Angus: A Memoir
By Charles Siebert
Crown, 175 pages

Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had
By Rick Bass
Houghton Mifflin, 188 pages

The Social Lives of Dogs: The Grace of Canine Company
By Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Simon & Schuster, 256 pages

Working Dogs: Tales From Animal Planet's K-9 to 5 World
By Colleen Needles and Kit Carlson, with photographs by Kim Levin
Discovery Books, 95 pages

Dogs With Jobs: Working Dogs Around the World
By Merrily Weisbord and Kim Kachanoff
Pocket Books, 250 pages

How to Speak Dog: Mastering the Art of Dog-Human Communication
By Stanley Coren
The Free Press, 274 pages

I hate them, too.

Sure, they are small and moderately cute. They sit or come on command and bark winsome renditions of songs like "When the Saints Come Marching In" and "B-I-N-G-O." One of them even farts. But they lack something fundamental -- they don't engender the rush of sentiment I feel whenever a flesh-and-blood dog passes my way. Big or small, cute or ugly, mutt or purebred, I'm completely indiscriminate toward real dogs. "Hello, you lovely handsome thing, you!" I coo to the fat chocolate lab that lives in my building. I stroke the warm, wriggling body of the local Rottweiler and anxiously watch the growth of a bichon frisé puppy that has moved in up the block. (I have not had a dog since my mother gave a husky mutt named Trouble away to some close friends in 1972. Clearly, it is high time.)

People love dogs for two basic reasons. First, they are cuddly, whereas the robot dogs are not. "Neoteny," the retention of juvenile features and behaviors in an adult, is a big part of why we feel so emotional about dogs, two recent books argue. Second, though people don't much like to think about it, dogs are easy to dominate. We love them because we can control them.

In "How to Speak Dog," which is essentially a guide for humans who need help interpreting doggish tail wagging, ear wiggling and barking, Stanley Coren argues that "domestication and neoteny seem to go hand-in-hand." People have bred pet dogs for floppy ears, short muzzles, frequent barking and other infantile behaviors that no adult wolf or fox ever displays. "In effect," writes Coren, "our dogs are the Peter Pans of the canine world."

We prefer pets that resemble puppies long into their adulthood partly because their perpetual juvenility allows us to express huge degrees of affection and sentiment toward them. It would be harder to snuggle and kiss an adult animal that had all the qualities of an independent creature. Wolves are not cuddly; Peter Pan dogs are. That is why I feel instant fondness toward even the inanimate lump of a Beanie Baby SharPei, while my robot dogs' hard metallic bodies and stiff postures fail to trigger any emotion.

Less practical, but more rigorous in its examination of the emotional allegiance between dogs and humans is Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' follow-up to her bestselling "The Hidden Life of Dogs." In that first book, Marshall Thomas argued that what dogs really want is other dogs. She wrote about her own pets' forming a pack that essentially excluded the humans on whom they were dependent.

Now, in "The Social Lives of Dogs," her remarkably touching sequel, she argues that sometimes dogs do want human beings. When new puppy Sundog finds himself excluded from the established elderly pack in the author's house, he commits himself to the people, forming a group with Marshall Thomas' husband and the top cat of the household, a bruiser named Rajah. Subsequent dogs bond across species as well.

Marshall Thomas reasons that neoteny is part of this phenomenon -- dogs treat us like parents. But she also notes that the dog-human bond is more complicated than that and, without providing any ultimate answers, traces the stratification of her multianimal home while speculating persistently on the reasons for her dogs' choices. Eventually, she asserts that she and the members of her animal group share a telepathic connection:

What happened to one of us happened to us all. In our lives, in our minds, in our joys and sorrows, and even in our deaths, we were united. We were related, like the wolves of a pack, or the parrots of a flock, or the cats of a barnyard, or the people of a little band of hunter-gatherers. Perhaps we belonged to different species, and perhaps we had not shared a common ancestor since the Permian or the Triassic, so that three hundred million years divided us, but we were one thing.

Whether telepathic or simply sentimental, the emotional response dogs elicit in humans is the subject of nearly every dog story ever written. We begin with children's book heroes like Clifford, Carl, McDuff, Blue, Biscuit and Spot, and never get tired of them. Recently we've had works by Willie Morris ("My Dog Skip"), Margot Kaufman ("Clara, The Early Years") and Peter Mayle ("A Dog's Life") -- and almost every year brings a new litter of dog books. On shelves now, Marshall Thomas sings the song of Sundog, who "demonstrated such a complete understanding of human behavior that if I believed in reincarnation, I'd have been convinced that in an earlier life he'd been a person"; Charles Siebert's "Angus" projects readers into the dying memories of the author's spunky Jack Russell terrier; and Rick Bass' "Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had" is a portrait of a runty brown animal who became "one of the greatest bird dogs that ever lived."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"