The New Work of Dogs: Tending to Life, Love, and Family

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Overview

In an increasingly fragmented and disconnected society, dogs are often treated not as pets, but as family members and human surrogates. The New Work of Dogs profiles a dozen such relationships in a New Jersey town, like the story of Harry, a Welsh corgi who provides sustaining emotional strength for a woman battling terminal breast cancer; Cherokee, companion of a man who has few friends and doesn’t know how to talk to his family; the Divorced Dogs Club, whose funny, acerbic, and sometimes angry women turn to ...
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More About This Book

Overview

In an increasingly fragmented and disconnected society, dogs are often treated not as pets, but as family members and human surrogates. The New Work of Dogs profiles a dozen such relationships in a New Jersey town, like the story of Harry, a Welsh corgi who provides sustaining emotional strength for a woman battling terminal breast cancer; Cherokee, companion of a man who has few friends and doesn’t know how to talk to his family; the Divorced Dogs Club, whose funny, acerbic, and sometimes angry women turn to their dogs to help them rebuild their lives; and Betty Jean, the frantic founder of a tiny rescue group that has saved five hundred dogs from abuse or abandonment in recent years.

Drawn from hundreds of interviews and conversations with dog lovers and canine professionals, The New Work of Dogs combines compelling personal narratives with a penetrating look at human/animal attachment, and it presents a vivid portrait of a community—and, by extension, an entire nation—that is turning to its pets for emotional support and stability in a changing and uncertain world.

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Editorial Reviews

KLIATT
In a world where people sometimes have better relationships with their computers than with their families or friends, the dog's role has evolved from "best friend" to surrogate child, focus-for-life, aid for the handicapped, rescuer and therapy assistant. As Jon Katz puts it, "the range of dogs' work today is breathtaking." (p.206) The New Work of Dogs is no dry sociological essay on these roles, but rather a bittersweet look at several individuals whose lives are different because of the dogs they have adopted. Perhaps most memorable are the chapters on the Divorced Dogs Club (a group of five recently divorced women who meet on a regular basis, providing support for each other and receiving added encouragement from their four-legged partners), Donna (who sang regularly to her corgi while she was fighting a losing battle against breast cancer) and Betty Jean, the feisty grandmother whose world revolves around dog rescue: " . . . rescue was her life, her real work, family and purpose; nothing else came close . . . In the same way writers, artists and actors fantasized about giving up their day jobs to pursue their passions, dog rescuers plotted how to do nothing but save dogs. And there were plenty to save." (p.47) Although Katz tries on occasion to be dispassionate and look objectively at our need for companionship and love, he cannot help but get caught up in the stories he hears of love and devotion. "It was a friendship and attachment literally beyond words, often beyond our consciousness." (p.222) Such feelings are understandable. Jon Katz has done a great service in telling these stories of animal-human bonding. Even in his concern for our seeing dogs as "quasi-humans with furand sharper teeth" he is reminding us of the need for compassion and understanding for both humans and animals. Recommended for all high school, public and academic libraries. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2003, Random House, 237p. bibliog., Ages 15 to adult.
—Katherine Gillen
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780375760556
  • Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 6/8/2004
  • Edition description: New Afterward by author
  • Pages: 237
  • Sales rank: 431,364
  • Product dimensions: 5.14 (w) x 8.01 (h) x 0.57 (d)

Meet the Author

Jon Katz
Jon Katz has written twelve books—six novels and six works of nonfiction. A two-time finalist for the National Magazine Award, he has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, and Wired. He is a contributing editor to public radio’s Marketplace and to Bark magazine. A member of the Association of Pet Dog Trainers, he lives in northern New Jersey with his wife, Paula Span, a reporter for The Washington Post; their college-student daughter, Emma Span; and their two dogs. Katz is working on his next book, which is about women and dogs. He can be e-mailed at jonkatz3@comcast.net.

From the Hardcover edition.

Biography

"I really don't know anyone in media who's been given the freedom I've had to spout off on a wide range of subjects," Jon Katz wrote in his 1998 farewell column for HotWired. As a writer for web venues such as HotWired and Slashdot, Katz has waxed enthusiastic about Internet culture and championed "geek life." As a contributor to Wired and Rolling Stone, he's written articles on technology, politics and culture. And as a book author, he's penned mystery novels, memoirs and more, at the rate of nearly one per year since 1990.

