Customer Reviews

Why We Love the Dogs We Do: How to Find the Dog That Matches Your Personality

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Stanley Coren, a psychologist famous for his popular 'The Intelligence of Dogs,' attempts in this more recent book to categorize the various dog breeds by their phychological natures in order to best match prospective owners and dogs.

An intriguing idea, but unfortunately not accomplished in this work.

Coren places each breed in one of seven rather indistinct categories: Friendly, Protective, Independent, Self-Assured, Consistent, Steady, Clever.

He tests your personality and indicates which of the groups is best for you. You are then encouraged to choose from among the breeds in that group, breeds he bills as fairly interchangeable compatibility-wise.

A large flaw in this is that no breed is described as having more than one strong characteristic: for example, no breed is listed as both friendly and clever.

Additionally, no other compatibility issues are considered. For example, in matching you with a breed, no consideration is given to the breed's needs/demands for attention and exercise. Nor is consideration given to the breed's tolerance for children and other dogs.

The most noteworthy accomplishment of this book is Coren's very extensive historical description of famous people and their relationships with their dogs, but the contribution of such anecdotes in establishing breed characteristics is rather ambiguous.

This was a very poorly written and researched book. I found many mistakes and inconsistencies. The books idea is to rate your personality and find a dog that would be an ideal match. A good idea, but this book won't help you find an answer. Just a small example of the books problems is the dog groups matrix. It is absolutely impossible to get a higher score than "2", (meaning not a good match) for the "consistent" breeds (his name for most toy dogs.) Although he plainly says that Elizabeth Taylor rated a "3" (which is impossible.) I can only think he made a huge typo and carried the error thoughout the whole book.

Then I can take the other example about what he calls the "clever" dog group. It is much easier for a man to rate "higher" for the clever dogs than a women. And, yes, he makes a distinction between dogs suitable for men and others for women. If a woman is an extrovert she could be happy with an Akita, yet if the man is an extrovert, he should get a clever dog like a poodle. Go figure. I certaintly can't see where he is coming from....or where he is going for that matter.

Oh, and although this isn't my last complaint about this book, it is the last I'll mention--the chapter on "cat people" is truly humiliating for both the cat, and the cat lover.

Don't waste your money on this book. The only interesting thing in it is its list of famous people and the breed of dog they owned. If your looking for a good book to help you choose your next dog, try "The Perfect Match" by Walkowicz, "The right dog for you" by Tortora, or "Choosing a Dog" by Baer. They are all good books with excellent information.

I bought this book while browsing through the bookstore, because it seemed to have some interesting anecdotes about celebrities and their dogs. I already am a dog owner, so I didn't need the book to help me find a dog.

Coren's main premise is that he can match owner personalities with dog personalities. This might be doable, but Coren does this in a very sloppy manner. He takes a bunch of historical figures and celebrities, and presumes to figure out their personalities. For example, he rates Josephine, the wife of Napoleon as medium for extroversion and dominance. Hmmm. Given that she lived two hundred years ago, how accurate can he really be? There's a lot of stuff like this in the book - Coren figuring out personalities based on secondary information.

The second problem with the book is that the groupings of the dogs is very broad, making this exercise almost pointless. How useful is a grouping when Shih Tzu's are grouped with terriers?

The books that I think are much better are: Your Purebred Puppy by Michele Welton and Understanding Dog Mind by Bonnie Bergin.

This book might be okay if you hadn't read any other dog breed references, and if your primary interests were in a) celebrities and their dogs, and b) the psyche of the book's author. Okay, I take it back: if you haven't read any other breed references, this book will actually be counterproductive, now that I think of it...

Where to start?

First off, at least half of the text in this thing is taken up with the rich and famous and their preferred breeds. Um, who cares? Jimmy Stewart was a "warm" guy, so he liked Golden Retrievers. Hoop-de-doo. Wading through this junk takes up a lot of reading time.

