I like the title – "What the Dog Saw"

I plan to pick up this collection of Malcolm Gladwell’s essays in a day or two. The title is intriguing indeed and I’ve learnt that it originates from his essay on Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer, who is admirable in his abilities to understand, calm and train any dog he comes across. Malcolm Gladwell also wonders about what dogs see in Cesar Millan.

I loved that as a title of a book. But it also seems that people are full of wonder lately about the mental abilities of dogs.

I came across this article by Sarah Kershaw in today’s New York Times about Jet, the Labradoodle who can detect seizures in its master.

There was a passage in this article that said:

The matter of what exactly goes on in the mind of a dog is a tricky one, and until recently much of the research on canine intelligence has been met with large doses of skepticism. But over the last several years a growing body of evidence, culled from small scientific studies of dogs’ abilities to do things like detect cancer or seizures, solve complex problems (complex for a dog, anyway), and learn language suggests that they may know more than we thought they did.

Coming across this passage, liking the book title “What the Dog Saw“, and to be enjoying a book called “The Ghost in Love” by Jonathan Caroll, where the fictional dog Pilot, can see cancer approaching as pink fog that is about to descend on someone, seem to be remarkable coincidences for me today.

Or maybe I am just more open to taking notes on dogs these days because my dear daughter insists on getting a dog before her ninth birthday. Beautiful doggie portraits in crayons, pencil and ink are flooding my field of vision these days.

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