Dog Sense begins with an excellent discussion on the evolution of the dog as a domestic companion to humans and a thorough description of canine and wolf social structure. Along the way, the author, John Bradshaw, thoroughly dissects  and discredits force-based and behavioral training approaches as well as effectively demolishing the myths that “dogs are cute wolves” and that humans must establish dominance over dogs. But many readers are likely to be turned off by the heavy, overly scientific tone.

Although the subtitle of Dog Sense is “How the new science of dog behavior can make you a better friend to your pet,” it is misleading. Dog Sense will teach you a lot about where dogs came from and about their social structure, but it really won’t teach you much about how to enhance your friendship with your dog. Despite the marketing copy (and the subtitle), there is little about the dog-human relationship other than a convincing (if obvious) statement that force-based training could damage that relationship.

While Bradshaw provides an excellent discussion of association, habituation, and sensitization and emphasizes the need for early, positive socialization, he fails to connect these ideas with how to best teach dogs. In fact, he denies that dogs can build associations from previous experiences or even remember those experiences (key elements of learning) — even though he provides several examples that show that they do display those skills.

Again contradicting the marketing copy, the book does not present a dog’s perspective. Instead, Bradshaw falls into the familiar anthropocentric habit of denying that dogs can feel complex emotions because they lack spoken language, going so far as to state that it is “unethical (his emphasis) to make” the assumption that dogs experience the same array of emotions that we do. His anthropocentric bias is humorously illustrated in Bradshaw’s comment that dogs never evolved the ability to see colors because it wasn’t necessary: the example he provides is that carnivorous wolves wouldn’t have needed the ability to choose the ripest berries. Wolves are opportunistic omnivores who do, indeed, eat berries. More to the point, though, neither dogs nor wolves need to rely on sight to choose ripe berries; they simply follow their far more sensitive noses to the choicest of fruits, as many a domestic dog has been known to do.

Despite a too-common reliance on old myths and a too-anthropocentric focus, there is much solid information in Dog Sense and it is a valuable addition to any dog professional’s library, especially for those who seek a detailed analysis of the science of the evolution, domestication, and social history of dogs.

The marketing and jacket copy for Your Dog Is Your Mirror, by Kevin Behan talk about the human-dog connection and tout the author’s rejection of the dominance-focused training model he learned from his father. They also swoon over the author’s amazing insights. Sadly, the book does not live up to its marketing.

While Behan says he has rejected a dominance-focused force training approach (except for Schutzhund training), he does not propose an alternate method of training or address training methodology much at all. The bulk of the book is given over to a novel and bizarre theory that Behan devised at the age of 23, having (according to him) read and rejected everything that biology and behavioral science — and his father, a leading dog trainer of the time — had to say about dog behavior and training. One morning, as he was letting the dogs his father boarded out of their kennels, he had the epiphany that “None of the dogs were entertaining any intention whatsoever, even though many looked as if they had the specific intent and goal of getting outside, and some appeared to understand what I expected of them … I now knew there was no intention in anything a dog might do.”

Instead, he posits, everything a dog does is a reflection of the owner’s emotions, both present and past, conscious and unconscious, and in fact, could be a reaction to any experience the owner has ever had. He even explains away the idea that a dog could ever feel aggression toward him (or anyone), stating instead that “when a dog went to bite me, I could see that the dog didn’t intend to hurt me, dominate me, or defend himself or his territory … there was something positive about me the dog was attracted to. The dog had no goal: he was simply attracted to me with a force of desire that for some reason was blocked, hence the aggression.” He does not, however, tell readers what he might have been feeling that could have triggered the dog’s behavior.

Behan rejects any notion that a dog can form intentions or even think. In fact, he utterly rejects the idea of dogs as individuals. Therefore, the canine perspective is completely absent from this book; Behan simply denies that it exists. A dog is “not an individuated consciousness, endowed with her own will that’s empowered by personal volition and informed by a self-contained sense of self or ego,” he writes. He adds that no animals can think, claiming instead that their entire consciousness is formed by something he calls a “networked intelligence,” defined as “a higher faculty of intelligence that in animal consciousness completely supersedes the brain.” Bizarrely, that would appear to rule out instinct, too, as a driver of canine behavior. Behan explains any dog’s behavior, no matter how complex, as a function of what its owner is feeling

Despite having worked with, in his own estimation, several thousand dogs, Behan provides few examples to illustrate his theories. The anecdotes he does give are “as told to him” by training clients, not behaviors he personally witnessed. Nonetheless, he feels confident enough in his theories to determine that one client’s dog reportedly habitually left a bit of food in his bowl because the dog’s owner always leaves some food on her plate; the dog is connecting with whatever emotional issue causes the owner to do so. Another client’s dog is aggressive toward children because, Behan discovers, the owner feels lasting pain and guilt over having “not been there” for her daughters when they were young, many years earlier.

