Man Meets Dog is a zoological book for the general audience, written by the Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n scientist Konrad Lorenz

Konrad Lorenz

Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch...

 in 1949. The first English-language edition appeared in 1954.

The original German title is So kam der Mensch auf den Hund, which could be literally translated as "How man ended up with dog". The German title is also a play on the phrase "Auf den Hund kommen", which is a common idiom in German-speaking countries and probably comes from the old days when farmers with economic problems had to sell their livestock

Livestock

Livestock refers to one or more domesticated animals raised in an agricultural setting to produce commodities such as food, fiber and labor. The term "livestock" as used in this article does not include poultry or farmed fish; however the inclusion of these, especially poultry, within the meaning...

 animals and ended up with only the dog.

Contents

The opening chapter "How it may have started" deals with theories concerning the question where and when man first domesticated the predecessor of the modern dog. The book has a lot of interesting anecdotes of the author's experiences with dogs, these stories are often illustrated with simple drawings. Lorenz usually owned several dogs and many other animals and lived with them in his house near Vienna. There are also many insights into the behavior of cats and birds, though the focus is of course on the behavior of dogs.

Daniel Pinkwater

Daniel Pinkwater

Daniel Manus Pinkwater is an author of mostly children's books and is an occasional commentator on National Public Radio. He attended Bard College. Well-known books include Lizard Music, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, Fat Men from Space, Borgel, and the picture book The Big Orange...

refers amusingly to Man Meets Dog in his Uncle Boris in the Yukon and other shaggy dog stories, stating among other things: