What's a Dog For?
The Surprising History, Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Man's Best Friend
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Narrated by:
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Don Hagen
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By:
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John Homans
About this listen
John Homans adopted his dog, Stella, from a shelter for all the usual reasons: fond memories of dogs from his past, a companion for his son, an excuse for long walks around the neighborhood. Soon enough, she is happily ensconced in the daily workings of his family. And not only that: Stella is treated like a family member - in ways that dogs of his youth were not. Spending humanlike sums on vet bills, questioning her diet and exercise regimens, contemplating her happiness - how had this all come to pass, when the dogs from Homans's childhood seemed quite content living mostly out in the yard?
In What's a Dog For?, Homans explores the dog's complex and prominent place in our world and how it came to be. Evolving from wild animals to working animals to nearly human members of our social fabric, dogs are now the subject of serious scientific studies concerning pet ownership, evolutionary theory, and even cognitive science. From new insights into what makes dogs so appealing to humans to the health benefits associated with owning a dog, Homans investigates why the human-canine relationship has evolved so rapidly - how dogs moved into our families, our homes, and sometimes even our beds in the span of a generation, becoming a $53 billion industry in the United States in the process.
As dogs take their place as coddled family members and their numbers balloon to more than seventy-seven million in the United States alone, it's no surprise that canine culture at large is also undergoing a massive transformation. They are now subject to many of the same questions of rights and ethics as people, and the politics of dogs are more tumultuous and public than ever - with fierce moral battles raging over kill shelters, puppy mills, and breed standards. Incorporating interviews and research from scientists, activists, breeders, and trainers, What's a Dog For? investigates how dogs have reached this exalted status and why they hold such fascination for us. With one paw in the animal world and one paw in the human world, it turns out they have much to teach us about love, death, and morality - and ultimately, in their closeness and difference, about what it means to be human.
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- Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society
- By: Frans de Waal
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Is it really human nature to stab one another in the back in our climb up the corporate ladder? Competitive, selfish behavior is often explained away as instinctive, thanks to evolution and "survival of the fittest", but in fact, humans are equally hard-wired for empathy. Using research from the fields of anthropology, psychology, animal behavior, and neuroscience, Frans de Waal brilliantly argues that humans are group animals.
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A Lot Of Things In Common With Our Animal Friends!
- By James on 08-14-11
By: Frans de Waal
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Citizen Canine
- Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs
- By: David Grimm
- Narrated by: Graham Hamilton
- Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In this fascinating exploration of the changing status of dogs and cats in society, pet lover and award-winning journalist David Grimm explores the rich and surprising history of our favorite companion animals. He treks the long and often torturous path from their wild origins to their dark days in the middle ages to their current standing as the most valued animals on Earth. For pet lovers or anyone interested in how we decide who gets to be a “person” in today’s world, Citizen Canine is a must-have. It is a pet tale like no other.
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Cats and Dogs Unite!
- By Gillian on 03-03-15
By: David Grimm
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The Bonobo and the Atheist
- By: Frans de Waal
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In this lively and illuminating discussion of his landmark research, esteemed primatologist Frans de Waal argues that human morality is not imposed from above but instead comes from within. Moral behavior does not begin and end with religion but is in fact a product of evolution. For many years, de Waal has observed chimpanzees soothe distressed neighbors and bonobos share their food. Now he delivers fascinating fresh evidence for the seeds of ethical behavior in primate societies that further cements the case for the biological origins of human fairness.
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Great research on apes, bad research on humans
- By Christian Bonnell on 07-18-14
By: Frans de Waal
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How the Dog Became the Dog
- From Wolves to Our Best Friends
- By: Mark Derr
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 8 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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That the dog evolved from the wolf is an accepted fact of evolution and history, but the question of how wolf became dog has remained a mystery, obscured by myth and legend. How the Dog Became the Dog posits that dog was an evolutionary inevitability in the nature of the wolf and its human soul mate. The natural temperament and social structure of humans and wolves are so similar that as soon as they met on the trail they recognized themselves in each other.
