How Your Dog’s Brain Works

Puppy Brain, by Kerry Nichols, is a book for anyone who wants to understand how a dog thinks, learns and feels, and how to raise an animal that not only obeys, but also trusts. As the author writes in her dedication: “To the hundreds of puppies I have raised: it has been an honour to be the first voice they heard, the first hands they licked, the first human they loved. Thank you for trusting me.”

Nichols left the legal profession to found Nicholberry Goldens, one of the most innovative breeding programmes in the United States, and went on to become a leading canine educator, with more than 100,000 copies sold in English.

“There is no straight path from practising law in Los Angeles to breeding dogs in rural California. If anyone had told the Kerry I was then where I would end up, I would have laughed out loud. But my older self looks back now and says: ‘Of course. It makes perfect sense.’ Life sometimes does that to us. In my case, it all began with a routine visit to the vet. Our dog Daisy, an eight-year-old golden retriever, was due her annual vaccinations and, as we had just moved to a new neighbourhood, we made an appointment at a veterinary clinic a few miles from our home. Daisy walked into the Family Pet Hospital in the same way she would sneak into the neighbour’s garden during a barbecue or burst into the house after chasing a squirrel: tail wagging, smiling, eyes sparkling. Typical golden retriever. Dr Singh came into the examination room and his expression changed immediately. He greeted me, but only briefly: his clinical assessment had begun the moment he saw Daisy’s abdomen. We thought she had simply stolen too many hot dogs from the neighbour’s barbecue, a skill that had earned her quite a reputation. He saw something different…

Weeks later, we found ourselves saying goodbye to our beloved Daisy, stunned by how quickly cancer had taken her from us…”, Kerry writes.

With photographs and practical instructions, the reader follows the animal’s development from gestation to adulthood and learns how attachment, confidence and adaptability are formed, as well as what we can do at each stage to strengthen them.

“The idea of raising healthy, emotionally balanced puppies filled me with energy. I dreamed of helping others avoid the pain we had experienced when we said goodbye to Daisy at an age when she should still have had many years ahead of her. As so often happens, there was a silver lining to the pain of her premature death, and I was beginning to see it. Saying goodbye to Daisy had brought loneliness and sadness: a house without the patter of her paws or her fur everywhere. But out of that pain, Nicholberry Goldens was born. My husband, always encouraging, supported me immediately. Full of enthusiasm but with little idea of what lay ahead, we did not know then that this venture would place a strain on our finances, our family and our marriage. We never imagined that one day we would have to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a newborn puppy who would go stiff in our hands. We did not imagine that, after two weeks of feeding her around the clock, we would lose a puppy whose body simply could not survive. We could not imagine that we would have to bury puppies who, for a thousand different reasons, crossed the Rainbow Bridge only a few days after being born,” says the author.

The author

Kerry Nichols is a canine educator and the founder of Nicholberry Goldens. She previously worked as a lawyer. Her methods are endorsed by specialists, and her puppies have been adopted by executives from Facebook, Microsoft and Tinder. Puppy Brain has become a bestseller in the United States.