I give this book 4 stars because it’s an excellent survey of what I call the “high cognitive” interpretation of dog behavior. The last star I reserve in critique of this view of dogs. There’s currently a paradigm shift underway in research on collective behavior, including the cooperative hunting style of wolves, which is identifying a systems’ logic, a “deep intelligence” in contravention to the high cognitive approach. A system’s approach leads to a model, a high cognitive approach leads to internal contradictions. For example, on the one hand the author says that dogs are unique individuals and can’t be modeled formulaically. He then says that all dogs benefit from the positive school of dog training, a general formula. He also says that dogs live in dominance hierarchies of both the linear or circular variety, again a formula. And yet, he claims that no dogs benefit from dominance methods of dog training. But if all dogs are individuals, and if dominance is to some extent a dynamic of canine sociability, then it’s only logical that some dogs would benefit from dominance based training. I’m not arguing in favor of dominance training rather I’m giving an example of muddled thinking when the high-cognitive approach relies on the “individual-is-everything” and “context-is-everything” manner of analysis. This invites the imposition of human thoughts and concepts onto their behavior. The play bow for example only makes sense on a systems’ level as we can observe the display between a sheep-killing dog and a sheep who won’t run. To say it’s a signal of intent to play is an unsatisfying answer as when the sheep moves the dog shifts into an all out predatory mode. Before asking why dogs do what they do, we should first ask, Why ONLY the dog? If as the author says it’s because we’ve made the dog in our image, does one suppose we could exert this kind of influence on other species of animal, could we remake the cat in our image? I think not. My answer is that because the ancestor of the dog is the wolf, a group hunter who emotionally synchronize in order to bring down a physically superior prey, is why dogs alone are able to play tug with a human, work for humans, be protection trained and yet not become social psychopaths (imagine protection training a cat or chimp?), be calm in situations that would unnerve any other animal and are infinitely malleable to the demands of human lifestyles. Humanity and canine became emotionally entrained through hunting a common prey together which was large and dangerous (see Pat Shipman “The Invaders”). If one wants to study the ultimate in this trans-species cooperation, I suggest the nomadic Mongolian herdsmen, riding their reindeer with a Golden Eagle on one arm and a wild wolf trotting freely alongside as they set off on a hunt together. I propose they know far more about the domestication process than is contained in any scholarly treatment on the subject.