Katz began his career in traditional media, as a reporter and editor for the Boston Globe and Washington Post and as a producer for the CBS Morning News. His experiences in television became fodder for fiction in his first novel, Sign Off, which Publishers Weekly called "an absorbing, well-paced debut" about the corporate takeover of a television network.

Disenchanted with the world of old media, Katz signed on to the cyber-revolution as a contributor to Wired magazine and its then-online counterpart, HotWired. As pundit and media critic, Katz became a prominent voice of the libertarian, countercultural, freewheeling spirit that prevailed on the Web in its early years. After HotWired underwent a corporate transformation, Katz moved to Slashdot, a free-for-all e-zine that allowed him to continue spouting off on a wide range of subjects (for Katz, "open source" is not just a method of software development, it's a metaphor for free expression).

Meanwhile, Katz began a series of "suburban detective" books featuring private investigator and family man Kit DeLeeuw, who operates out of a New Jersey mall. The intricately plotted mysteries serve as "a framework for the author's musings on suburban fatherhood, a subject on which he is wise and witty and honestly touching," wrote Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times.

In 1997, Katz's digital-age pontifications took book form in Virtuous Reality, which tackled censorship, online privacy and the shortcomings of the media. Katz struck a more personal chord with Geeks (2000), a work of gonzo ethnography that follows two computer-obsessed teenagers and their struggle to escape the Idaho boonies. "Katz's obvious empathy and love for his 'lost boys,' his ability to see shades of his own troubled youth in their tough lives, gives his narrative a rich taste that makes it unlike other Net books," said Salon writer Andrew Leonard.

Katz turned to himself as the subject for a meditation on middle age, Running to the Mountain (2000) which chronicles the three months he spent alone in a dilapidated cabin in upstate New York. The result is "a funny, moving and triumphant voyage of the soul," according to The Boston Globe.

Then there's Katz's other pet subject: dogs. In A Dog Year , Katz writes about a high-strung border collie -- a canine "lost boy" he adopted and gradually bonded with. "Dogs make me a better human," said Katz in an interview. Given his recent contributions to The Bark magazine, dogs may make Katz an even more versatile and prolific writer, if that's possible.

Good To Know

Katz is so persuaded of the power of interactivity that he's refused to have his work printed by publishers unless they'll run his e-mail address with it. His published e-mail addresses include jonkatz@slashdot.org, jonkatz@bellatlantic.net and jonkatz3@comcast.net.

After a Slate writer made a disparaging comment about Katz's basement, Katz wrote a column describing the basement office where he works. Its accoutrements include a wooden cherub, portraits of Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln, and a collection of gargoyles. A Haitian voodoo "frame thingy" (in Katz's words) graces his computer.

In our interview, Katz told us more fun facts: "I see every movie that comes out, usually alone in a megaplex. I love the New York Yankees because they win a lot. My one brilliant move in life was marrying my wife Paula."

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    1. Hometown:
      Montclair, New Jersey
    1. Date of Birth:
      August 8, 1947
    2. Place of Birth:
      Providence, Rhode Island
    1. Education:
      Attended George Washington University and The New School for Social Research

Read an Excerpt

chapter one

dogville, u.s.a.

A as gracious as the shady township of Montclair is, as hip and pricey as it is becoming, there’s no escaping the fact that it sits squarely in New Jersey, a beacon in the vast sea of ugly industrial and suburban sprawl that is the state’s most famous characteristic. Malls and condo complexes lap at its lush borders from every side.

But Montclair remains an enclave of old homes on streets lined with giant oaks and maples planted eighty years ago, some of which fall in every big storm. It has more movie screens than hardware stores and more Thai and Japanese restaurants than fast-food outlets. It is utterly obsessed with education and the present and future development of its much-attended-to children.

Founded as a summer retreat for wealthy New Yorkers, it also reflects the sobering disparities in wealth that characterize contemporary America. Along the ridges of the Watchung Hills, the living rooms of vast, meticulously maintained mansions have clear views of the Manhattan skyline. In the South End, small apartments and houses are home to most of the town’s poor residents.

For reasons few can recall, Montclair is actually divided into two parts—Upper Montclair and plain old Montclair. The two Montclairs share the same government, municipal services, and school system, but Upper Montclair is richer and whiter, with an upscale shopping area and its own zip code.

Partly because of its proximity to the cultural and media institutions along Manhattan’s West Side, Montclair attracts rafts of writers, artists, editors, journalists, TV producers, and other media people. So even minor civic squabbles tend to make their way onto the pages of The New York Times, since half the people who work at the paper live here, or so it sometimes seems.