Once you fight past your indifference to all the eagerly-related inside celebrity scoops, you realize Mr. Coren is attempting to use a personality inventory approach to dog selection. He has you take a little set of personality exams -- a quite rudimentary example of this sort of test, about on the level of an article in Cosmo or Women's Day -- and then use the results to choose a breed. As I said, the test is irritatingly incomplete. As another reviewer here has mentioned, the results you get are ridiculously biased against certain groups of dogs, too. It's impossible to score well for certain groups, and almost inevitable that you'll score well for others. A comparable test is included in Daniel Tortora's "The Right Dog for You," only that one's more well-rounded.

Did I mention the way the dogs are grouped? Other books -- "Paws to Consider" by Kilcommins and Wilson, for example -- use interesting systems to group dogs. "Paws" uses groups like Nine-to-Five dogs, or non-shedding dogs, as a counter to the AKC's "Working Breeds" and "Terriers." Why We Love... tries the same thing, but it's trying to group dog personalities in a really reductionistic way. Believe me, if you love a particular breed, you'll feel vaguely insulted at the way this book tries to stomp that breed's personality flat. The most thorough personality descriptions of the different breeds are probably in "The Right Dog for You," which uses 16-some personality traits for each dog. This book describes one. "Steady." "Warm." Gee, does that mean it's territorial? Dog-aggressive? What DOES it mean?

Finally, don't even get me started on this author's strangely compulsive revelations about his own personality. The cats chapter, which amounts to a really insulting, embarrassing tirade against cats AND their owners, is probably the worst example. I can honestly say I learned much more about the author's romantic life from the chapter than I learned about cats. He phrases a fair chunk of the chapter in anecdotes about a former girlfriend, whom he is plainly misquoting and insulting throughout. No, I'm not pulling your leg. This girlfriend supposedly tells him at one point that cats are good for older people because they won't care when their owners die. Does that sound plausible to you?

If what you want is excellent, carefully written, well-rounded descriptions of different breeds, my personal recommendation is "Paws to Consider" by Brian Kilcommins and Sarah Wilson. They get to a breed's essence without writing like a ponderous encyclopedia. If you're really into the personality test approach, you'd want a copy of "The Right Dog for You" by Daniel Tortora. The tests in that book are sort of half-put-together, but they'll actually help you think about dogs, which this title doesn't do.

If, on the other hand, you want to learn about this author's internal life and whether Zsa Zsa Gabor prefers Great Danes to Yorkies, well, here's your title. I wouldn't use it to choose a dog, though.

I really did enjoy the little anecdotes in this book -- the ones about James Stewart and his dogs were especially sweet. It's worth browsing for some of those little gems, although frankly I don't think there's much here that hasn't been reported elsewhere. I can't answer for the structure of the "find your breed" quizzes, although I thought it weird that different breeds were recommended for men and women of the same personality "type." ...[I]t seems odd that no breed falls into two categories -- surely some are *both* "friendly" and "clever"?

Where Coren drops the ball and then trips over it is when he discusses people who dislike dogs, and people who like cats. ...I think it's worth taking a closer look at exactly what he does in these two chapters. Apparently, people who dislike dogs have no other redeeming features. It's interesting to see Harry Truman discussed solely in light of his failure to enjoy the company of dogs. Apparently, Napoleon grew up a dictator because he lacked the love of a good dog. This is superficially convincing, until you remember that Adolf Hitler was apparently capable of being fond of at least ONE dog in his misbegotten life. What Coren is doing here is playing to the prejudices of animal lovers, who sometimes believe we're superior to people who don't like animals. Specifically, though, it's to any inherent feelings of superiority experienced by dog lovers.

The chapter about cats and cat people is even worse -- and again, it's worse for an interesting reason. In his far superior book, *The Intelligence of Dogs,* Coren is at great pains to point out that "obedience intelligence" is only one kind of intelligence, that dogs bred for different purposes think in different ways, and just because a terrier is not as biddable as a goldenn retriever, it does not make the terrier "dumb."

