Dogpedia: A Brief Compendium of Canine Curiosities

by Jessica Pierce, Kelly Chudler (illustrator)

Genres: Dogs, Animals, Nonfiction

223 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 10, 2024

About the author

Bioethicist Jessica Pierce, Ph.D., is the author of the book The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the Ends of Their Lives (University of Chicago, 2012). Some of the questions she explores are: Do animals have death awareness? Why is euthanasia almost always considered the compassionate end point for our animals, but not for our human companions? Is there ever a good reason to euthanize a healthy dog? Why do people often grieve more deeply for their pets than they do for people? What is animal hospice?

Her other books include Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, Morality Play, Contemporary Bioethics: A Reader with Cases and The Ethics of Environmentally Responsible Health Care.

Reviews

[Noelle Salmi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charming book that any dog owner or dog lover will appreciate. Even though it’s written as an encyclopedia of terms related to dogs, it’s still best written from start to finish — as Hankins cleverly arranges it in a way that builds up your knowledge about dogs.

[Olga · Rating 3 out of 5]

The name compendium is very misleading: it's collection of random curiosities and facts about dogs and in many cases they seem to be chosen only to fill all alphabet letters. Some of them are actually pretty interesting. The author has also quite visible bias (for instance towards positive methods or against breeding of purebred dogs), which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but has no place in a compedium, which should serve to present certain facts and approaches, not to judge them.

The illustrations, however, are one of the ugliest I've ever seen.

[Neil Saltmarsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this encyclopaedia but really because I found it made me think of my canine pals over the years and the way they relate and how we modify their behaviours without truly understanding them. There is much unknown about the canines among us but this has helped me to hopefully be better understanding to them.