Book Review: Who's a Good Dog? by Jessica Pierce

A new book about the joys and challenges of being your dog's best guardian

Our book today is Who's a Good Dog? And How To Be a Better Human, by Jessica Pierce (a 2023 release from the University of Chicago Press), and it's the latest entry in that endless category, books about dogs, aimed at the human owners (Pierce prefers the lovely term “guardians”) of the roughly 80 million canine pets in the US alone. These books come in thousands of configurations: heartfelt memoirs, schmalzy anecdote-collections, 'dog whisperer' cheat codes for coercing your pets, hard-core training manuals designed to break the will of even the sturdiest quadruped holdout, and, scattered among these, the occasional book calling for compassion and understanding – the occasional book that approaches with appropriate wonder and caution the weird and unguessable fact that humans, who famously can't go a single day without murdering other humans, have spent the last 17,000 years bio-engineering a companion species they can love and cherish.

Pierce is a bioethicist, and Who's a Good Dog is this last-mentioned kind of dog book, indeed the best of that kind that's ever been written. This is a thoroughly honest, entirely jargon-free searching personal and professional inquiry into the delicacies of human-alien relations.

It could probably only have been written by the guardian of a less-than-perfect dog. Present on every page of this book is Bella, Pierce's thirteen-year-old shelter dog who's very guarded around new humans (and will sometimes give them a warning snap if they get too familiar), follows Pierce from room to room, and sometimes snaps if she's jostled in bed. Bella is not one of the “perfect” dogs who stride through this book as unattainable cautionary tales. Pierce unabashedly adores her.

This is a guide, and it's a better, more accurate guide than all the veterinarian knowledge in the world. Imperfect dogs unknowingly make the kinds of demands on their guardians that increase both compassion and understanding. They allow no autopilot caretaking. They search the soul.

Pierce's book touches on a wide array of dog-topics, and Bella is there for every one of them. Creating a calm and comforting home environment? Pierce tries her best to look at it from the dog's point of view. Surveying the ethics of training or teaching tricks to dogs? On this and all other subjects, she consults with the writings of many experts of all kinds, but always with the implicit understanding that dogs are complex individuals of a different species, not animate toys or design accents that occasionally require feeding. The anxiety of the day's dog walks, when you're not sure how your dog will react to the outside world? “The dog walk is the nexus of a whole collection of issues, dilemmas, and choices,' Pierce writes. “Walks can be the best time we spend with our dog each day. They can also be a concentrated dose of frustration between dog and guardian, a power struggle, a time of mutual disappointment.”

That struggle is very real for the guardian of an imperfect dog. Imperfect dogs can be fearful on beautiful afternoon walks; they can see threats where there's only invitation to play; and their stiff, often unpredictable neuroses can sometimes elicit blithe, hurtful comments from passing humans who think only of perfect dogs. “These unpleasant human interactions just add insult to injury,” Pierce writes, “as people with reactive dogs often work much harder than their dog-owning peers at training and going out of their way to make sure their dogs can feel safe and be safe, which is a challenge when other dog guardians don't obey leash laws and think that a friendly dog poses no risk to others.”

As befits her professional training, Pierce on every page investigates what she describes as the “uneasy tension with responsible guardianship of a dog.” Her determination (Bella must make it ever-present in her thoughts) at all points is to honor dogs by remembering their actual individuality, their multi-faceted personality, their viability as separate beings in a unique cross-species partnership.

Who's a Good Dog offers almost nothing in the way of standard prescriptive pointers. That's its main strength – prescriptive pointers are for fixing a MacBook. Rather, this is an intensely memorable grappling with the nuances of a relationship far too many humans blunder through with a kind of blind selfishness that would get them incarcerated if they tried it with their own offspring. Every dog guardian in the world should read this book. And they all owe dear difficult Bella an immeasurable vote of thanks for inspiring it.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News