Most books about puppies are dog-improvement manuals, guiding readers on ‘How to Raise the Perfect Dog’ or how to achieve ‘Perfect Puppy in 7 Days.’ Dr. Alexandra Horowitz‘s profound and totally delightful new book is not that type of book. It’s an unprecedented look at the complex, overlooked, and often hilarious journeys of puppies becoming themselves.
“Instead of following an instruction manual for a puppy, I wanted to follow the puppy,” she writes. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget famously watched his own three children grow into adults and his observations of them helped inspire many of his theories about how young human minds develop. Horowitz, a world-renowned expert in dog cognition, set out to do the same for her family’s spectacularly eye-browed, exquisitely sensitive, and rambunctious new bearded lady, Quiddity. In The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves, Horowitz observes, documents, and revels in the first year of Quid’s life from her birth on Day One through the puppy equivalents of infancy, childhood, and adolescence.
Horowitz is a bestselling author of multiple books on dogs, the host of the podcast Off Leash, and the founder and leader of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College. She combines deep scientific expertise with the doggedness of an investigative reporter, the gift and imagination of a master storyteller, and the infectious enthusiasm of, well, a puppy. She has devoted her career to trying to answer the question, “what is it like to be a dog?,” and has inspired people around the world to try to better understand the complex inner lives of our closest four-legged companions. In this podcast episode, we spoke with Horowitz about the science of puppyhood, how Quid is enjoying her big literary debut, and what we have to learn from trying to understand how puppies encounter and make meaning of the world.
