![]() Instead of breeding out the problems, they’re breeding them in. I wonder, in my retirement, whether we bred a designer dog or a disaster. Years later, Garfield notes Conron lamented to The Associated Press, “I’ve done so much harm to pure breeding and made so many charlatans quite rich. ![]() And voila, an offspring turned out to be nothing to sneeze at for the Hawaiian woman’s partner – and the designer-dog revolution was sprung. Next step was crossing a male Poodle with a Labrador Retriever. His first thought was a Standard Poodle, which turned out to be a bust. The craze began in the early 1980s when an Australian, Wally Conron, received a request to provide a vision-impaired woman in Hawaii with a guide dog, but one her partner, who was allergic to pet hair, could live with. The Craze of Dog Trendsĭesigner dogs get plenty of attention, too, in this interspecies introspective. Chaser, shown here with her toys, learned the names of more than one thousand objects. Today, we’ve gained insight into how the smartest dogs learn. “She maintains that her objective isn’t just a well-trained dog but a well-behaved dog, a dog that will make judgments based on a wider understanding of its role and purpose. ![]() People are more selfish now than they were, she reasons, which means some people expect puppies to arrive fully house-trained,” Garfield writes. Susan Close, an English 70-something dog trainer who has seen a wide array of owners over decades, “believes that our changing relationship with dogs has been affected by our changing relationship with each other. The versatility and heart of man’s best friend is front and center from a chapter entitled “What Darwin Didn’t Know About Dogs (Was Hardly Worth Knowing)” to “Born a Dog, Died a Gentleman.”Īnd don’t forget the psyche of our four-legged mates, either, Garfield notes, whether it’s an experiment to detect how and why dogs look guilty an investigation into the effect of different genres of popular music on the stress levels of dogs in kennels or what drives a service dog. Take, for instance, this characterization: “The behavioral traits that humans value most highly in dogs today may be summarized in a few rather unscientific words – friendliness, compatibility, usefulness – and one equally unscientific action, the disarming offering of a paw.” Dogs and Their Owners In the process, the British author’s delivery is witty, probing, and spot-on. Garfield delivers bigtime on his intent that this penetrating overlook reflects a celebration of dogs’ intelligence, curiosity, beauty, and loyalty and their cultural journey from historical working companion to today’s bed mate. In the Introduction, Garfield acknowledges, “I am finishing this book during the virus-haunted days of April 2020, and Ludo is the only presence in our house not looking anxious.” ![]() Ludo quickly emerges as the guidepost for this pragmatic – and colorful – travelogue across dogdom’s worldwide turf from the comics and cinema to research laboratories, the literary world, and even into space. ![]()
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