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Interesting and thorough, but not for everyone
- By N. Rogers on 12-12-11
By: Mark Derr
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Our Wild Calling
- How Connecting with Animals Can Transform Our Lives - and Save Theirs
- By: Richard Louv
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Richard Louv's landmark book, Last Child in the Woods, inspired an international movement to connect children and nature. Now Louv redefines the future of human-animal coexistence. Our Wild Calling explores these powerful and mysterious bonds and how they can transform our mental, physical, and spiritual lives, serve as an antidote to the growing epidemic of human loneliness, and help us tap into the empathy required to preserve life on Earth.
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Sharing our world
- By Scott Br on 10-06-21
By: Richard Louv
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How Dogs Love Us
- A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain
- By: Gregory Berns
- Narrated by: LJ Ganser
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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How Dogs Love Us answers the age-old question of dog lovers everywhere and offers profound new evidence that dogs should be treated as we would treat our best human friends: with love, respect, and appreciation for their social and emotional intelligence.
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misleading title
- By Cindy on 08-06-15
By: Gregory Berns
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Coyote America
- A Natural and Supernatural History
- By: Dan Flores
- Narrated by: Elijah Alexander
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the "wolf" in our backyards and its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse.
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Very Enjoyable Book, Subject Matter, and Reader
- By John Townsend on 03-17-17
By: Dan Flores
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Do Dogs Dream?
- By: Stanley Coren
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In a conversational Q&A format, a leading dog expert answers the most commonly asked questions about how dogs think and act. Do dogs dream? Can they recognize themselves in the mirror or understand what they’re seeing on television? Are they more intelligent than cats? People have a great curiosity - and many misunderstandings - about how dogs think, act, and perceive the world. They also wonder about the social and emotional lives of dogs. Stanley Coren brings decades of scientific research on dogs to bear in his unprecedented foray into the inner lives of our canine companions, dispelling many common myths in the process.
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Must read for dog lovers
- By Elad on 08-01-13
By: Stanley Coren
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Cesar Millan's Lessons from the Pack
- Stories of the Dogs Who Changed My Life
- By: Melissa Jo Peltier, Cesar Millan
- Narrated by: Angelo Di Loreto, Cesar Millan
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In this inspiring book, best-selling author and "Dog Whisperer" Cesar Millan uses decades of experience to reveal the many ways that dogs and people can enrich each other's lives, sharing eight essential life lessons imparted by a group of very special dogs he's trained over the years. From his roster of celebrity clients to his reality television series, Cesar Millan is America's most sought-after dog behavior expert. In this affecting book, he shares eight heartwarming stories about the dogs that have inspired him the most.
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Insightful
- By Sandy Alstrin on 12-23-17
By: Melissa Jo Peltier, and others
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In the Company of Bears
- What Black Bears Have Taught Me About Intelligence and Intuition
- By: Benjamin Kilham
- Narrated by: George Backman
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine raising an orphaned bear cub, carefully reintroducing her to the wild, then being welcomed back, almost daily, to observe her wild world for more than 17 years. Imagine visiting her in her feeding spots, watching her with her mates and her young, peering into her den, and, over time, observing the lives of all the other wild bears in her territory and surrounding ones. That is what happened to Ben Kilham.
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Best Bear book I have read!
- By Walking With Bears on 06-02-21
By: Benjamin Kilham
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Love Is All You Need
- The Revolutionary Bond-Based Approach to Educating Your Dog
- By: Jennifer Arnold
- Narrated by: Jennifer Arnold
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Dogs are the most social animals on the planet, second only to humans in their ability to read and understand emotion. Even chimps and bonobos, our closest genetic relatives, are no match for dogs when it comes to social cognition. Jennifer Arnold understands this better than anyone, having spent the past 25 years training service dogs for people with disabilities at Canine Assistants. She is a pioneer in the emerging field of "bond-based" dog training.
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Best book I have ever read about dogs. Period.
- By Brandon on 04-26-17
By: Jennifer Arnold
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Cat Sense
- How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet
- By: John Bradshaw
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Cats have been popular household pets for thousands of years, and their numbers only continue to rise. Today there are three cats for every dog on the planet, and yet cats remain more mysterious, even to their most adoring owners. In Cat Sense, renowned anthrozoologist John Bradshaw takes us further into the mind of the domestic cat than ever before, using cutting-edge scientific research to explain the true nature - and needs - of our feline friends. Tracing the cat’s evolution from solitary hunter to domesticated companion, Bradshaw shows that cats remain independent, predatory, and wary of social contact.
