Conville & Walsh

Dr John Bradshaw’s Dog Sense will hit the NY Times hardback bestseller list this week at #18, having risen to #5 on Amazon.com last week. It’s now seen its third printing, with 30,000 copies in circulation.

This follows a recent interview with National Public Radio, in which he talks about his 25 year experience of working at the world-renowned Anthrozoology Institute, based at the University of Bristol. Biologists now know far more about what really makes dogs tick than they did twenty years ago, but this new understanding has been slow to percolate through to owners, and has not yet made enough of a difference to the lives of the dogs themselves. This book is here to set the record straight.

‘The main [myth],’ as John explains in the NPR interview, ‘is that wolves are essentially an intrinsically aggressive animal that is continuously trying to take over whatever group they find themselves in and dominate it. And the new wolf biology really exposed that as an artifact — that particular view of wolves came from wolves in zoos and in wildlife parks, where a bunch of unrelated wolves were basically put together and told to get on with it and, not surprisingly, they got on with it by being aggressive toward one another. The new picture of wolf society is that wolves are harmonious animals. They live in family groups. They get along really well together, and they’re almost never aggressive to one another. The aggression comes out when two families meet, so they have very strong family ties.’

You can listen to the whole interview and read excerpts of the book at the NPR website. The book will be published in the UK as In Defence of Dogs (Allen Lane, 28th July).