Jeff Lazarus Book order

Chew on this. As humans, we have a deep need to believe . . . a need to relate to something greater and more ideal than ourselves. Perhaps that’s why so many millions believe in Dog. Man’s devotion to Dog has come to rival the great -isms and -ologies of the world. This thing has gone way beyond a hobby. We may not literally worship dogs, but we come pawfully close. This rabid reverence for Rover has a name: Dogtology. Dogtology is for the dog lover who has bailed on a date because they didn’t want Twinkles to be left home alone. It is for the human whose dog owns a more festive holiday wardrobe than they do, whose pups dine on free-range bison burgers while they live off ramen, or whose smartphones have more photos of their dog than of the humans in their family. In this sacred dogtrine, the case is made that Dogtology has become a bone-a-fide belief system on par with the world’s great philosophies and religions.

Does your cat own you? What has caused us to enthrone cats as the most popular pet on the planet? Why do we devote so much of our time and income to grooming, feeding, coddling, photographing, praising, providing laps for, and “entertaining” our cats? If an anthropologist from outer space were to study our civilization objectively, would she not conclude that our devotion to Cat amounted to nothing less than a full-blown religion? Would she be wrong? Catakism, the belief system, is rooted in a bold premise: namely, that felines are humanity’s biological and spiritual masters. By allowing Man to handle all of Her low-level needs, Cat is free to do the higher-level spiritual work that Man has no time for, such as meditating seventeen hours a day, teleporting into locked rooms and cabinets, communing with disembodied spirits, and reeducating humanity on the true purpose of boxes, bags, and keyboards.

An engaging and sometimes humorous book about the art of listening. The author suggests that to improve the effectiveness of our listening and communication skills, we should model our behaviour after dogs, the masters of communication.