Yesterday I wrote about some older dog books — all published more than 50 years ago. Today, four books published in the last couple of years, all non-fiction, all dealing with how pets fit into our world or their interior lives.

Top of the pile — and I mean that literally, not in terms of it being the best, or even the first I read — is Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. It came out last year and changed the way I watched dogs play. Author Alexandra Horowitz took her experience as a zoologist and applied it to dogs, often looking at film frame by frame to analyze the body language of dogs, particularly the language they speak to each other in play. I came away from the book feeling like I knew my own dog better, and wished it had been available before the tail end of her life, when she did a lot less playing and a lot more sleeping. Horowitz has strong opinions about dog training, all based on her sense of the dog view of the world, how they communicate, how they learn. When the time comes for us to get another dog, I’ll be reading it again. And probably keeping it in arms reach — it just has that much to teach us about the animals we share our lives with.

Also published in 2009, Animals Make Us Human is the latest work by Temple Grandin, perhaps the most famous autist in the world, and certainly the most published. Known for her work with large animals and in making slaughter houses less stressful for cattle, Grandin takes her research into stressors of those animals and applies it animals we’re more likely to have contact with: dogs, cats, rabbits, as well as farm and zoo animals and wildlife. Each animal or group of animals is treated in its own chapter. Her goal is the same as with those cattle walking to their death in a slaughterhouse: how to  make animals in whatever environment as content as possible. This is another book that will be pulled from the shelf when there’s another dog in the house. Grandin is that insightful.

Tell Me Where It Hurts is the memoir of a vet, Nick Trout, that came out in paperback last year. If you love animals, like watching the emergency vet and animal police shows on the Animal Planet network, you’ll like this book. It’s pegged as a day-in-the-life, but the author quickly admits that he did a little cherry picking of his cases to give readers the idea of what a typical day might look like. I suppose if you’re thinking of getting into the animal care business — as a vet or a vet tech — this would be beneficial. I liked it well enough. It was entertaining and I learned a little. But it wasn’t like a spotlight shining in an area of darkness.

More along those lines — and in kind of a scary way at times — is One Nation Under Dog. This book, by Michael Schaffer, is something of an expose on the business of pet keeping as it has morphed over the years. We’ve gone from keeping dogs in the yard as some mix between security and companion to seeing entire shops pop up that are devoted to doggie treat. People put their dogs in clothes that cost more than their own, in bags that would cover a week’s worth of groceries. There are dog funerals and graveyards, and drug companies look as hard for new pharmaceutical treatments for pet diseases real and imagined as they do for treatments for humans — after all, as Nick Trout can attest, people often do spend thousands of dollars on pet health. There’s even pet health insurance to help cover the costs.

Given the 2007 dog food recalls, looking a little more harshly at the pet business isn’t a bad thing. Schaffer has done a mitzvah writing the book. We can all do a good deed for our companion animals by reading it.