Companion Animal Psychology Book Club August 2022

“Lucy Cooke is brilliant, pedigreed, fearless, and flat-out hilarious . . . Bitch is astonishing, wildly entertaining, and massively important.”―Mary Roach

A selection of small photos of animals (dogs, cats, hedgehog) with books

By Zazie Todd PhD

This month, the Animal Book Club is reading Bitch: On the Female of the Species by Lucy Cooke.

From the publisher,

“Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: all her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser.  

Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted.  

In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn‘t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology. It’s more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun.”

Bitch is available wherever books are sold. It and all of the previous book choices (and more!) are also available in my Amazon store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/animalbookclub.

The US cover of the book Bitch by Lucy Cooke

Note that, for readers in the UK, the title is Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal.

The UK cover of the book Bitch by Lucy Cooke

The book club is a Facebook group and is open to people who subscribe to my free Companion Animal Psychology newsletter and/or my premium newsletter, The Pawsitive Post. Please feel free to sign up and join us!

Of course, you are also welcome to read alongside us without joining the group. 


Zazie Todd, PhD, is the award-winning author of Wag: The Science of Making Your Dog Happy and Purr: The Science of Making Your Cat Happy. She is the creator of the popular blog, Companion Animal Psychology, and also has a column at Psychology Today. Todd lives in Maple Ridge, BC, with her husband, one dog, and two cats. 

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