Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I completely agree with Ms. Donaldson's central premise; that we create unnecessary frustration (both human and canine) when we act on the mistaken notion that dogs possess human-level understanding of abstract concepts, human motivations and human desires. She presents excellent techniques designed to short-circuit the escalating frustrations that result from our tendency to anthropomorphize our dogs. That said, I do not like this book. Culture Clash has a minimalist table of contents and NO INDEX, which makes it nearly impossible to find passages on a specific topic. This renders the book nearly useless as a training resource or reference work. One could still read it cover to cover and glean much useful information in the process, but this would require enduring the vitriol that seems to drip from every page. The story I made up about Ms. Donaldson while reading Culture Clash is that she has been nursing some long-standing personal grudges against specific people in her professional field and that she wrote this book as much to ridicule them and settle old scores as to impart useful information to dog-owners. Ms. Donaldson seems unsatisfied with simply pointing out the faulty notions about dog behavior that are the currency of contemporary "common sense" thinking about dogs. It seemed to me as I read the book that she considers no myth properly debunked until she has cast one of her "rivals" as the personification of that belief and then heaped ridicule on that person. The following passage seems typical: "I once spoke to a traditional trainer who poured scorn on the use of food as a motivator. The line he trotted out, which still makes me wretch even to this day, was "if you use food to train, the dog is doing it for the food and not for you. (...) If you opt to not use positive reinforcement, you end up, like they all do, using aversives and announcing that your dog is doing it for you. Pathetic." If you think you would enjoy wading through 224 pages of this sort of thing, then Culture Clash may be the dog-training book for you. I'd still like to finish the book, but Ms. Donaldson's tone starts to wear on my nerves very quickly, so I take it in very small chunks.