“I think she’s fascinating and full of excitement and love and she has a hairy joie de vivre - with a lot of hair and teeth - and she is untrammeled in her enthusiasms, which is nice,” he said. “A member of our family.”Īs we chatted, Horowitz’s husband, the writer and editor Ammon Shea, wandered over to make something in the kitchen. “She wasn’t responsive to us in a way that I wanted her to be.” Quid was impulsive, eager to run heedlessly after squirrels and other elusive creatures, inclined to bark more relentlessly and with less apparent purpose than Horowitz’s two older (and now, sadly, late) dogs.Īnd so the book is as much about how Horowitz adjusted to Quid as how Quid adjusted to the business of growing up, becoming “an exquisitely sensitive, preternaturally agile, sweet, loving creature,” Horowitz writes. “Her early life was not full of trauma, and yet nonetheless she was not the dog I hoped she would be at first,” Horowitz, 53, said. “It turns out that we were just too intertwined in her life,” Horowitz said in a recent interview. But “ The Year of the Puppy,” coming on Tuesday from Viking, became less scientific inquiry (though there is a lot of that in there) and more personal memoir, as the arrival of this tiny and vociferous being threw the family off its normal axis. She imagined herself as the canine-behavior equivalent of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who used his own children as subjects in formulating his theories of developmental psychology. This seemed like the perfect opportunity. Why did anyone get a new puppy during the pandemic? (Why didn’t everyone?) Apart from the usual reasons, there were scientific considerations for Horowitz, who runs the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College and whose books include the runaway best seller “ Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know.” Long fascinated by canine umwelt - how they experience the world - she had never before studied a puppy’s development from its origins as “a mewling splodge of fur,” as she writes, into adolescence and beyond. Her family - three reasonable humans, two elderly dogs and one contented cat - was already “replete with animal fur,” she writes in “The Year of the Puppy,” her latest book. The last thing the writer and dog behavior expert Alexandra Horowitz needed in the spring of 2020 was a new puppy.

Being a dog horowitz