An Introduction
Reading this book will make you your dog' s best friend! Never before has one pet book covered so many subjects and presented so many secrets and tips. Most cover only one Subject, such as health, breed, or behavior. But what follows is a veritable pet-pourri of information in dozens of areas of interest to the dog lover.
Our goal was to write a book which would appeal to dog nuts like us. Since our attention span isn't much longer than our dogs', that meant writing a book which would contain many short, easy-to-read articles on a variety of interesting topics for people who want to bone up on dogs.
Most of these subjects-and secrets-have never appeared in a dog book before. A few have, but were buried in a paragraph or on a page of the 6,000 books that have been written about, for-and even by-dogs. Not only will this material probably be new to you, but it is presented differently, so that it will be more relevant to your dog and your life.
We found that too many dog books asked provocative questions about dogs, and then answered with discussions of the authors' dogs, or those they knew, trained, handled, observed, or analyzed. Even though we both have advanced degrees, in psychology or communications, we didn't think you wanted to know what we knew about dogs, but rather what experts knew. We also suspected that you don't want to read about our dogs, but rather what would help your dogs. So we didn't even mention our dogs (Pinki and Pucci) in this book, except one time, when we got carried away. (Sorry, we couldn't help ourselves.)
Thus, you are about to read approximately 125 chapters and side-bars, which we call "sidebarks" based on over fifty interviews and hundreds of books and newspaper, newsletter, and journal articles from the past five years. A few of the people we interviewed will be familiar to dog lovers, such as Cleveland Amory, Carol Lea Benjamin, Roger Caras, Sherry Carpenter, Warren Eckstein, Captain Haggerty, Brian Kilcommons, Mordecai Siegal, and others.
They, along with veterinarians, scientists, behaviorists, trainers, and a large number of experts you may not have heard of, will present you with a doglopedia of secrets, findings, ideas, suggestions, thoughts, and tips on how your dogs can live longer, healthier, happier, and safer lives so you can enjoy yours for many more years.
In the following pages, you'll learn how to understand what your dogs are trying to tell you so you can communicate with them better; how to show them off so you can share them with others; how to teach them a few simple things so they behave -better; how you can be even happier with them-and vice versa; what to buy for them; what to read about them; along with much, much more.
We included more "controversial" and "negative" material than one usually finds in dog books, so some of this information may make you slightly uncomfortable. Like the possible connection between dogs and multiple sclerosis, or little-known dangers that could kill your dogs.
We felt that you should know about these things for your own sake as well as your pet's. Dogs are a gigantic responsibility; the more you know, the more you can truly be their best friends. If you're not informed and something happens, not only will you have needlessly hurt your pals, but your grief will be compounded by guilt that comes from knowing you could have prevented their illness or death.
We also do a little more moralizing and include more material on socially relevant dog issues than one might expect to find in a book of information. But we didn't want to just write facts. We hoped to make the dog-owning public aware of some of the problems out there, such as the dreadful things we do to dogs in this world. After all, if dog lovers don't know or care what's going on, no other segment of the population is going to do anything about these situations.
Before we begin, we want to apologize for using the word "he" whenever we refer to dogs in this book. It isn't personal; both our teacup Shih Tzus are females. But alternating between "he" and "she" is awkward, we didn't want to refer to a dog as "it, and, like it or not, in our language we have a tendency to refer to dogs as "he" and cats as "she."
Finally, most of the people we interviewed are thanked in the acknowledgments, and the written sources are recognized in Suggested Reading (and Viewing) About Dogs, which is at the end of the book. We also wish to thank our agent, Ted Chichak, for his unflagging support and enthusiasm, and our editor, Lorena Jones. Especially, though, we want to thank Phil Wood and Jo Ann Deck of Ten Speed Press. We always considered it a delight to be their friends; now we're honored to be their authors, too.
 NetPets Main Page |
contact information |
 The Dog Center |