not people's present-day association with dogs is really "bad" in some esoteric way for dogs just doesn't come across as convincing in this book. Their ideas, which are not very precise, seem to be based on biological definitions of "evolutionary success" that are in themselves just human words and concepts with no more functional weight than an AKC breed definition. This is an area where the Coppingers seem to have abandoned their incisive real-world observations and fallen for their own "scientific" jargon.
Do we want to know if the human-dog association is bad for dogs? That's like asking the question, Is marriage bad for people? Obviously for some dogs it is wonderful, for others it is a disaster, for others it is irrelevant. Dogs hardly seem to be going extinct--what more can they ask from an evolutionary perspective?
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29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Startling? A Starling Mixed Bag, May 10, 2003
By A Customer
My recommendation is to read this book with a highlighter in each hand -- one color for illogical personal conclusions, and the other for valid observations (often made by others). It is fun to read -- but a truly mixed bag full of potential pitfalls for the novice that accepts as proven truth the comments made by the authors. This book undertakes a topic of tremendous interest to almost every dog owner -- no matter what breed! It is written in a readable fashion while seeming to be based on the years of experience that the Coppingers have had. Thus, while I own Ray Coppinger's non-serious book on "fishing dogs," I was hoping that this book would be as insightful as "The Domestic Dog," edited by James Serpell (which includes a chapter by Ray Coppinger and Richard Schneider -- carefully edited I now suspect) or as informative as "Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals" edited by Grandin or even the small volume "A Concise Survey of Animal Behavior" by Honore and Klopfer. It isn't. The Coppingers have evidently spent years with dogs; they are often cited in work with livestock guard dogs and have a confessed love of sled dogs. Interesting topic - some real experience -- all that is lacking is an editor or someone to point out the serious lacks in logic that the Coppingers blythely sprinkle throughout this book. Because the authors knew a border collie ("with papers" p. 174) that they describe as a "superb sled dog," they make the leap that "any dog will do for any job if raised and trained properly" (p. 154). In fact, attempts to support this theory have failed miserably. A prime example that I am familiar with as a livestock producer and one that is within the Coppingers area of expertise was the attempt to use retrievers (Chesapeake?) as livestock guardians in western sheep flocks. That unsuccessful endeavor has been deleted from memory -- and the pages of this text. Instead, this text published in 2001 quotes 1985 initial observations about training and guard dogs and omits almost two more decades of real study on that topic -- some by the same source -- research which does not support the authors' premise. How many other topics in this book are as slanted in coverage? A readable, fun book which must be read much like any work of fiction -- it's up to the reader to pick out the eternal truths and to simply puzzle over the rest.
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