It was headline news for the BBC not long ago: “If you want to live a healthier life, get a dog.” Those who own dogs would not have been surprised to read this, and those who study the relationships between dogs and their owners have known this particular bottom line for quite some time. As dog scientist Deborah Wells has observed, dogs can prevent us from becoming ill, can help us recover from being ill, and can even alert us that we may be about to become ill. Dog owners who suffer heart attacks are nearly nine times more likely to survive the following year than those who do not own dogs (cats do not help at all here). Therapy dogs decrease the stress levels, and increase the social interactions, of people lucky enough to be visited by them. The list goes on and on.

It is not just dog owners who benefit from interactions with their canine companions. Quite obviously, the dogs themselves benefit. In fact, the mutual benefits are so great that the phrase “dog owner” is not really an appropriate one because dogs own us as much as we own them. As Darcy Morey points out in the book you are about to read, the process of dog domestication was one in which members of different wolf societies adapted themselves to living in the environments that people created.