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Not what I had expected
- By Terry on 03-11-14
By: John Bradshaw
What listeners say about What's a Dog For?
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Tango
- 08-21-13
What's a Dog For? Ask a Dog!
As a SERIOUS dog lover (I have four and a foster currently and I'm actively involved in Rescue), I take interest in most books about dogs and there are a lot of them lately. Dogs seem to be the latest craze in books - slipping past Angels, almost up there with Zombies, but not quite at the level of Vampires yet. However, a fair number of these books seem to be written by people who don't really have much experience with dogs and "What's a Dog For?" is one of those. John Homans is a journalist so his writing is competent, but he admits that he has truly known only a couple of dogs - both Lab mixes - so he really isn't the ideal candidate in my mind to answer a question like: What's a Dog For? And, he doesn't answer the question in this book - OK, I guess it was rhetorical anyway - but he does do a good job of lining out the basic scientific study of the evolution of dogs and their cognitive abilities, the history of breeding and humane organizations, and the changes in cultural attitudes toward dogs.
This book will be interesting to most dog lovers, but I saw two major short comings. For a book titled, "What's a Dog For?", this book is decidedly short on the history and background of working dogs (other than hunting dogs like LABRADORS - Homans' dog). Search and Rescue, aids to the physically disabled, herding dogs, therapy dogs, police/military duty; there is an almost inexhaustible list of job functions dogs have taken on in history and still do. Homans talks much about how the "emotional side" of dogs and their physical characteristics have allowed them to mold themselves into human society, yet he skims over the fact that dogs (unlike his example of tamed foxes who are also cute and emotional) have made themselves almost indispensable to people independent of what jobs we ask of them or what environments we put them in. (Hey, dogs have gone over the mountains, into the deserts and arctics, across the oceans, and even into space to work with us!!) The fact that dogs always seem willing, even eager, to "partner" with us (even our family dogs protect our person and property) versus just being a pet like a gerbil may have a lot more to do with the dog's success in our society than just the fact that they are cute. Yet, I was still thinking that for scope and entertainment, this book was still a good 4 star until Homans came to the last hour or so and entered the debate on No Kill. Homans seems to ignore the fact that the No Kill movement has resulted in the annual euthanasia rate in the US dropping from 20 MILLION dogs and cats in 1970 to about 3 million today and that many city run pounds are now operating on No Kill principles. The current euthanasia number is still ghastly but hugely improved, yet Homans only reports this change from the perspective of the ASPCA, an organization that will lose its current raison d'être if No Kill succeeds. Homans paints Nathan Winograd (founder of the No Kill Advocacy Center) as a kook and a zealot as characterized by the head of the ASPCA without interviewing Nathan Winograd or anyone active in No Kill. He uses the large Pit Bull population in shelters as evidence that we must continue killing - can't get all those dogs into refuges like Michael Vick's dogs (quotes the ASPCA guy) - but, in fact, Michael Vick's dogs were fighting dogs which most pit bulls in shelters are not AND (this is a big AND), most of Michael Vick's pits were rehabbed and ADOPTED to regular people, not killed and not sent to refuge. So this was a totally specious argument and Homans as a journalist should have caught it. Homans seems to be arguing that a commitment to stop the killing through aggressive spay/neuter programs and education is tantamount to giving dogs person-hood. I just don't agree and I don't think he presented his arguments well in this area.
Ultimately, if you are interested in dogs, this book provides a quick fairly entertaining historical summary. If you actually care about what happens to all dogs in our society, this book presents an incomplete and somewhat skewed picture. If you want to understand dogs better, this is NOT the book - Homans clearly loves his dog, but doesn't seem to have much insight into dogs as a whole. If you really want an answer to What's a Dog For?, get a a dog!
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- J. Childs
- 01-14-13
A must if you are a dog lover
Would you listen to What's a Dog For? again? Why?
Homans provides an entertaining, yet informative perspective on how and why humans interact with dogs. Do dogs have rights? Should they be breed? How have they evolved? What makes them unique in their abilities to communicate with and befriend humans? These are just some of the questions addressed in this book. Well researched.
