Norton's Philosophical Memoirs: The story of a man as told by his dog

Now don't start getting ideas. I am not a philosopher. I'm a dog. But I look like a philosopher, they say, and I'm not sure the distinction is as great as you might think. I'm what's known as a Rhodesian Ridgeback. My forebears used to hunt lions in Africa, but I'm a modernized urban specimen. I don't hunt much of anything.

I was born somewhere on the plains west of Uppsala, Sweden. In the beginning I was blind and tumbled around with my siblings. We pooped and bit each other and nursed, an...