#26 [2022/CBR14] The Story of Your Dog by Brandon McMillan

On May 13th, my boyfriend and I officially adopted a puppy! Her name is Sadie. She's very cute and very sweet, and she's a handful. As the first dog of our adult lives, I feel a responsibility to not mess her up too much. She's signed up for some group obedience classes, but we can't get her in for almost another month. So I've been reading puppy training books and watching Youtube videos, which have been pretty helpful. It's kind of amazing to see her learn something from scratch--when she goes from confused and frustrated to understanding what I want from her.

Anyway, I was still in the mode of learning everything I can when I saw that The Story of Your Dog (2022) by Brandon McMillan was at the library as an Audiobook. It sounded right up my alley, and I was excited when it became available.

Now that I've read it, it wasn't exactly what I was expecting or hoping for. Basically, McMillan discusses generalities of different dog breeds. I did learn some things, and I found some of it interesting. However, I didn't know many of the dog breeds (especially on Audiobook without pictures), so I wasn't that interested in genetic traits of many of the breeds. In addition, many of these traits were kind of repetitive. You know, "this dog will benefit from training and exercise." Then when he got to the breeds I really wanted to learn about, there wasn't enough information to keep it interesting to me. However, I did enjoy some of the history of the breeds, which helped explain their current behaviors. McMillan also used some anecdotes from his own dogs and training, which I enjoyed, but those are a very small part of the book.

This is probably my fault for not knowing what kind of book I was picking up. Apparently there is an earlier book of McMillan's where he goes more into the basics of training, which would have been more helpful and interesting to me.