Picture the scene: anthropologist and novelist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, notebook and pencil in hand, trailing her friend's dog Misha through the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her aim: to find out what this dog does when it is outside the human home. Her starting-point: wonder. She writes:

These “dogological studies”, as she terms them, form the basis of her bestselling book The Hidden Life of Dogs, and offer, I think, an extreme version of the great fascination for pets shared by so many in Western culture today. Thomas's travelling through the city streets after a dog is asking a question that other pet owners have also asked themselves: how can we come to know this other being that is simultaneously in our home and utterly alien?

Here is not the place to retell Thomas's stories; as with many texts mentioned in what follows, you might want to read them for yourself if you haven't already. What is of particular interest to me is the fact that Thomas's study seems on the surface to rely on what she sees.