Very good read and I would recommend it to anyone that has an interest in animals.
Gregory Berns covers Dogs, Sea Lions, Dolphins and Tasmanian Thylacine (Tiger) as well as others in the informative read. This book looks into the brains structure and inner workings of these animals to really give a sense as to what it's like for them and show that they are not that much different for humans.

The Dog Project and the research that has stemmed from it is a step in the right direction for animal welfare and understanding.

Neuroscientist Gregory Burns put his love for dogs, and his questions about their behaviour to work when he decided to embark on a project examining the brains of dogs under an MRI scanner to see what he could find out about how it all worked in comparison to the brains of humans.

This book looks at the driving forces behind the actions of dogs, whether it be food, love of an owner or a combination of both, as well as taking turns at looking at other animals in the natural world from sea lions, dolphins and Tasmanian Devils. Burns even gets to handle a 100-year-old brain of a creature thought to have gone extinct in the 1900s.

As a dog lover and an animal/nature lover I really enjoyed this book and I found the topic really interesting. Thanks to a glance at other reviews before I picked the book up, I knew not to expect the book to be all about dogs, though the start and end are both focused on the author's work with dogs. I think it's very unfair to review this book poorly because of the 'lack' of dogs in it - as dogs are the author's love and interest in dogs is the driving force behind the project before he begins to explore other animals. I think the book is really well written and engaging - I particularly loved learning more about sea lions, and how clever they are and the training methods used to see how they used their brains - as well as the domoic acid poisoning which I had never heard of before.

I also loved learning more about the thylacine which, while a very sad story maintains a small bit of hope that perhaps there are more out there, just hiding away from the humans who persecuted them for years.

CW at the end of this book for mentions of animal cruelty and animals being harmed for the 'benefits' of science/science experimentation. I really appreciate and respect Gregory Burns for telling the story that clearly haunts him, from when he was in medical school and as part of lab work, had to experiment different drugs on dogs before killing them. You can feel the shame, pain and regret from the author and even though the story was hard to read, I respected him for sharing it and not hiding away from the continuous cruelty of animals within the world of science. And I really loved and appreciated how he shared how they gave the dogs within the MRI training a choice on if they wanted to go into the scanner, and there were some who despite training wouldn't do it and didn't have to.

All in all, an enjoyable nature-focused non fiction that I really liked reading!