Much of the book is a sort of memoir and retelling of his “discoveries” about dog consciousness; there is also considerable psycho-analysis of the humans who own the dogs he trains. The book does not address multiple-dog households where each dog has a very different personality and behaviors, nor does it explain how to apply Behan’s theory to dogs who live and interact with multiple humans. There is no index and no references, making it hard to find specific information.

While I agree with the author that emotion is a primary driver of dog (as well as human) behavior, I strongly disagree that it is the dog owner’s emotion that is solely responsible for the dog’s behavior. I also completely reject any notion of dogs that denies their considerable cognitive abilities, including thinking and planning and, yes, forming intentions. Dogs are separate beings from us, not merely empty vessels that reflect the worst of our emotional pasts back to us. They are brilliant and intuitive beings who deserve to be loved and valued for the individuals they are. Regarding them as our “mirrors” — as extensions of ourselves — is arrogant and egocentric and a terrible disservice to all dogs.

A longtime New York Times bestseller, Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz clearly has mainstream appeal; it is thoroughly enough referenced and indexed to appeal to canine professionals as well. The author, a psychologist and animal behaviorist, is no stranger to scientific research, and is a lifelong dog owner and dog lover.

The book is informative and entertaining, and it offers insights that will promote greater human understanding of dogs. It concludes with a strong chapter that suggests ways humans can relate better to the dogs in their households. The book also does an outstanding job of describing dogs’ sensory experience of the world, devoting nearly 100 pages to the subject.

But in its claim to present the canine perspective, the book gets a mixed review. Horowitz does decode some situations according to a canine point of view — her discussion of doggy raincoats and the way that their tight embrace might make dogs feel “subdued” rather than protected is an amusing example. But in other examples, a strong anthropomorphic bias comes through. For instance, after lengthy and well-done sections describing dogs’ vision and how it differs from humans’ and explaining that smell is dogs’ primary source of information, Horowitz attributes her dog’s hesitance to enter an elevator to age-related deterioration of her vision or difficulty adjusting to low light after being outside. These are both reasons a human might hesitate. Possible reasons that consider dogs’ experience of the world — that the crevice between the floor and the elevator harbors many strange smells or an unpleasant memory of the moving floor (though this is unlikely in the case of Horowitz’s apartment-dwelling dog) — are not mentioned.

Horowitz displays her scientist roots in her reliance on research studies to draw conclusions, even when the studies are poorly designed, and even when real-life experience points to different conclusions. A study of dogs’ reactions to “emergency” situations is a prime example. In this study, humans set up a highly contrived scenario, first having owners introduce their dogs to a “friendly stranger” and then having the owners feign an emergency — a heart attack, for example. None of the dogs who were tested did what the humans wanted them to do (seek help from the “stranger”). Calling this a “clever” experiment, Horowitz draws the conclusion that dogs “simply do not naturally recognize or react to an emergency situation.” A more obvious conclusion, and one that gives more credit to the dogs’ intelligence, is that the dogs could tell that the people were faking — none of the scents and signals that indicate true alarm or physical dysfunction would have been present in the “actors.” Some dogs do, in fact, react to emergency situations, even when they have not been specifically trained to do so.

Horowitz relies exclusively on some studies that dogs “failed,” such as the mirror test for self-awareness and a test of whether dogs felt “guilt” if they “stole” a treat, in arriving at her limited conclusions about doggy consciousness and self-awareness. She fails to acknowledge (or notice?) that the tests cited are anthropocentric in design — that is, they test things that are relevant to people but not to dogs — and were conducted in unfamiliar, highly controlled environments where the dogs’ behavior would be far from natural. Other research showing strong evidence of dog self-awareness is not mentioned. Finally, and despite a section at the beginning of the book chiding scientists’ tendency to see one animal as representative of a species, she makes many broad statements about dog behavior that seem to be based on her observations of her one dog.

Overall, the book provides an excellent description of dogs’ sensory perceptions of the world and a wonderful guide to improving our treatment of dogs, but I think that its conclusions about dog behavior, consciousness, and self-awareness are questionable.