Alexandra Thurston gives us added incentive to clean our plates at mealtime: so we can enjoy the portraits that adorn her ceramic ware. In creating her porcelain portraiture, Thurston combines three passions—ceramics, printmaking and dogs. She’s had her hands in clay since she was six and studied printmaking at college, concentrating on wood block printing. She says that dogs were always her favorite subject. As she renewed her interest in ceramics, some of her old prints made their way onto her pottery.

War is hell, the saying goes, and not just for soldiers. The highly trained military dogs at their side pay an equally severe price. Sculptor James Mellick has memorialized these dogs— and through them, the soldiers with whom they served—in a series of seven life-sized works. The Doberman missing a foreleg, a German Shepherd with a prosthetic paw, a Belgian Malinois with a metal plate: as hard as they are to contemplate, these dogs seem undaunted, a testimony to Mellick’s sensitivity and dogs’ innate, in-the-moment nature.

In Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? Frans de Waal presents a fascinating history of the study of animal behavior and cognition. De Waal, who says his love of animals dates to his childhood, is a worldrenowned primatologist and ethologist and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. We asked him to shift gears and give us his take on the canine mind.

Bev Thompson: How challenging was it to separate from the loss of your sister in order to write Heal? What kept you going?