Hey guys, it's Adventure Van here with a blog about 'Inside a Dog', a book about how a dog acts with the world both the same way or differently the same we do, and how we can teach and learn from them. It's written by Alexandra Horowitz, who brings up situations with her dog Pump to add on to her points that she writes about. It's about 300 pages long, and it's a pretty heavy read. However, the info is awesome and makes you look at dogs differently then you would before reading this book.
The book consists of 12 chapters, which each consist of a variety of dogs, their owners, and experiments that all group together to create their own sections, and the author does an excellent job on adding old folk tales and scientific ideas together, as well as adding on her own experience with her dog(s) to the book to create one concise book about the ways dogs work. I really enjoyed reading it, as the style itself was well done, and I haven't really gotten to the actual info in the book yet.
As I said, the book is 12 chapters long, and ignoring the prelude/postscript, there's stuff about Umwelt, the way the author describes how everyone sees and rates things and how you can see things the way other animals/people see them. Then there's a chapter about how wolves became dogs, one about how dogs smell things, as well as ways that they speak and see, the way they can nudge us to do the thing they want us to do, how they can complete simple tasks and even some complex ones while not falling prey to the Clever Hans fallacy.
As well as a huge chapter about what dogs actually know, what we teach them and how they learn, how they teach and we learn, and how we both deal with problems, happiness, and death. It talks about the human in them and the dog in us. It's an awesome book and I recommend you check it out. Did I mention there was a 'version for kids'? It's much less complex and dense, but you'll still learn stuff!
That's Adventure Van, petting out!
