From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2006:

How to be a Cat Detective:
Solving the Mystery of your Cat’s Behavior.
by Vicky Halls
Penguin (375 Hudson St., NY 10014), 2006. 285 pages, paperback. $14.00.

More and more people are extending their homes to feline
companionship today. The numbers of U.S. cat-keeping homes have
doubled in 20 years, and the number of multi-cat households has
increased even faster, as people who already have a cat in residence
decide that they can offer a loving home to others less fortunate,
such as the local stray whom they have been feeding at the bottom of
the garden, or a shelter cat.
“Sadly they don’t come with a manual so, to a certain
extent, we have to make up the rules as we go along,” writes Vicky
Halls about keeping cats healthy and happy.
And make them up we do. But do we know what we are doing?
Often not.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2006:

A Good Dog by Jon Katz
Villard (Random House Publishing Group, 1745 Broadway, New York,
NY 10019), 2006. 216 pages, paperback. $21.95.

Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, an animal may come
into one’s life with life-changing consequences. This is the story
of one such animal, the border collie Orson.
“Orson radically altered my life,” writes Jon Katz. “He
came at a pivotal time and provoked–with no conscious part in the
process, I’m sure–a series of actions and reactions that caused me
to change almost everything about the way I lived and worked and
thought.”

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2006:

For The Love Of A Dog
by Patricia B. McConnell, Ph.D.
Ballantine Books, Random House,
1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019
322 pages, hardcover. $24.95.

McConnell, a zoology teacher at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, wrote The Other End of the Leash, which we
reviewed for Animal People in 2004.
For The Love Of A Dog further draws upon her considerable
experience in dog training and treating canine aggression to offer
insights into the canine mind.
This is not a manual on dog training, although McConnell
presents comparisons of dog and human thought processes which could
make dog training much easier. Nor is it a scientific treatise on
anthropomorphism. McConnell’s goal to make canine behavioral
research more accessible to the public. She explains the biology of
emotions, then focuses on fear, anger, joy and love, teaching the
reader how to identify each of these emotions in dogs from their
expressions, postures, and activity.
A particularly helpful section of photographs at the end of
the book illustrates vividly dogs’ facial expressions as they express
their emotions.
McConnell concludes that, notwithstanding the scientistic tradition
of denying animal consciousness, and of deriding those who argue
that animals have complex mental capacity, dogs do have a rich and
complex emotional life. –Chris Mercer

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2006:

The Good Good Pig by Sy Montgomery
Ballantine Books (c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway MD 18-2, New York,
NY 10019), 2006. Hard cover, 228 pages, $21.95.

The Good Good Pig celebrates 14 years of life with a pig,
and the love of the woman, Sy Montgomery, who saved his life–
“As I walked beside him, I began to rub his belly and grunt
our favorite mantra: “Good, good pig. Big, good pig. Fine,
fine swine. Good. Good, good.” He crumpled to the ground and
rolled over in porcine bliss. And then I lay down beside him,
beneath an apple tree. As long as I lay there and stroked him, he
wouldn’t get up and leave. And that was how I spent that afternoon:
lying beside someone I loved, watching the clouds and the
dragonflies and the sun streaming through the leaves of the apple
tree.”

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