Companion Animal Psychology Book Club October 2022
“Equal parts science and doggy diary, [The Year of the Puppy] charts how our irresistible fur babies develop personality.”—People.
By Zazie Todd PhD
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This month, the Animal Book Club is reading The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves by Alexandra Horowitz.
From the publisher,
“Few of us meet our dogs at Day One. The dog who will, eventually, become an integral part of our family, our constant companion and best friend, is born without us into a family of her own. A puppy's critical early development into the dog we come to know is usually missed entirely. Dog researcher Alexandra Horowitz aimed to change that with her family's new pup, Quiddity (Quid). In this scientific memoir, she charts Quid's growth from wee grub to boisterous sprite, from her birth to her first birthday.
Horowitz follows Quid's first weeks with her mother and ten roly-poly littermates, and then each week after the puppy joins her household of three humans, two large dogs, and a wary cat. She documents the social and cognitive milestones that so many of us miss in our puppies' lives, when caught up in the housetraining and behavioral training that easily overwhelms the first months of a dog's life with a new family. In focusing on training a dog to behave, we mostly miss the radical development of a puppy into themselves—through the equivalent of infancy, childhood, young adolescence, and teenager-hood.”
The Year of the Puppy is available from all good bookstores and my Amazon store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/animalbookclub
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The book club is open to subscribers to my free Companion Animal Psychology newsletter as well as subscribers to my premium newsletter, The Pawsitive Post. You'll get the details as part of your welcome emails.
