“While we can stand in one place and take in the world, dogs must do much more moving themselves in order to absorb it all.”
“objects only continue to exist as long as an 0door is emitted and he inhales.”
I love these two passages, I think it really brings home how important it is for dogs to be allowed to smell their world! I was watching CM while I was lounging in my hotel room in fiji and was utterly disgusted by this idea that dogs must not be allowed to sniff the ground while they go for a walk, that walking right next to their “pack leader” was some how a “normal” dog behavior. Yee Gadds! A dog who isn’t sniffing is not normal. It would be like someone inviting you for a walk on the beach at sunset and then insisting that you wear a blindfold.
But I digress. “Inside of a Dog” overall was beautifully written and Horowitz’s poetic descriptions of her own experiences with her dog are lovely. My only real frustration with this book is that well, until page 175, I felt like I had read it all before. It was all very interesting but fairly well covered in many other books. I think this might be a personal problem for me seeing as I have read dozens of canine related books, and probably most readers have not. In fact if this is the one book you buy, that explains how dogs see the world, then you won’t be disappointed!
Hi Marika, if the CM you refer to is Cesar Milan then I don’t mind saying that the man disgusts me through and through. As far as I can tell he’s a backwoods brute who is not averse to kicking dogs, dangling big heavy-framed dogs by the neck and other such ‘alpha corrections’ in order to *impose* his will.
A South African friend told me long ago that, in South Africa, when dogs stop to sniff the environs, they call it ‘reading the news’ – finding out who’s passed this way recently, what state of health they are in and a whole lot of other stuff that we humans have no clue about. Modernising that for our techno age, I call it reading his peemail. I once met a dog with diabetes who had artificial eyes, arthritis, flaky skin and a raft of other age-related complaints, but the sniffer was still working so he still found joy in the world!