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What the Dog Knows Young Readers Edition: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World - Hardcover

Warren, Cat

 
9781534428140: What the Dog Knows Young Readers Edition: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1534428143 ISBN 13: 9781534428140
Verlag: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

“Fun and engaging.” —School Library Connection
“A fast, fascinating read that captures the strong bond between dog and owner.” —School Library Journal

In this young readers edition of the New York Times bestseller, Cat Warren and her canine companion, Solo, teach readers that the nose knows no bounds when it comes to working together, being persistent, and helping others.

Solo has a fine nose and knows how to use it, but he’s only one of many thousands of scent-detection dogs all over the United States. That’s a group that includes cadaver dogs, tracking, trailing, and apprehension dogs; dogs that can locate unmarked graves of Civil War soldiers; and even dogs that can find drowning victims more than two hundred feet below the surface of a lake.

All these dogs love to use their noses. They think their job is simply the best, most interesting game they’ve ever played! What good working dogs can do may seem magical or mysterious, but What the Dog Knows shows the science, the rigorous training, and the skilled handling that underlie these amazing abilities.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Cat Warren is a professor at North Carolina State University, where she teaches science journalism, editing, and creative nonfiction courses. Before starting her academic career, Warren worked for newspapers across the United States, reporting on crime, poverty, and politics, from California to Wyoming to Connecticut. Warren started training her young German shepherd, Solo, as a cadaver dog in 2004. She and Solo were called to search for the missing across North Carolina for a number of years. She lives in downtown Durham, North Carolina, with her husband, David Auerbach, a retired professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University, and their two German shepherds. Visit CatWarren.com.

Patricia J. Wynne is an artist, printmaker, and freelance scientific illustrator based in New York City. She works as a contract artist for scientists at research organizations around the world. Wynne has illustrated over 200 books for both adults and children, and her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Cricket, and Scientific American. Her books have received multiple awards, including a Theodore Seuss Geisel Honor for Hello, Bumblebee Bat (by Darrin Lunde). She studied printmaking at the University of Iowa and works at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in midtown New York City. Find out more at PatriciaWynne.com.

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Chapter One: A Furry Prince CHAPTER ONE A FURRY PRINCE
The e-mail arrived in my inbox with a subject line that made my heart race: “Good News.”

I had been waiting and hoping for nearly a year for a German shepherd pup from a respected breeder in Ohio. We wanted one of Joan’s puppies. It seemed our wait was finally over.

“We have one gorgeous male,” Joan said in her e-mail to me. But he had to be delivered by C-section, lifted out of his sedated mother’s womb. He was a heavy lump. A litter of one.

I gazed at the photos Joan sent me with the lone male pup’s birth announcement. In one shot he nestled in Joan’s cupped hand. In another he was latched on to one of his mother’s ten teats. Vita looked mournful, lying in the whelping box with one pup suckling.

No wonder he was strong. Inside the womb, he didn’t have to share nourishment with other pups. Outside the womb, he had his choice of milk dispensers.

His head didn’t look gorgeous. His nose looked squashed. His eyes were squinty. But I realized that Joan knew much more about newborn German shepherds than I did. This solitary pup was her twenty-fifth litter.

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Photo courtesy of Joan Andreasen-Webb

The newborn pup looked like a mole to me.

The pup wasn’t just handsome and strong, Joan told me. He also had a fine nose. The three of them had been back from the surgical delivery at the vet hospital for only a few hours, but when Joan walked into the room, the pup woke up and bobbled his head.

“His nose was working scent!” Joan wrote.

I read right past that piece of news. I knew what “working scent” meant, and it didn’t interest me. I’d taught my German shepherds to keep their muzzles away from visitors’ legs and crotches.

Dogs recognize each other that way. Most people find it rude.

“No sniff” was a standard command that David and I used in our house. But the house had been empty of German shepherds for nearly a year. Our sweet Zev had died almost a year earlier.

I found the most important news buried a few paragraphs down in Joan’s e-mail: “You have the choice to have our little prince as we see how he develops.” Then she assured me we could discuss any concerns I might have about his being “a singleton.” She—along with her helpful adult shepherds—could help the pup overcome these issues.