The audio quality was done well, but a little difficulty at times when played at 2x speed...which is what I normally do.
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- Carpenters helper
- 02-20-15
Loved the information
A tremendous amount of information. Granted its an overview not a detailed analysis. The reader was a bit difficult to understand.
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- N. Rogers
- 08-24-13
Probably the Best Book on Dogs I've Read!
I just loved this book! I’ve read quite a number of dog books: books about individual dogs, novels about them, and canine informational texts. This is probably my favorite from the lot. I was given the print hardcover version as a gift and really wanted to read it but hadn’t gotten far when the audiobook became available. We live with three large dogs and a military working dog foster puppy, all of whom need daily training, care, and handling. I honestly have no time for anything that requires much sitting--including writing book reviews. It took me only two days to finish the audiobook, and because I liked it so much, I am writing a brief review. I will retain the print version of What’s a Dog For? for reference. It is well-organized and contains useful information worth having available through an index.
John Homans writes well, and he has managed to skillfully weave the personal story of his rescued lab mix, Stella, into the larger “history, philosophy, and politics” of the dog world, past and present. He clearly loves his dog and all dogs in general, but he was able to present a reasonably balanced view of our relationship with this wonderful enigmatic creature that so many of us live with intimately. He covered theories on the evolution of dogs, dogs throughout history, the origin or pedigree dogs (as well as their serious genetic deficiencies brought about through by man’s attempt to engineer them), and the issues of dogs in our present society. I was surprised and pleased with how much information was condensed into this relatively short volume.
For me this book flowed smoothly from one topic to the next. In addition, the use of grown-up sentence structure and vocabulary enhanced my enjoyment of it. The narrator made it easy to listen to and absorb, although I will want to go back and review several sections in print. I’m surprised this book doesn’t have a higher overall rating. I suppose a reader , looking either for a personal memoir of a dog or a rigorous scientific treatise on dogs, might be disappointed. For me, however, What’s a Dog For? combines the two genre and does it well. I certainly recommend it to anyone with a dog or who might be thinking about brining one into their life.
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- Anonymous User
- 12-21-13
an elegant stroll through dog land
do you just love dogs ? / did you have a favorite dog as a kid ?
do you believe that dogs are unique within the animal world ?
does all the recent canine scientific research confuse you ?
john homans has written the perfect book for you
he is not an academic veterinarian or a research scientist
he is simply a NY magazine editor with a breezy and urbane curiosity
homans makes no attempt to be exhaustive or authoritative
he simply asks and answers the questions he thinks we'd like to know
the book has an ironic, humorous, sophisticated and affectionate tone
recent MRI research confirms that dogs can in fact "read" humans
they're also an antidote for the sadness and loneliness of modern city life
homans reminds us that most dog owners have known these facts for years
books by g. berns, c. warren, a. horowitz and t. grandin are more scientific
homans is happy to let them have their expertise and elegant theories
he simply wants to tell us what a real dog lover would want to know
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-04-19
the guy and his dog in the history of dogs
good book kind of drought which most dogs looks are.
is the story about a guy and his dogs that had had his life along with the history of the good and bad how we've treated dogs and how this came along for the ride...
definitely worth the listening
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- hermanous
- 05-05-13
Disappointing Book
This book meanders. It's in need of a stronger outline, to truly direct the reader from chapter and a narrator that doesn't sound like somebody's docile grandpa.
This book, as well, may be better intended for those on the periphery of dog interest and not someone who's truly into dogs and has developed his or her own perspective of canines. As I am of the latter camp, I found the author's tone at times to be off-putting and annoying, frankly.
Can you pick up nuggets of info? Yes, but because of the outline (or lack thereof), and because of the narrator, and because of the author's voice (tone), I found it to be a huge disappointment in what I was hoping for.
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- Sailormom
- 12-20-17
Couldn't get through it
What could John Homans have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?
Not start out by speaking about dogs in insulting terms.
How could the performance have been better?
Get someone to do the reading with less monotone.
What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?
I took some offense in the way he talked about dogs and their relationship with humans right from the get-go
Any additional comments?
I was so curious about so much of this information and spent well-earned credits to buy this, and was extremely dissappointed in the tone of the first few chapters that I stopped listening and haven't played it again for over two years.
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