Right Dog for You: Choosing a breed that matches your personality, family and lifestyle Book

Is this book relevant 40 years later in a world with an internet full of articles and anecdotes? Absolutely yes. With the caveat that it's missing the breeds that have since been recognized by the AKC. I'm not going to go through all 195 breeds and list out those that are missing, but I did notice a few: Havanese, Border Collies, and Australian Cattle Dogs are not in this book. It does not include cross breeds either, since cross breed temperaments are much more variable.

This book has a clearly defined system to choose a breed. The book includes thorough charts to plot various attributes across all breeds, like sociability, watchdog/guarddog-ness, activity level, etc. It goes into more detail than most of the information I've found online, like breaking sociability into three categories (within family, with children, with strangers), learning into three categories (rate, obedience, problem solving) and including novel and useful other attributes, like vigor (how vigorously a dog attempts something, its drive, from gentle to aggressive) and constancy (how single-minded a dog is at a task.) I don't think the individual questionnaires and results should be followed to the letter, but it gives you a good idea of what breeds will match your lifestyle best. What this book doesn't have is a detailed description of each breed. It's much more about describing breeds by contrast with others.

I went into reading this book with about 12 breeds in mind, and narrowed it down to a solid 5. It's a great complement to internet research.