Montclair is, for much of the surrounding area, a Manhattan surrogate, a place to go for indie movies or fusion cuisine.

It’s commonplace to go out for a walk and see a commercial being shot at the picturesque train station down the street, to encounter a New Yorker writer or a soap-opera star at church or at the organic-foods supermarket, or to spot Yogi Berra, the New York Yankee legend, getting his SUV serviced downtown.

Less-celebrated residents commute into Manhattan or out to the exurban office complexes and business parks that stain the surrounding countryside. A growing number sit by their computers all day in home offices, visited at intervals by UPS and Fed-Ex trucks, with whose drivers they are on a first-name basis.

Newcomers—drawn by improved rail lines into the city, the town’s growing rep for sophisticated cultural offerings, and its deserved tolerance for diversity (all driving real estate prices through the clouds)—are streaming in from Brooklyn and Manhattan. They bring an informed, somewhat combative, politically correct edge to the civic life of a town that was fairly intense to start with.

Montclair is also something of a social laboratory, where trends and traits pop up before hitting the rest of the country. Moms leaving home for work, kids strollered around by nannies, dads staying at home, then moms growing disillusioned with the workplace and returning home to raise their kids—we could track it all as we walked our dogs. We saw the influx of families with two mommies or two daddies. We watched the town become a magnet for interracial couples. An already successful and settled black professional class expanded. The Wall Streeters stayed with their Beamers and Mercedes.

In fact, Montclair seems to include some of everything and everyone. WASP country-clubbers live more or less harmoniously with Jews and blacks; single professionals from Manhattan coexist with kid-crazed boomers from Brooklyn; ardent liberal professors and Republicans and conservatives manage to get along; lesbian and gay families mingle with Asian immigrants.

Of Montclair’s 38,977 inhabitants, 23,000 are white and 13,000 African-American. The 2000 census also found 73 American Indian or Alaskan natives, 1,300 Asians, and nearly 2,000 Hispanics.

Maybe they get along reasonably well because there is no mistaking what Montclair is primarily about: children. Kids are why most people move here or stay here, why they sound off angrily at school board meetings and gather intelligence on math teachers and soccer coaches with the same ruthlessness and determination that archaeologists comb desert sites for dinosaur bones.

Day and night, station wagons, SUVs, and vans zip back and forth between friends’ houses and hockey and lacrosse games, karate classes and art lessons. For Montclair’s hyperstimulated middle-class children, a day without a positive educational or social experience is—well, there hardly are such days.

But high up on the list of things this polyglot town cares most deeply about—close behind real estate values—comes dogs.

Montclair, it turns out, is Dogville, U.S.A. According to the American Veterinary Association’s U.S. Pet Ownership and Demographic Sourcebook, Montclair almost perfectly exemplifies the American dog-owning population—educated, affluent, child-centered, and middle-class to the core.

Dog ownership increases as family income rises. Nearly 40 percent of American households with annual incomes of $60,000 or more own a dog, compared with fewer than a quarter of households with less than $25,000 in income.

More than three-quarters of dog owners nationwide are home owners, and dog owners are much more likely to be highly educated than the population as a whole. This is Montclair.

As is obvious on TV every night, dogs have become part of the American Dream package, that vision of supposed success and joy that includes a house, a patch of lawn, kids, and a car or two. An affectionate canine companion completes the picture.

In Montclair, people focus on their dogs with much the same intensity they apply to their children, the difference being that dogs can’t play sports, take music lessons, or apply to college, fortunately for them.

I’ve been walking dogs—first Clarence, a golden retriever; then two yellow Labs named Julius and Stanley; now two border collies named Devon and Homer—in and around Montclair for nearly two decades.

So have a lot of other people, raising all the policy issues that have cropped up in every town with dogs: Should dogs walk off-leash? Should they be permitted to run freely in parks, or, for that matter, be admitted to parks at all? How much barking constitutes a nuisance? Should people be permitted to own so-called “dangerous” breeds like pit bulls? How vigorously should the police enforce clean-up laws? What if people want to own more than one dog or two?

Such questions have become so sensitive that what a big-city newspaper would refer to as “a senior police official” would agree to meet with me only on condition of anonymity. He also insisted on leaving the jurisdiction: we met at the Eagle Rock Diner in adjacent West Orange. “In my shoes,” he told me in a hushed voice over coffee, “there is just no percentage in talking publicly about dogs. Every dog call is bad. Either there’s a nasty biter loose, or some dog ran away, or there’s a dogfight, or somebody’s dog is barking late at night. It’s nothing but trouble. Whatever you do, you lose. People will fight harder for their dogs than they do for themselves.”

