Alexandra Horowitz, Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell (New York: Scribner, 2016).
Alexandra Horowitz, Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (New York: Scribner, 2009) (". . . replace our anthropomorphizing instinct with a behavior-reading instinct. You need only know how to translates his answer." "Here is our first tool to getting that answer: imagining the point of view of the dog. The scientific study of animals was changed by a German biologist of the early twentieth century named Jakob von Uexkull. What he proposed was revolutionary: anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umwelt (OOM-velt): their subjective or 'self-world.' Umwelt captures what life is like as the animal. . . . If we want to understand the life of any animal, we need to know what things are meaningful to it. The first way to discover this is to determine what the animal can perceive: what it can see, hear, smell, or otherwise sense. Only objects that are perceived can have meaning to the animal; the rest are not even noticed, or all look the same. The wind that whisks through the grasses? Irrelevant to the tick. The sound of a childhood birthday party. Doesn't appear on its radar. The delicious cake crumbs on the ground? Leave the tick cold." Send, how does the animal act on the world? . . . " "Thus, these two components--perception and action--largely define and circumscribe the world for every living thin, All animals have their own unweltn--their own subjective realities, what von Uexkull thought of as 'soap bubbles' with them forever caught in the middle we human are enclosed in our own soap bubbles, too. In each of out self-worlds, for instance, we are very attentive to where other people are and what they are doing or saying. . . . We see in the visual range of light, we hear audible noises, and we smell strong odors placed in front of our noses. On top of that each individual create his own personal umvelt, full of objects with special meaning to him. You can most clearly see this last fact by letting yourself be led through an unknown city by a native. He will steer you along a path obvious to this, but invisible to you. But the two of you share some things: neither of you is likely to stop and listen to the ultrasonic cry of a nearby bat; neither of you smells what the man passing you had for dinner last night (unless it involved a lot of garlic). We, the tick, and every other animal dovetail into our environment: we are bombarded with stimuli, but only a very few are meaningful to us." Id. at 21-22.).
Jon Katz, The Second Chance Dog: A Love Story (New York: Ballantine Books, 2013).
Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier, How to Raise the Perfect Dog: Through Puppyhood and Beyond (New York: Three River Press, 2009).
The Monks of New Skete, The Art of Raising a Puppy, 2nd ed. (New York: Little, Brown, 2011).
The Monks of New Skete, How to Be Your Dog's Best Friend, 2nd ed. (New York: Little, Brown, 2002).
