What a dog's troubled mind can teach us about the human psyche

When Laurel Braitman and her husband first adopted Oliver - a Bernese Mountain Dog - all was well. But then Oliver began to act anxious, and compulsive.

From Braitman's interview with NPR:

My ex-husband and I had a wedding to go to in South Carolina, and we left him with a human he really liked - our downstairs neighbor. But our neighbor had to go to the farmer's market and left him alone for about two hours. And Oliver just panicked and ended up pushing a window air-conditioning unit out of the way and chewing a hole through the metal screen, holding a sash up and then jumping out of our apartment. And we lived on the third floor of a Brownstone.

And he survived, which was, in a lot of ways, miraculous. But a year after that, he developed bloat during the middle of an anxiety attack. And the damage to his internal organs was so extreme that we were forced to put him down.

That was the inspiration for Braitman's new book, "Animal Madness." Braitman took a deep dive into the minds of animals. Her book looks at the mental states of all sorts of animals -from dogs to elephants- and how they can help us understand ourselves.