Inside of a dog

Before I read this book, I thought I knew what a dog was. It barks, it wags its tail, it fetches sticks, it craps on the carpet. However, now that I’ve finished this learned tome, I realise there’s a bit more to it than I thought. As well as the domestic dog (Canis familiaris), the genus Canis also includes wolves, jackals, dingoes and coyotes. They all seem very different, yet domestic dogs can breed with all of them. According to Darwin, this makes them all members of the same species. Now can you see why I’m confused?

Raymond and Lorna Coppinger don’t want you to make a snap decision about what a dog is — or what it isn’t. They want to make you think about how zoologists classify things: why we decide to call an animal one thing and not another. For instance, in New England wolves are an endangered species, while coyotes are unprotected.