Dogs : A Philosophical Guide to Our Best Friends - Mark Alizart

Man's best friend, domesticated since prehistoric times, a travelling companion for explorers and artists, thinkers and walkers, equally happy curled up by the fire and bounding through the great outdoors-dogs matter to us because we love them.� But is that all there is to the canine's good-natured voracity and affectionate dependency? Mark Alizart dispenses with the well-worn clich�s concerning dogs and their masters, seeing them not as submissive pets but rather as unexpected life coaches, ready to teach us the elusive recipes for contentment and joy.� Dogs have faced their fate in life with a certain detachment that is not easy to understand.� Unlike other animals in a similar situation, they have not become hardened, nor have they let themselves die a little inside. On the contrary, they seem to have softened. This book is devoted to understanding this miracle, the miracle of the joy of dogs - to understanding it and, if at all possible, to learning how it's done. Weaving elegantly and eruditely between historical myth and pop-culture anecdote, between the peculiar views of philosophers and the even more bizarre findings of science, Alizart offers us a surprising new portrait of the dog as thinker-a thinker who may perhaps know the true secret of our humanity.