The Book of Dogs: A Life-Size Guide to Canids Worldwide - Hardcover

by David W. MacDonald (Author)

For all dog lovers, a stunningly illustrated and scientifically informed global guide to our beloved canine companions and their wild kin.

Dogs are spectacularly diverse. From the world's smallest wild canid, the diminutive fennec fox, to the majestic grey wolf, and from the towering great Dane to the tiny Chihuahua, The Book of Dogs celebrates the connections between humans' best friends, their ancestors, and their wild cousins, offering insights into both wild and domestic canines and profiling every related species in the dog family Canidae as well as the vast variety of domestic dog breeds.

No other book so comprehensively and globally covers the most widespread family of carnivore species, helping to show that humans' companions are part of a much larger animal world. Leading canid expert and award-winning author David W. Macdonald accessibly explains developments in the study of genetics to reveal the ancestry of modern canids and the astonishing hybridization among them. In addition to showcasing the diversity of our planet's dogs, the book presents the latest research on the ecology, behavior, and society of wild dog species. These compelling descriptions with beautiful photographs--including life-size snout images of each of the thirty-seven wild canid species and over two hundred global breeds--offer readers of The Book of Dogs a chance to meet and understand our companions and their kin like never before.

Author Biography

David W. Macdonald is the University of Oxford's first professor of wildlife conservation and founder, in 1986, of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU). He holds a Professorial Research Fellowship in wildlife conservation at Oxford college Lady Margaret Hall, and was the A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University, visiting professor at Imperial College and Liverpool University, and emeritus fellow of the IUCN's Survival Service Commission. Macdonald is known for his television documentaries, including the BAFTA-finalist Night of the Fox, as well as The Velvet Claw: A Natural History of Carnivores and Meerkats United, all for the BBC. Among his many books, he is the author of Running with the Fox and European Mammals, the editor of The Encyclopedia of Mammals, and coeditor of the definitive book on canids, The Biology and Conservation of Wild Canids.