Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 201.

As I understand it, so it's quite, I think I find it quite funny, just like when I

go to the park and I see like this great loping greyhound or this fierce

Alsatian and then I look at my dog and I'm like, how are you the same species?

I think about the fact that my dog, my little dog who is basically, you know, an

animate teddy bear in terms of survival skills and think about the fact that he's

in some way distantly related to a wolf, it seems bizarre and there's a lot of

lovely sort of evolutionary science that you can read in terms of how that

happened. That is Kate Leaver, she has a new book

called Good Dog. Celebrating the dogs who change and sometimes even save our

lives and that will be the topic of this episode. Who is Kate Leaver? So my name is

Kate Leaver, I'm a journalist and an author. Kate has another book called The

Friendship Cure and she was on this show not too long ago talking about that in

the time since she wrote this book Good Dog, which I love, I love this book

because it details the science behind what dogs do to our minds, to our brains,

to our bodies just by coexisting with this, by being companions. It has a lot of

studies, a lot of science, the history of our relationship with dogs, but it

focuses on the role that dogs play in enriching and improving our mental and

emotional health. So by way of science, it's also a celebration of friendship,

friendship with another species. It also has this really cool structure where it

focuses on 10 personal stories of dogs and their owners and it becomes sort of

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