The township issued 1,049 licenses for dogs in 2001, but officials think at least three times that number are in residence without licenses. Although local ordinances require vaccinations and licensure, the senior police official confided what dog owners already know: this isn’t high on the cops’ list of unlawful activities, so the law gets widely ignored.

The numbers fluctuate, of course. Trainers and walkers and groomers talk about “Christmas dogs,” the legions of adorably beribboned puppies placed under trees that will inevitably mean an upswing in their business a few months hence.

Like the rest of the town, the registered dog population is diverse. But among the properly licensed dogs are, in round numbers, 50 beagles, 150 golden retrievers, 200 Labs and Lab mixes, 20 German pointers, and a dozen cairn terriers along with hundreds of mixed and indefinable breeds.

Because dog ownership correlates with class, since they are expensive to own, Montclair may have more thoroughbreds than many towns; despite its mix of incomes, it remains a predominantly upper-middle-class community. But people’s attitudes and feelings about their pets are the same, regardless of income.

It’s stunning just how much the dog experience has changed in the past few decades. Years ago, people went to the pound to find a dog, or got a puppy from a friend’s or neighbor’s litter. Those who bought purebreds or boutique breeds were a privileged minority, their well-born dogs an affectation.

Dog training was little known and little needed, since most dogs merely wandered their neighborhoods and were seldom walked on leashes. Mailmen and children got bitten from time to time, but it hardly ever made the news. Fighting breeds were almost unheard-of. People surely loved their dogs, but by contemporary standards, few spent much time or money on them. Dogs were in the background, not at the center, of family life. They slept in the basement or—unthinkable today—in a backyard doghouse, chased after cars and other dogs, ate table scraps.

They came and went. Some got hit by cars, others ran off or were put down when they got sick or old. When that happened, people went to the pound for another dog. Beyond the initial round of puppy shots, people rarely invested much in veterinary care.

Often much loved and fondly remembered, dogs were not treated as family members, according to behaviorists who have studied human-animal bonds. Nor did they have playdates, a phenomenon fairly common in Montclair today. The notion that they were a part of one’s deepest emotional experiences would have been a joke.

From the Hardcover edition.

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First Chapter

chapter one

dogville, u.s.a.

A as gracious as the shady township of Montclair is, as hip and pricey as it is becoming, there's no escaping the fact that it sits squarely in New Jersey, a beacon in the vast sea of ugly industrial and suburban sprawl that is the state's most famous characteristic. Malls and condo complexes lap at its lush borders from every side.

But Montclair remains an enclave of old homes on streets lined with giant oaks and maples planted eighty years ago, some of which fall in every big storm. It has more movie screens than hardware stores and more Thai and Japanese restaurants than fast-food outlets. It is utterly obsessed with education and the present and future development of its much-attended-to children.

Founded as a summer retreat for wealthy New Yorkers, it also reflects the sobering disparities in wealth that characterize contemporary America. Along the ridges of the Watchung Hills, the living rooms of vast, meticulously maintained mansions have clear views of the Manhattan skyline. In the South End, small apartments and houses are home to most of the town's poor residents.

For reasons few can recall, Montclair is actually divided into two parts—Upper Montclair and plain old Montclair. The two Montclairs share the same government, municipal services, and school system, but Upper Montclair is richer and whiter, with an upscale shopping area and its own zip code.

Partly because of its proximity to the cultural and media institutions along Manhattan's West Side, Montclair attracts rafts of writers, artists, editors, journalists, TV producers, and other media people. So even minor civic squabbles tend tomake their way onto the pages of The New York Times, since half the people who work at the paper live here, or so it sometimes seems.

Montclair is, for much of the surrounding area, a Manhattan surrogate, a place to go for indie movies or fusion cuisine.

It's commonplace to go out for a walk and see a commercial being shot at the picturesque train station down the street, to encounter a New Yorker writer or a soap-opera star at church or at the organic-foods supermarket, or to spot Yogi Berra, the New York Yankee legend, getting his SUV serviced downtown.

Less-celebrated residents commute into Manhattan or out to the exurban office complexes and business parks that stain the surrounding countryside. A growing number sit by their computers all day in home offices, visited at intervals by UPS and Fed-Ex trucks, with whose drivers they are on a first-name basis.

