If Dogs Could Talk

Vilmos Csányi is an ethologist, a student of animal behavior, specializing (as one might guess) in dogs. In If Dogs Could Talk, he provides a layman's introduction to the results of his studies of canine psychology, combining anecdotes of his own dogs with descriptions of experiments; the result is a lively and fascinating story. (It is also a controversial one; Csányi counts himself as one of the "New Anthropomorphists", who are willing to acknowledge the possibility of animal minds, but require scientific verification of claims about those minds. I suspect that the majority of ethologists would currently disagree.) A more detailed discussion is under the cut.

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