ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS - The Hidden Life of Dogs

London England, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994. Reprint, Binding: Cloth, Very Good/Fine/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall 0297814613 Hardback What do dogs want? 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 author brings us a completely new understanding of dogs. It is a tender, intimate yet absolutely unsentimental chronicle of the lives of a dozen dogs, based on thousands of hours of close observation. Like an anthropologist studying a tribe, the author came to understand the lives her dogs led, their emotions, desires, hierarchies, and sometimes their dreams. The dogs themselves were her guides, beginning with Misha, a husky who nightly roamed a suburban territory of 160 square miles, and Maria, his true and faithful love, who bore his first puppies and then, after he moved away with new owners, gave herself indifferently to any adequate passerby. As the author watched, the dogs, of differing breeds, abilities and temperaments, surreptitiously formed themselves into the domestic equivalent of a wolf pack, and settled into a daily life unregulated by human rules. This is no training manual or abstract essay. Rather, like the great animal studies by writers such as Jane Goodall, it is an insight into a species different from our own, but in many respects surprisingly the same. Read it, and you will learn more about how dogs think, and what dogs want, than you would ever have believed.