Newcomers—drawn by improved rail lines into the city, the town's growing rep for sophisticated cultural offerings, and its deserved tolerance for diversity (all driving real estate prices through the clouds)—are streaming in from Brooklyn and Manhattan. They bring an informed, somewhat combative, politically correct edge to the civic life of a town that was fairly intense to start with.

Montclair is also something of a social laboratory, where trends and traits pop up before hitting the rest of the country. Moms leaving home for work, kids strollered around by nannies, dads staying at home, then moms growing disillusioned with the workplace and returning home to raise their kids—we could track it all as we walked our dogs. We saw the influx of families with two mommies or two daddies. We watched the town become a magnet for interracial couples. An already successful and settled black professional class expanded. The Wall Streeters stayed with their Beamers and Mercedes.

In fact, Montclair seems to include some of everything and everyone. WASP country-clubbers live more or less harmoniously with Jews and blacks; single professionals from Manhattan coexist with kid-crazed boomers from Brooklyn; ardent liberal professors and Republicans and conservatives manage to get along; lesbian and gay families mingle with Asian immigrants.

Of Montclair's 38,977 inhabitants, 23,000 are white and 13,000 African-American. The 2000 census also found 73 American Indian or Alaskan natives, 1,300 Asians, and nearly 2,000 Hispanics.

Maybe they get along reasonably well because there is no mistaking what Montclair is primarily about: children. Kids are why most people move here or stay here, why they sound off angrily at school board meetings and gather intelligence on math teachers and soccer coaches with the same ruthlessness and determination that archaeologists comb desert sites for dinosaur bones.

Day and night, station wagons, SUVs, and vans zip back and forth between friends' houses and hockey and lacrosse games, karate classes and art lessons. For Montclair's hyperstimulated middle-class children, a day without a positive educational or social experience is—well, there hardly are such days.

But high up on the list of things this polyglot town cares most deeply about—close behind real estate values—comes dogs.

Montclair, it turns out, is Dogville, U.S.A. According to the American Veterinary Association's U.S. Pet Ownership and Demographic Sourcebook, Montclair almost perfectly exemplifies the American dog-owning population—educated, affluent, child-centered, and middle-class to the core.

Dog ownership increases as family income rises. Nearly 40 percent of American households with annual incomes of $60,000 or more own a dog, compared with fewer than a quarter of households with less than $25,000 in income.

More than three-quarters of dog owners nationwide are home owners, and dog owners are much more likely to be highly educated than the population as a whole. This is Montclair.

As is obvious on TV every night, dogs have become part of the American Dream package, that vision of supposed success and joy that includes a house, a patch of lawn, kids, and a car or two. An affectionate canine companion completes the picture.

In Montclair, people focus on their dogs with much the same intensity they apply to their children, the difference being that dogs can't play sports, take music lessons, or apply to college, fortunately for them.

I've been walking dogs—first Clarence, a golden retriever; then two yellow Labs named Julius and Stanley; now two border collies named Devon and Homer—in and around Montclair for nearly two decades.

So have a lot of other people, raising all the policy issues that have cropped up in every town with dogs: Should dogs walk off-leash? Should they be permitted to run freely in parks, or, for that matter, be admitted to parks at all? How much barking constitutes a nuisance? Should people be permitted to own so-called "dangerous" breeds like pit bulls? How vigorously should the police enforce clean-up laws? What if people want to own more than one dog or two?

Such questions have become so sensitive that what a big-city newspaper would refer to as "a senior police official" would agree to meet with me only on condition of anonymity. He also insisted on leaving the jurisdiction: we met at the Eagle Rock Diner in adjacent West Orange. "In my shoes," he told me in a hushed voice over coffee, "there is just no percentage in talking publicly about dogs. Every dog call is bad. Either there's a nasty biter loose, or some dog ran away, or there's a dogfight, or somebody's dog is barking late at night. It's nothing but trouble. Whatever you do, you lose. People will fight harder for their dogs than they do for themselves."

The township issued 1,049 licenses for dogs in 2001, but officials think at least three times that number are in residence without licenses. Although local ordinances require vaccinations and licensure, the senior police official confided what dog owners already know: this isn't high on the cops' list of unlawful activities, so the law gets widely ignored.

The numbers fluctuate, of course. Trainers and walkers and groomers talk about "Christmas dogs," the legions of adorably beribboned puppies placed under trees that will inevitably mean an upswing in their business a few months hence.

