Book Review: Dog Sense by John Bradshaw

 

The canine companion to Bradshaw's Cat Sense, which I have already reviewed.

In this book, Bradshaw delves deeply into dogs, telling us things about their evolution, behavior, expressions, how to best train them, etc.

Unlike Cat Sense, which had me thoroughly engaged throughout the entire thing (but especially the first third), I found this one to be a bit disappointing. Not bad, mind you, it just didn't grab me in the same way Cat Sense did.

I did have one or two minor issues with Cat Sense, mostly the author's philosophy on outside cats, but with this book I didn't really find anything objectionable. It's just a solid non-fiction about our canine companions. But I also don't really have much else to say about it. It didn't grab me, despite being by the same author as Cat Sense.

I feel like this might just be a me-thing, however. It's still overall a good book, but unlike with Cat Sense I already knew a lot of the information presented here. Because I've already consumed a lot of canine non-fiction, but also because I've quite a bit of experience with dogs after following a college course about pets and another one about being a vet assistant, and of course owning one myself. I didn't end up completing the college course, but still retained a lot of the information. And the animals we talked about the most was obviously dogs. We also learned a lot about other species such as cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters and various bird species, but most of it was about dogs. Case in point, not a lot of the information presented in this book was new to me, which is probably why it didn't grab me like Cat Sense did. While I already knew a decent amount about cats going in because I own a cat, that book really did consistently did keep feeding me new information. 

So, yeah. Objectively speaking this is a good book and for people who don't know a lot about dogs or simply want to learn more about man's best friend, I can totally recommend it. It just didn't really do anything new or groundbreaking for me personally. 

Rating: 3.5/5