BARK

Do dogs have history?

- LARISSA MACFARQUHAR

Stanley Coren, a psychologist and dog trainer, is haunted by a primal scene. He pictures a distant ancestor, clothed in skins, huddled by a tiny fire. Next to the ancestor sits a dog, its pointed ears pricked for sounds of danger-sounds too faint for the man to hear. "What do you hear, my dog?" the ancestor says. "You will tell me if I should worry?" Then, Coren writes, "his rough hand reached out and stroked the dog's fur, and that touch made them both feel content."

Coren is the author of several books about dogs-"The Intelligence of Dogs,""What Do Dogs Know?,""Why We Love the Dogs We Do," and "How to Speak Dog."He is the host of "Good Dog!," a Canadian television show. But his most recent book, "The Pawprints of History" (Free Press; $26), is his first attempt to do justice to the primal scene to come to grips with the fourteen thousand years that man and dog have lived together. It is Coren's mission to set the record straight: he is indignant that conventional historians had ignored the canine contribution, as though, all these years, dogs had just been standing around, wagging their tails. "Pawprints of History" is not just a story; it is an homage. Historians must look carefully, in the crannies of the past, to find the dogs of yore. "The pawprints of many dogs are there," Coren writes, "but they are faint, and the winds of time erase them if they are not found and preserved." Dogs, like women before them, have been confined, illiterate and voiceless, to the domestic sphere, and so dog history, like women's history, must be found in private places.