Like the rest of the town, the registered dog population is diverse. But among the properly licensed dogs are, in round numbers, 50 beagles, 150 golden retrievers, 200 Labs and Lab mixes, 20 German pointers, and a dozen cairn terriers along with hundreds of mixed and indefinable breeds.

Because dog ownership correlates with class, since they are expensive to own, Montclair may have more thoroughbreds than many towns; despite its mix of incomes, it remains a predominantly upper-middle-class community. But people's attitudes and feelings about their pets are the same, regardless of income.

It's stunning just how much the dog experience has changed in the past few decades. Years ago, people went to the pound to find a dog, or got a puppy from a friend's or neighbor's litter. Those who bought purebreds or boutique breeds were a privileged minority, their well-born dogs an affectation.

Dog training was little known and little needed, since most dogs merely wandered their neighborhoods and were seldom walked on leashes. Mailmen and children got bitten from time to time, but it hardly ever made the news. Fighting breeds were almost unheard-of. People surely loved their dogs, but by contemporary standards, few spent much time or money on them. Dogs were in the background, not at the center, of family life. They slept in the basement or—unthinkable today—in a backyard doghouse, chased after cars and other dogs, ate table scraps.

They came and went. Some got hit by cars, others ran off or were put down when they got sick or old. When that happened, people went to the pound for another dog. Beyond the initial round of puppy shots, people rarely invested much in veterinary care.

Often much loved and fondly remembered, dogs were not treated as family members, according to behaviorists who have studied human-animal bonds. Nor did they have playdates, a phenomenon fairly common in Montclair today. The notion that they were a part of one's deepest emotional experiences would have been a joke.
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Sort by: Showing all of 3 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted November 21, 2010

    I Also Recommend:

    A Dog Year: Rescuing Devon, the Most Troublesome Dog in the World
    Running to the Mountain: A Midlife Adventure

    Calling All Dog-Lovers: This Book is Your Perfect Match!

    In The New Work of Dogs, Jon Katz explores the dog-loving society in Montclair, New Jersey and discovers that it's important to understand our relationships with dogs, so we don't put them at risk. Dogs are now treated as human companions since America is filled with technology addicts who barely interact with people and become isolated. This companionship plays a key role in eliminating this loneliness. Dogs give us unconditional loyalty and love and will never judge or abandon us when humans tend to leave people and stop loving them. Katz reaches this understanding by interviewing dog owners, animal workers, trainers, breeders, rescuers, and uses statistics and facts about attachment theory to make his information clear. Every dog has a specific job to do and some can help people get through difficult situations in life. This book is heartwarming and cheerful. It made me realize that dogs play an important role in society and without them life wouldn't be the same. This is one major message that Katz wants us to take from the book. He cautions us, however, that humans are arrogant and take advantage of dogs. "But I find it troubling, this idea that we can deny or alter the very nature of animals to suit our temporal needs, the arrogant assumption that an entire subordinate species exists solely to lend us a hand when we want help, often later to be discarded like junk-food wrappers when we don't" (208). The author's message here is for humans to continue to support dogs even after they have done their jobs, instead of just tossing them away. I definitely recommend this book because Jon Katz uses a unique style of telling a different story in each chapter, providing something meaningful for everyone. I loved the way the author used vivid words and details to get his many points across. I could actually visualize all of the events that occurred in the book. However, at times the book became a little boring and confusing, and I had to reread parts. Overall, this book is very satisfying and gives the reader a new respect for dogs.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted February 6, 2010

    The New Work of Dogs

    As soon as I started this book I could tell Jon Katz did a tremendous amount of research. I found it very informative and intuitive about how society "works" their dogs these days.

    At times I did feel the information became a bit dry and found myself skimming over parts of pages, however on the whole I found "The New Work of Dogs" very enlightening. It opened my eyes to the fact of how much of our society has to "keep up with the Joneses" (more than I was aware of) which causes innocent dogs to endure their owner's selfishness and ignorance.

    I have always had a dog and currently have the most wonderful Border Collie in the world - Toby. As I read this book and look at Toby, the knowledge I have gained is reinforced to keep on striving to create a world for my dog(s)that emulates nature, my dog's breeding characteristics and to continue to challenge Toby to be the dog he was meant to be. And it shows - he is one happy dog!

    Thanks, Jon Katz, for enlightening the reader and reminding us how our dogs are such wonderful and intellegent animals that learn how to adapt to do the work assigned them.

    If anyone is interested in how to better their best friend's life and their bond with their dog, read this book.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 9, 2009

    No text was provided for this review.

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