Then he uses the word "dumb" to characterize cats -- repeatedly. It never occurs to Coren that an animal which is not a dog might legitimately behave in a way different from dogs. And it's obvious he doesn't know much about cats, because he mouths all the stereotypes (aloof, unfriendly, doesn't socialize with its humans) in a manner to make anyone who knows a well-socialized cat howl with laughter. ("You rarely see cats during the day." Sure, you rarely see mine, unless you happen to be near me and looking down -- they're almost always underfoot!)

Coren then quotes from a "study" he did of cat and dog owners. He doesn't reproduce his survey instrument, so there is no way of knowing whether it's reliable, but he uses it to characterize cat owners as cold, aloof, unloving people -- far inferior to the nice warm dog people! Then, just in case we haven't already lost all faith in his scientific impartiality, he proceeds to relate an anecdote from his past, in which a single, neurotic woman with obvious attachment issues is made to represent all cat people. (And yes, he says she is the quintessential cat person.) Now, if half of what he says about this poor woman is true, she was a mess -- but I know dog owners who treat their unfortunate pets in the very same ways. Turn them into picky eaters and then feed them an unbalanced diet of people food? Some dog owners do it all the time. Fail to socialize their pets and then make excuses when Fluffy bites someone? Again, plenty of dog owners do this. Let your pet run loose and then shrug when it comes to a tragic end, because "that's the natural way"? I've known several dog owners who did that, with a series of dogs. Coren's attempt to characterize these flaws as "typical" of cat people make it clear that he is unable to overcome his own dislike of cats, and either lacks the insight to realize it, or hopes to foist his agenda off on his readers.

Me, I like dogs. I like cats. And I enjoyed his earlier book. But after he's exposed his own unacknowledged prejudices to this extent, how am I supposed to believe his discussions of different breeds of dogs carry any less bias? If the only criteria he has for dismissing cats as pets is his own opinion (and he does, in fact, offer his unsupported opinion that owning a cat is just slightly better than coming home to an empty house), what if he doesn't care for a particular breed of dog? Will that influence the groupings he creates?

This is pop psychology of the most shallow, facile sort. Read this book for the anecdotess about Jimmy Stewart, but for heaven's sake don't hope for any insights into animals or people!

I admit, I went into this book thinking it couldn't possibly work - that I would know just by reading dog descriptions what dog I wanted. But I have been there - I have gotten a dog and it just didn't work - so I tried this. I read the book, I took the test. I examined the types of dogs that he recommended - I did further research and then I bought one of those types. WOW was he right on - this has been the best fit yet! I am an absolute fan of this book and recommend it to anybody who tells me they are thinking of getting a dog.

Most people don't really know much about the different breeds - they know what looks good to them - and what looks good is NOT what fits into our lives. Try it - you'll be surprised by what he comes up with - and I bet it will be a match for life!!

I own a dog and two cats so I was interested in reading about my breed of dog in this particular book. I was shocked and appalled to find that "Doctor" Coren dedicated a chapter to bashing catsd. While I get that people have personal preferences, his thinley veiled attempt to disguise a personal bigotry with weak research was disgusting and it truly reflected an extraordinary ignorance by a man who obviously has had litle encounters with cats. Where did he get his PhD? From one of those spam emails on the internet?

While full of fascinating anecdotes, this amusing book is only =useful= if you already know a great deal about dogs. And cats, may I add; cats, too, come with differing personalities depending on breed/type, and are social domestic animals. The entire chapter spent cat-bashing was totally uncalled for, not to mention wildly peculiar. I've been to both dog and cat shows, and let me tell you, cat shows do NOT smell and are NOT full of yowling cats. The statement that dog shows are quiet was sort of mindboggling. And most unfortunately, the editing on this book was incredibly sloppy, resulting in such howlers as the statement in an opening chapter that Queen Victoria was George IV's daughter! I wouldn't use this to research the Right Dog For Me, but it's an amusing bedtime read.

This book was a nice biography of celebrities and their dogs but failed to find the dog that matched my personality. According to this book I should get an Irish Setter or Saluki or one of several other big, active dogs in the "independent" category. The problem is I'm not an active person, I'm positive getting one of these breeds would be a disasterous mistake for myself and the dog. I was left feeling very discouraged after reading this book.