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No, the dog books I enjoy are the ones that explain the biology of dogs, how they evolved away from wolves to become Man’s Best Friend, how their minds work (dogs are the only animals who respond when a human points at an object), and about their amazing sensory organs (for instance, their hearing range goes up to 60,000 Hz while humans’ bombs out at a mere 20,000, and they have a second smelling organ behind the nose especially for processing the scents of other dogs; each dog, by the way, has a unique scent, produced by a gland beneath his or her tail, which is why dogs are always sniffing one another’s butts). Some of the best are Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz, What Dogs Know by Stanley Coren, and What’s a Dog For? by John Homans. And now add How Dogs Love Us by Gregory Berns to the list.
Some of the best parts of How Dogs Love Us, though, are about the questions, not the answers. In his account of the slow, meticulous, day-to-day process of creating a scientific study, Berns has produced one of the best accounts of how science is “done.” There are scenes of debates among the scientists who work in his lab, descriptions of different types of experiments (surprisingly, Berns doesn’t believe that following the scientific method always produces the most interesting results), and explanations of how experiments and studies get paid for and the legal and ethical ramifications of doing fMRI scans on a dog who also happens to be a pet. He also gets in a few good digs, at the expense of his daughter’s seventh-grade science teacher, at the way science is taught in schools, by rote memorization instead of in the inquisitive, trial-and-error spirit of professional scientists.
