| I originally became interested in this book for two
reasons. First, I’d read somewhere that Katz considers two dogs to
be company and three to be, no, not a crowd, but a pack. I have five
Newfies at the moment so my ears perked up at the reference to pack.
Secondly, I was getting pretty sick and tired of all these experts
on the web telling well-intentioned dog lovers that they were bad people
if they didn’t train their dogs in the one true way which is . . . [fill
in the blank here, there are lots of answers, most of them wrong].
Katz had me hooked half way through his
introduction. His goal, he stated, was not to be all knowing, but to
be useful. He offers a common sense approach which is
in sharp contrast to the “tyranny [which] surrounds dog training” (p. XX).
This approach leads him to address difficult questions like: why do you
really want a dog, is it ever OK to give away a dog that you love, how
do you face the death of a beloved pet? In the end, Katz doesn’t
really answer these toughies, rather he offers a framework for thinking
them through in order to arrive at your own answers.
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His case studies are sometimes poignant, occasionally humorous, but always worth the time to read and reflect on them. In the course of 218 pages, which read quickly and easily as though they were many pages fewer, the author’s messages come through. The major message: obedience is a lousy word to describe what is actually the ongoing development of a dialogue between two very different species. Katz, and I’m sure many of us, derives extraordinary pleasure from learning to communicate with this alien species. The minor message: be flexible, if one approach fails, try another one.
Don’t expect to learn how to train your dog to sit,
stay and come or how to pick a future Westminster winner from a litter of
puppies. Katz climbs up on his tallest barn, finds a comfortable
place to sit and looks down on his pack trying hard, and succeeding, to
get perspective.
Nice job Jon. I got a lot more than just the useful read that you promised.
Bob and Hannah, December 2005.
Also published at
Amazon.com
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