She recorded the lives of 11 dogs, five males and six females 22 pups were born. And she is mostly dealing with large dogs - German Shepherds, huskies. This of course begs the question: what are normal circumstances? Certainly, her apprehension of dogs is a touch different to most people's. Her question, the one never before asked, was: how do dogs conduct themselves if left uncoaxed and undisturbed in normal circumstances? How did he do it? It was while she was pondering this that she came on her revelation and her quest. What were these errands? Where did he go? How did he navigate the city of Cambridge, Massachussetts, evading traffic, dog officers, dog nappers (who at the time supplied the flourishing laboratories of Cambridge with experimental animals)? He never touched poisonous bait, he was never mauled by other dogs, he returned unscathed every time. Her road to dog Damascus came one day when she fell to wondering about Misha, a dog who rambled out every evening on his own secret errands. She emerges from her odd chronicle as a warm, wise, unwitty woman, who like all great eccentrics sees nothing strange in her behaviour, her diurnal and indeed nocturnal activities. Of all the literature I've read about dogs (and occasionally cats), only four items have been memorable: one is Lord Byron's epitaph on his dog Boatswain - 'beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of man without his vices' another, Maurice Maeterlinck's observation that 'in this incommunicable world where exist among created things no other relations than those of executioners and victims, eaters and eaten, one animal alone has succeeded in breaking through the prophetic circle, in escaping from itself to come bounding towards us'. As a result of the man's-best-friend syndrome and our sentimental attachments, dogs have been anthropomorphised out of their own separate existence - an existence whose reality has been given back to them by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in this odd and inviting book. DOGS are the quislings of the animal world: willing slaves, distorted by domesticity and beloved of the enemy.
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