Canine Confidential: Why Dogs Do What They Do

8 reviews for Canine Confidential: Why Dogs Do What They Do

1. 

   Patty G – February 28, 2025

   Man Meets Dogs and Coyotes and Wolves
   The original meaning of “grok” in Robert Heinlein’ novel Stranger in a Strange Land captures how prescient Marc Bekoff seems to be about dogs, as though his own deep intuition and empathy allow him to psychoanalyze every dog he meets. Make no mistake though: As wise and Merlin-like as Bekoff is, his knowledge – the stuff he describes so carefully in Canine Confidential – comes not from intuition but from his lifelong practice of ethology and animal behavior. Bekoff is a real-deal scientist. I know, because Bekoff and I are professional colleagues, going way back (40+ years) having first met in the 1970s at an annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society. Marc knows stuff because he has always been a careful, and honest scientific observer. He attends to what individuals do in their wild and natural environments. His collective knowledge about hundreds, maybe thousands, of individual dogs, coyotes, wolves, and foxes, informs what he says and also how he says it. Bekoff made the cognitive leap to the idea that animals are sentient and conscious years ago. His insights about animals’ savvy capacities comes from his long term observations of what individuals were doing when and with whom and where. In Canine Confidential Bekoff describes things that dogs do that indicate their wisdom, their understandings of other dogs, their emotions, their moods, their needs, their behavior and their apparent knowledge, and he makes a series of sage suggestions showing readers how they too can adopt an ethologist’s frame of mind to make rational, data based inferences of their own about dogs. Canine Confidential is a wonderful book by a gifted observer using a powerful scientific method.: I learned a great deal from reading Canine Confidential and I suspect you will too.

2. 

   Betty M. – February 28, 2025

   Dog Lovers Should Read
   Marc Bekoff has written an essential book for anyone who cares about dogs, much less those of us who share our lives with them. He provides his vast scientific learning, experience, and observations in a conversational style easily accessible to an audience, like me, with little scientific background but a great interest in learning about dogs. (At the same time, extensive footnotes, bibliography, and an appendix on how to become an ethnologist provide both documentation for other scholars and instructions for novices.) His goal in providing us this knowledge —“Why Dogs Do What They Do”—is clear: to improve the lives of dogs by educating their human companions. Topics include behavior in the dog park, dogs having fun, minding dogs, emotions and heart, and others. Bekoff is a master storyteller, as the best writers are, and has a rare ability to employ anecdotes both from his experience and from that of others. Without ever being overbearing, Bekoff also reminds us—among many other facts—that walking a dog is for the dog and that dogs going through a door ahead of us does not mean they are exerting dominance. In fact, he explores all aspects of our lives with dogs, including difficult topics, such as the end of life and legislation that addresses animal abuse. In short, all people who are sharing their lives with dogs, who plan to, or who have done so—as well as anyone who loves dogs or is simply interested in this species uniquely attuned to us—should read this book.

3. 

   Immer – February 28, 2025

   We Really Don’t Know
   Marc BeckoffCanine ConfidentialMarc Beckoff’s Canine Confidential would have been better served with Henry Beston’s quote about animals leading off the first chapter rather than buried toward the book’s end, page 189.“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”Beckoff’s work is an easy, pleasant, and at times a very sobering book in regard to our relationship with dogs. It’s been a long time coming for me, but very enlightening that more often than not, reward and positive response is the way to go when teaching/training one’s dog(s). I will put in a disclaimer though and say that every dog, just like people, are different, and different methodology may fit different situations, in particular when a companion dog gets itself into a dangerous situation.Beckoff writes why do dogs do this and why do they do that, and all too often, the reply is we just really don’t know. I would have liked to see some of the clinical data tables put together by the author and those he cited in order to support or refute contentions on some of these matters. It’s a bit ironic that clinical psychology is still trying to piece together why people behave the way they do, and more often than not, we speak a language that is in the very least decipherable.Beckoff writes about the canine’s keen sense of smell, and how reliant dogs are upon that sense. He also spends a very small amount of time dealing with dog hearing. The point I want to make in regard to the author’s trying to decipher dog actions, he and his fellow ethologists are attempting to do their work at a distinct disadvantage. Dog/canine communication my be beyond our comprehension if the senses of scent and hearing are beyond our ability to interpret. This is captured by the Beston line, “In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.As an aside, I’ve recently read Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, where in short Jaynes theme is man’s sense of self, consciousness of himself is based upon a language that has become metaphorical and at times abstract, without which our own consciousness would be deprived. Applied to dogs, how do their sense of hearing and sense of scent set the table for their language, and interpretation of life? Do they in fact have culture?Such is the world of science, where every question answered, opens the door to a pack of new questions. I think Beckoff does a good job in approaching these questions, yet, the answers are more than likely eternally outside of our grasp. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Emotions and Heart that deals with topics such as dog: anger; joy; grief; fear; pain; jealousy; the language of tail wagging ; and their bonding with humans. The question also arises, do dogs get stressed out by human life?Marc Beckoff’s Canine Confidential concludes with a short section on citizen science and how the reader can begin to be the dog, and collect data about their dog as well as others while incorporating the tools of ethologists. I’ve held a thought for quite some time, that we will soon begin to uncover things about animals that us humans may find uncomfortable. The late Alaskan wolf biologist Gordon Haber began to hypothesize that wolves may actually have culture. Those of us who have shared our lives with dogs may find this very believable. Beckoff helps the reader understand this process, which once again focuses on another portion of the Beston quote, “They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

4. 

   Bernadette K. – February 28, 2025

   Informative and positive read.

5. 

   Tamika – February 28, 2025

   Excellent and truly informative!

6. 

   maria alonso garcia – February 28, 2025

   Muy bien libro sobre etología canina. Como es habitual en Bekoff, contenido fundamentado y actualizado y, además, ameno. Buena compra.

7. 

   Andreas Weber – February 28, 2025

   Mark Bekoff hat wir kaum einer den Fokus der Verhaltensforschung verschoben, sodass es jetzt als normal gilt, Emotionen bei Tieren zu akzeptieren. Aus dieser Perspektive kommt vieles an unserem Verhalten ihnen gegenüber in ein anderes Licht. Mark zeigt das exemplarisch an seinem Lieblings-Forschungs-Subjekt und täglichen Begeleiter, dem Hund. Ein Buch, dass die Augen öffnet.

8. 

   Lisa – February 28, 2025

   Just arrived but I haven’t had a chance to read it. I flipped through quickly, looks like a long read, not many illustrations of any kind. I’m sure the read is very good and knowledgeable. I’ll update once I actually read it. It was recommended by other dog training professionals.