People often want or (or do) send me books about dogs, and I always return them or give them away. I don’t want everybody else’s thoughts about dogs in my head,  especially since I  began writing my own.

I do not want to read the accounts of people who love and miss their dogs. I’ve done that, and I know the story. I mostly read new novels. And I never give other people’s books to authors.

I want my thoughts about dogs to be my own. There is no one way to look at dogs; we are all prisoners of our own experience. I find most dog books to be sappy and dramatic.

One exception is Canadian Psychologist And Dog Trainer Stanley Coren, whose intelligent and common sense books about dogs are the best ones I have read in the days when I read as many as I could.

His books “Why We Love Dogs” “How To Speak To A Dog” are terrific, miles above the typical dog histrionics (like that ridiculous rainbow bridge). Coren avoids extremes, dog bullshit, and emotionalizing and backs up his ideas with experience and thoughtfulness.

I’m getting this new book next week, “The Pawprints Of History,”(Free Press, $26), and just finished an excerpt. I love it already. We are fans of one another.

Coren looks back on the 14,000 years that dogs and humans have lived and worked together. Dogs’ history is much like human history; dogs have been mistreated, defended, worshipped, and evolved along with us imperfect humans.

Coren, who loves and respects dogs in healthy and helpful ways, has excellent taste for the highlights of dog history.

I love the story of Japanese Shogun Tokugawa Tsunayooshi, born in the Year Of The Dog, 1646. He loved dogs so much that he instituted the Laws of Compassion to protect them. Under these laws, injuring, killing, or even ignoring a needy dog might be punishable by death, and

In a single month in 1687, he killed 400 people for mistreating dogs, and in his reign, somewhere between ten thousand and two hundred thousand people were put to death or exiled for animal welfare violations and crimes. Talk about animal rights; some people I’ve met in the movement would love to do that.

(books I liked and recommend during my head banging and recovery.)

Although the idea that dogs might think independently was unheard of for most of their history, dogs began picking up other, more moderate defenders during their long and rich history with us.

One of my inspirations in deciding how to steward my dogs comes from English Philosopher  Jeremy Bentham, who Coren quotes in his book.

“The day may come,” Bentham wrote, “when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholding from them but by the hand of tyranny.”

Bentham wrote this also, and it is the foundation for my idea of the stewardship I owe dogs: “The question is not,” he wrote, “can they reason?, nor Can they Talk? But Can they suffer?”

I don’t spend much time claiming that my dog can think and talk like I do, but I believe Bentham got the right question: Can they suffer?

They can, and in our time, the people who love dogs often make them suffer because they can’t see them as animals but as surrogate children and treat them accordingly. Dogs (and cats)  suffer painfully and needlessly from this unknowing human selfishness.

They undergo brutal and expensive surgeries they can’t understand, they live in pain and stress for months, even years beyond their time, and millions languish in crates for  years or their entire lives because some genius in the animal rights movement decided that they should always be kept alive by allmeans possible for as long as is possible.

My job is to keep my dogs from suffering, not to enable it because I wish to keep them alive.

These people insist it’s cruel for a working horse to work and have chased these amazing horses out of sight in most of America and into extinction. They’ve done the same thing for many elephants and ponies.

Our children will only know domestic animals on You Tube, most of them are already safe and dead.

I believe Bentham understands that this idea that being imprisoned for life was preferable to being alive was a sad turn for dogs in their compelling history.

I’m eager to get Coren’s new book.

From what I read, it looks great. I recommend his book “How To Speak Dog,” the best book I’ve ever read on how to understand what dogs are trying to tell us and how we can learn to talk to them in a way they can understand.

Most dogs I know don’t even know their names.