"Wonderdog": A Journey into the Heads and Hearts of Dogs

Source: Jules Howard, with permission.

Jules Howard's Wonderdog is a wonderful, fact-filled, and easy-to-read journey into the heads and hearts of dogs—who they are, what they know, and what they feel. It's essential to know and respect how these fascinating animals sense their worlds so that we can help them adapt to ours.

Jules does a masterful job blending the latest science with doses of common sense as he covers what we know and still need to know to give dogs the best lives possible. Here's what he had to say about his latest book

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write Wonderdog?

Jules Howard: I've always wanted to write a book about the minds of dogs but, well, there are many brilliant authors far more qualified to speak on the subject—and so for many years, I kept this secret desire hidden away in my soul.

It was only upon reading Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures by Virginia Morell a few years back (one chapter of which details the rise in “family dog” studies in academic institutions) that I realised I had something to contribute: that dogs are, quite literally, answering questions about the science of animal minds that no-one could have predicted decades ago. Dogs are leading us somewhere, challenging the assertion that human minds are different from the minds of other mammals.

MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?

JH: My science writing has always been about challenging the idea that there is some chasmic division between humans and other species. In Sex on Earth, it was about our strange coyness (or outright objection to) animal reproduction, nature’s most natural act; in Death on Earth, it was about our fear of death. In Wonderdog, the story is about how the boundary between human minds and the minds of other animals is starting to fall apart, thanks to research involving family dogs—a cast of fascinating characters whose stories in science deserve to be told.

This is the first time I’ve written about animals from a historical perspective and I’ve really enjoyed it. My gut feeling is that exploring the history of dogs in science might help us see where we’ve come from, and better make plans for where our relationship with dogs goes next, making their lives better and ours too.

MB: Who is your intended audience?

JH: My book is for general readers: people who love dogs; people interested in animal cognition science and how far it’s come; people who love thinking about dogs and how on Earth this unbelievable relationship between two species continues to endure.

MB: What are some of the topics you weave into your book and what are some of your major messages?

JH: If there is one central theme of the book it is this: the more compassionate we have become in our treatment of dogs in the cognitive sciences, the more intelligent they have proven themselves to be. By extension, I think this message should apply to all animals.

Story-wise, the early chapters detail the 1850s, an era of quaint anecdotal dog science, through to Darwin in the 1860s and Pavlov in the 1890s; through psychologists like Watson and Skinner (and his dismissal of free will) and the zoologist Rudolph Schenkel and his incorrect notion of “alpha wolves—an idea that lingers in society today.

The later chapters see readers explore the 1970s and 1980s, an era of mirror studies, consciousness questions, and theory of mind, in which my own academic interests began. The last few chapters detail the fantastic research that has taken place in recent years, including Alexandra Horowitz’s fascinating research into how the way that dogs play can inform us about a dog’s rudimentary theory of mind.

When I started out my zoological career two decades ago, theory of mind was all about chimpanzees and bonobos and gorillas. Yet here we are, seeing it express itself in every dog park in the country, in the most eloquent and natural mammal behaviour of all: play. I love the simplicity of this. That the animals we share our lives with have something to tell us about the way that animal minds work.

MB: How does your book differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?

JH: That’s an important question, because there are some fabulous books out there about dog cognition, including Inside of a Dog, Wag: The Science of Making Your Dog Happy, as well as your own, Marc—I am a big fan of Canine Confidential which I thought was brilliant.

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I see Wonderdog as adding context to these books and books like them. I feel really privileged to have been able to tell this story, and in the UK (where it was released a few months back) it seems to have resonated, which is pleasing. I hope the same is true in the U.S.

MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about dogs they will treat them with more dignity and respect?

JH: If there’s one thing I’ve learned whilst writing this book, it’s that science is capable of rapid leaps forward—that dogs can emote in a way comparable to humans, for instance, that sociality is in their nature, that dogs have a rudimentary theory of mind—but that culture (and governments) take much longer to catch up.

Rudolph Schenkel’s 1940s study on wolves and his misinformed ideas about "alphas" is a good example of this. This notion was discredited decades ago, but we still live with the ghost of those ideas in society today. Society hasn’t caught up with science, not fully.¹

The same goes for the ethical treatment of dogs: we have this amazing science telling us that dogs can feel emotions like we do—loving like we can; suffering like we can—and yet, in the UK at least, the numbers of dogs used in laboratory research is actually rising year-on-year, not falling. That’s very frustrating and sad. I guess, as a dog-loving community, we have work to do.

Overall, I hope Wonderdog might play some part in pushing us forwards so that we can get far closer to what the science is telling us. It’s my feeling that good societies make happy dogs and happy dogs make good people. Science is a large part of how we get there.