From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2004:

The Cat Who Came In From The Cold: A Fable
by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Ballantine Books (c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY
10019), 2004. 103 pages, hardcover. $15.95

This fable takes place thousands of years ago, in the
forests of southern India, and is aimed more at children than at
adults. Billi, a wild cat, lives with his feline family. Tragedy
strikes and Billi finds himself alone. He decides to take a journey
of discovery through India.
His journey takes him into many villages and to meetings with
other animals such as dogs, a parrot, and a cow. He has seen the
attention that these animals get from their human keepers, and
wonders what it would be like to have the pleasure of being part of a
human family. He questions them about their lives with humans,
trying to get a better perspective on life as a domestic animal.
Billi eventually chooses a family and joins them.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2004:

If You Tame Me:
Understanding our Connection with Animals
by Leslie Irvine
Temple University Press (1601 N. Broad St., Philadelphia,
PA 19122), 2004. 240 pages, paperback. $19.95.

If You Tame Me is an unusual title for an interesting
investigation into the lives of animals. Concentrating on dogs and
cats, Irvine uses sociological techniques to decode the mysteries of
animal behavior, and then discusses our relationship with animals.
Irvine’s theme is that people care for their companion
animals as intensely as we do because animals, like people, have
individual personalities that she refers to generically as “selves.”
This allows them to interact and connect with individual humans in a
way that would be impossible for an inanimate object.

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2004:

The Other End of the Leash:
Why we do what we do around dogs
by Patricia B. McConnell, Ph.D.
The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group
(1745 Broadway MD 18-2, New York, NY 10019),
246 pages, paperback. $13.95.

The Other End of the Leash opens up a
whole new way of looking at animal behavior.
After reading it, I can quite understand how
much difficulty a dog must have in trying to
understand the garbled way we go about
dog-training.
“So here we have two species,” writes
Patricia B. McCon-nell, “humans and dogs,
sharing the tendencies to be highly visual,
highly social, and hardwired to pay attention to
how someone in our social group is moving, even
if the movement is minuscule. What we don’t seem
to share is this: dogs are more aware of our
subtle movements than we are of our ownŠ Surely
it would be a good thing if we knew what we were
saying.”

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