The Culture Clash

Jean Donaldson may be the most brilliant, certainly the most blunt and forthright, thinker on the subject of how dogs are, rather than how we wish them to be. In The Culture Clash, she lights dynamite under some of our fondest myths about why dogs do the things they do. The book reads like a manifesto. It forms a foundational philosophy for modern, evidence-based training, and it vigorously takes apart every dissimulating notion that dogs don’t already know what’s best for themselves. Reading this book for the first time was literally thrilling for me—my copy is filled with double underlinings… show more.

Reading The Culture Clash for the first time was one of the most eye-opening moments of my learning journey with dogs. A particular section asks the reader to imagine their life with an alien species whose language we cannot understand and who have completely different customs but expect us to fit in with their society and expectation. Seeing that idea expressed for the first time explaining how different our lives are to a natural dog world was a watershed experience for me, and started me on my quest to help people better understand their dogs.