Dog Sense by John Bradshaw:
Dogs don’t feel guilt.
But my guess is they feel love much more profoundly than we do, and I would contend that they are much more social than humans are.
When he says “dogs are not wolves,” he means that they are not the cartoon version of a pack in which every member does nothing but fight to become the leader, a notion that is derived from studies of captive packs where no dispersal can happen. Dogs in terms of genetics and phylogeny are wolves, but they are special kind of wolf. This is a wolf that has evolved to live with humans, which requires several specialized adaptations that other wolves don’t necessarily have. In this way, a dog is a specialized wolf in the same way an arctic wolf is specialized to living on the tundra and hunting in large packs to bring down muskoxen, and an Arabian wolf is specialized at living in very small family groups and hunting smaller prey in the scorching deserts of the Middle East. We can think of them all as being part of the same species, but they are not necessarily interchangeable. An arctic wolf would die in the desert heat, and if it survived the heat, it would likely have a very hard time finding enough prey to nourish its large body. A little Arabian wolf would freeze to death. It might do okay in terms of finding prey. There are often lemming booms that it might take advantage of, and there are usually ptarmigan and arctic hares to hunt.
I think that he means that dogs are wolves in terms of species, but they are not in the same subspecies.
I found his chapters on where dogs came from and how they might have evolved very interesting. It all makes sense to me, but then again, I don’t have the scientific background and know-how to realize when someone is trying to blow smoke up my ass, either. :-)
John Bradshaw is a breath of fresh air. I could listen to his interviews for hours…
He was on the Colbert Report not too long ago:
http://shibainuspirit.blogspot.com/2011/05/john-bradshaw-on-colbert-report.html
I loved this book. I’ve never been a big fan of the alpha theory in human-dog interactions, and Bradshaw did a lot to balance out the heavy Alpha rhetoric that is popular in dog training right now. And the chapter discussing the way dogs perceive and handle separation from their people was interesting and very helpful.