In addition to speaking to cognitive researchers and smell experts, Horowitz visits detection-dog trainers and training centers she meets researchers working with dogs to detect cancerous cells and anticipate epileptic seizure or diabetic shock and she even attempts to smell-train her own nose.Īs we come to understand how rich, complex, and exciting the world around us is to the canine nose, Horowitz changes our perspective on dogs forever. Guided by her own dogs, Finnegan and Upton, Horowitz sets off on a quest through the cutting-edge science behind the olfactory abilities of the dog. In her “fascinating book…Horowitz combines the expertise of a scientist with an easy, lively writing style” ( The New York Times Book Review) as she imagines what it is like to be a dog.
From the #1 bestselling author of Inside of a Dog and The Year of the Puppy-“an incredible journey into the olfactory world of man’s best friend” ( O, The Oprah Magazine), Alexandra Horowitz’s follow-up to her New York Times bestseller explains how dogs experience the world through their most spectacular organ-the nose. It looks at what scientists know about the biology and psychology of dogs, and from that information tries to work out how the world seems to them. The book I discovered I needed as an antidote to my anthropomorphic upbringing is called Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know (2009). For that you need another sort of book, and I don’t mean the canine equivalent of those bringing-up-baby manuals, although there are plenty of them too. But it doesn’t equip you for owning a dog. It’s seen in primitive religions – the Ancient Egyptians worshipped animals – and early myths and fables, such as Aesop’s.
Dog’s-eye ViewĪnthropomorphism is an innate part of our psychology: we have evolved to read each other’s faces and we instinctively try to do the same with animals. Reviewed by Rebecca Willis in Slightly Foxed Issue 65. This book introduces the reader to the science of the dog – their perceptual and cognitive abilities – and uses that introduction to draw a picture of what it might be like to be a dog. As both an unabashed dog lover and a cognitive scientist, Alexandra Horowitz is naturally curious about what her dog, Pumpernickel, thinks and is intent on understanding the minds of animals who cannot say what they know or feel.
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