Our Four-Legged Friends

Clive D. L. Wynne, Ph.D., is a founding director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University. He has published pieces in Psychology Today, New Scientist, and the New York Times, and has appeared on National Geographic Explorer, PBS, and the BBC. Every dog lover likes to believe our dogs love us, too. But for years, scientists have resisted that conclusion, warning against anthropomorphizing our pets. In Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Clive Wynne, a pioneering canine behaviorist, shows that affection is the very essence of dogs, from their faces and tails to their brains, hormones, even DNA. Wynne’s research is helping to usher in a new era in which love, not intelligence or submissiveness, is at the heart of the human-canine relationship. This scientific revolution is revealing more about dogs’ unique origins, behavior, needs, and hidden depths than we ever imagined possible. Cat Warren, New York Times best-selling author of What the Dog Knows called Dog Is Love “Lively and fascinating... The reader comes away cheered, better informed, and with a new and deeper appreciation for our amazing canine companions and their enormous capacity for love.”

Mark Goldstein, DVM, has spent over 40 years caring, advocating, and fighting for the welfare of animals. He was a senior staff clinician in the medicine department at Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in Boston. After being hired to head the Boston Zoos, he led a turnaround for the failing inner-city Franklin Park Zoo. "Dr. Mark" then moved west when he was appointed to lead the Los Angeles Zoo. He took the helm at the San Diego Humane Society and SPCA where he oversaw the design, development, and completion of the "San Diego Campus for Animal Care." He has a BS in Animal Science and a DVM degree from Cornell University. He is the author of Lions and Tigers and Hamsters: What Animals Large and Small Taught Me About Life, Love, and Humanity (Health Communications Inc.). Dr. Mark's life with animals taught him more than how to be a great doctor, it taught him how to live life. The stories in this book reflect those lessons; they will make you laugh and cry as they entertain and amaze you. Each real-life experience sheds light on the challenges and hard work of the talented individuals who work in the world of animal welfare. These are stories that illustrate the tremendous impact animals have on our daily lives—they are hallmarks of the sacred importance of the human-animal bond.

Susannah Charleson is the New York Times bestselling author of Scent of the Missing and The Possibility Dogs. She trains search and detection K9s, service dogs for the disabled, and comfort dogs that serve the community. She shares her home with a fur and feather menagerie, including a paralyzed pup on wheels named Ruff Draft. She is the author of Where the Lost Dogs Go: A Story of Love, Search, and the Power of Reunion (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). In Where the Lost Dogs Go, Susannah Charleson, author of Scent of the Missing and a trusted chronicler of the human/animal bond, dives headlong into the world of missing dogs. The mission to reunite lost pets with their families starts with Susannah’s own shelter rescue, Ace, a plucky Maltese mix with a mysterious past who narrowly survived months wandering lost. Along the way, Susannah finds a part of herself also lost. And when unexpected heartbreak shatters her own sense of direction, it is Ace—the shelter dog that started it all—who leads Susannah home. Inquisitive, instructive, heartrending, and hopeful, Where the Lost Dogs Go pays tribute to the missing dogs—and to the found—and to the restless space in between.