Paul McGreevy - A Modern Dogs Life: How to Do the Best for Your Dog

Table of Contents

A Modern Dogs Life combines sensible information with charming wit; this is an entertaining guide for new and veteran dog owners alike.

KEN FOSTER, author of The Dogs Who Found Me

Science, experience and common sensePaul McGreevy brings all three to this amazing new book. Your dog will want you to read it.

MARK EVANS, Chief Veterinary Adviser, RSPCA UK

A milestone in understanding dogs... Perhaps even the Rosetta stone in translating dog behaviour... Dr. McGreevy is a world-recognized expert in dog behavior who just happens to have written a book that is as easy to read as a quality novel... If you want to have more fun with your dog, you need this book. If you just want to know more about dogs than your friends, you need this book.

DON BURKE, founder, Burkes Backyard

Ive been waiting for a book like this for years. A clear and logical account of dog behavior and training... both scientific and entertaining.

DR. BIDDA JONES, Chief Scientist, RSPCA Australia

I would encourage all dog owners to read this book, to understand their dogs view of our human lifestyle and to improve the human-canine relationship.

DR. JOANNE RIGHETTI, Chair of the Delta Society Australia

Dr. McGreevys book is an essential text for any true dog lovers library. It gives the new dog owner the chance to start on the right foot, the seasoned dog owner the knowledge to improve life for themselves as well as their pet, and even the experienced dog trainer the opportunity to see many things better through a dogs eyes.

ROB ZAMMIT, DVM

BECAUSE EVERY BOOK IS A TEST OF NEW IDEAS

For my late father, Elvis,
and all my beloved hound-dogs,
past and present.

Dogs and humans have evolved alongside one another over a long period of time, but all is not well in the Land of Dog. We breed dogs with negligible emphasis on temperament, even though problem behaviors are the main trigger for euthanasia in young dogs. We want dogs that are devoted to us but somehow expect them to cope when left alone. We persistently frustrate our canine companions by ignoring what they truly value. This book is about dogs needs and how we can improve our understanding of dogs and how best to look after them in the twenty-first century. Drawing on the latest research and my expertise as a veterinary behaviorist who has spent a lifetime with dogs, my aim is to suggest a new approach to owning a dog. I hope to explain why dogs thrive on three key things: fun, exercise and training. Most importantly, I offer fresh ideas about how we, as dog owners, can help our dogs access these goodies.

Salman Rushdie described dogs as the loving, half-comprehending, half-mystified aliens who live within our homes. A Modern Dogs Life looks at aspects of our behavior that are particularly mystifying to dogs and establishes why dogs may never comprehend some of our characteristics and tendencies. It also examines features of dog management that many owners struggle to get rightand sets out some blunt home truths about the realities of keeping a dog. Ultimately, A Modern Dogs Life is for anyone who wants to understand more and therefore demystify their dog. Its aim is to help you to become a better dog-watcher, team player, caregiver, companion and life-coach by knowing when and how to intervene.

This is not a book about the charm of dogs or the many ways of caring for them. There are hundreds of such books already out there. Instead, my premise is that owning a dog takes time and thought and is not always a pleasure. Despite figures pushed out annually by pet food manufacturers as they insist that pets are good for our health, we all know that dogs can also cause tremendous distress to humans around them, and not only to their owners. This book asks why dogs can be distressing and why they get distressed. It offers solutions to some common doggy dilemmas but does not shy away from the fact that many dogs lead less than ideal lives. In a sense then, this book is for those who strive to do the best for their dogs rather than those who need to get the best out of their dogs.

My aim with this book is to deliver insights and challenges that prompt you to reflect on your own dogs behavior. All the dogs you have shared time with offer examples of the concepts I describe. When exploring the unwelcome consequences of our actions on the welfare of dogs, I promise not to use the trite and inadequate remark: How would you like it? This is not useful because our chief challenge is to think like dogs rather than expect them to have the same sensitivities we have. My pledge is to avoid interpreting dog behaviors in human terms. Any statement suggesting that dogs are almost human is, for many dog enthusiasts, nothing short of an insult. In return, I encourage you to use my reflections to improve the lot of the dogs you know now or are yet to meet. This book gives dogs the benefit of the doubt (and of the latest research) when it comes to their feelings, but never assumes that they have human intelligence. Dogs have canine intelligencefor them, a far more useful attribute.

As we gather more information on dogs and their behavior, we begin to realize how much there is still to discover. Humans owe dogs a great deal, and vice versa. We have coevolved, exploiting one another to various degrees. Indeed, we continue to do so in novel ways that I note throughout this book.

Dog keeping may be as old as hunting, grunting and cave painting, but studying domestic dogs in family homes is a complex business. Each dogs behavior and motivation may seem clear enough, but they usually reflect human differences. One family may lavish attention on their dog, while another virtually ignores theirs. One person within a family may be a great trainer, while another, within the same household, may be inconsistent or incompetent. If we want to understand dog behavior as clearly as possible, the most helpful observations come from populations of free-ranging dogs living in the wild, uncontaminated by direct contact with humans. No collars, no leashes, no bowls, no beds, no fences. Such dogs come from the same stock as our domesticated dogs but live separate from humans. Completely unpolluted data can be very difficult to obtain. Although free-ranging dogs tend to stay away from disruptive and dangerous human activity, they often are still affected by people. Even dogs living on a landfill can be influenced by the humans who deliver the rubbish, while those hiding in remote forests and undeveloped land can be disturbed by human activity at the boundaries of their territory. Dogs considered feral may have been dumped as pups and so are products of the human-dog interaction.

Traditionally, we have tended to regard the wolf as the perfect model of what dogs are like without human interference. To an extent, this is entirely valid, since we believe dogs evolved from wolves. The domestic dog is a subspecies of its ancestor, the gray wolf. Indeed, at times in the chapters that follow, I will refer to the gray wolf as Uncle Wolf as a nickname for the archetypal lupine forebear. And to save time, when offering examples of free-ranging or feral dog behavior, I shall refer to feral dogs as Feral Cheryl. The critical DNA sequences of the domestic dog differ from those of the gray wolf by only 0.2 percent. This means the two are very closely related and explains why they can interbreed. By contrast, the difference between the gray wolf and its closest wild relative, the coyote, is around 4 percent.