Concerns? Absolutely not. David and I had a puppy! I had checked my e-mail every hour for the last week, waiting for news about the litter’s arrival. Humans stay inside their mothers’ wombs on average nine months from conception to birth. For dogs it’s only about two months. But it felt so much longer to me.

Now it was early spring, and the next chapter of our life with dogs could begin. This pup would play a starring role.

I ran to find David, who was working on his logic classes in the study. “Puppy!” I said. He knew what I meant.

Then I flitted around the living room. I landed in front of my computer. My patient husband stood and listened as I read the entire e-mail to him.

I waited for my dizzy joy to ebb before responding to Joan. I wanted to sound like a grown-up. I was supposed to be one. I felt bad for her. All that planning and work and cost and hope. And one lone puppy instead of a squiggling mass of them. Other people who had been waiting for this day like me would be so disappointed.

I knew all of that. I also knew that we had the pup I wanted.

I had fallen in love with Joan’s many German shepherds, and with the idea of this pup, ten months before. Joan lived in Ohio, but she bred and raised shepherds that had a West German family history.

As she weaned the pups from their mother’s milk, she replaced it with goat milk and a raw-meat diet. They had lots of early exposure to woods and creeks, to friendly people and suburban malls, to toys and games—and to her other dogs.

Joan’s adult dogs lay calmly on the sidewalk next to café tables. They attended children’s reading hour at the library, heads planted between their paws, listening. They herded sheep, for fun. Some German shepherds, like border collies, have an innate desire to keep groups of people and animals together and moving in the right direction.

They also excelled in a sport called Schutzhund, a German word that means “protection dog.” I didn’t know much about it, except that the dogs had to bite someone on command. Luckily, that person had a hard protective sleeve on. A couple of Joan’s pups grew up to become police K9s. When I was a newspaper reporter, I once spent the night shift with a patrol K9 and his handler. The dog’s intensity and deep-throated bark startled me.

I didn’t want that kind of German shepherd. This pup would have two jobs when he grew up. I wanted him to lie beneath my desk while I wrote articles and graded student papers, and then leap up and play ball in the yard with me when I wanted a break. If he won awards in the obedience ring, that would be a nice bonus.

I finally stopped daydreaming and looked up the word “singleton” on my computer. In math a singleton is a set with just one element. Most humans are singletons (though some of us are born as twins, or triplets). In dogs “singleton” means exactly the same thing, “a single one.” But with horror stories attached.

The vast majority of puppies have littermates, from three to twelve, or more, depending on the breed. Those littermates exchange thousands of signals daily. That’s part of how they grow and learn. They tumble over one another, squeaking and mewling at first, then, as their baby teeth come in, licking and biting, squealing in pain, licking and wagging in apology. From there a pup might learn to bite a little less hard the second time.

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Solo photo by Sherri Clendenin

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Litter photo by Diana Bunch

Solo was a singleton. Most pups have littermates who help them learn dog manners.

Litters are adorable, and the puppies’ interactions help each pup become a well-socialized dog. Pups learn to play well with others because they receive instant feedback from their littermates if they don’t. That rough-and-tumble play can help a puppy learn how to deal with a variety of other dogs—the elderly miniature poodle in pain, the next-door neighbor’s rude retriever. That play even prepares dogs for chance encounters with weird people.

As I kept reading, the tales of singletons got darker. A singleton dog lives in a universe of “yes.” A singleton tends to lack “bite inhibition” because he never learns from fellow pups what’s too hard or what hurts. He doesn’t know what a hard bite feels like. At the same time, a singleton can be overly sensitive to touch, even from his human. He’s never had to sleep with a squirming or snoring littermate on top of him, or underneath him.

A singleton is “unable to get out of trouble calmly and graciously.” (Although I wasn’t an only child, I related to that one.) A single pup can have an “inability to handle frustration.” (I related to that one too.)

I stopped reading about the bad and tried to focus on the good. Singleton dogs can sometimes make...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1534428143
ISBN 13 
9781534428140
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Zeichner
Wynne Patricia J.
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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