RADFORD – Recent studies suggest that dog owners tend to live longer, richer and happier lives.

You can count Darcy Morey as a believer in those studies.

Morey, a member of the Radford University Forensic Science Institute research faculty, devoted a substantial portion of a chapter to the happy, healthy relationships between man and his best friend in his new book, “Dogs: Domestication and the Development of a Social Bond.”

“I’ve had great experiences with abandoned young mutts, and see no reason to change,” said Morey, the proud owner of a small “purebred mutt” named Jezebel that was rescued by a police officer when Morey and his wife lived in Tennessee.

Morey’s book, published by Cambridge University Press, traces the evolution of dogs from their origins approximatley 15,000 years ago up to the present. It addresses the timing of dog domestication and makes comparisons between various genetics-based models of domestication timing and archaeological evidence.

Dog burial is a recurring topic throughout “Dogs: Domestication and the Development of a Social Bond,” and a unifying theme is the development of a distinctive social bond between dogs and people. The book also examines why dogs and people get along together so well.

Much of the book’s emphasis is on the New World, Morey says. An entire chapter is devoted to dogs of the arctic regions, mostly in the New World. “Discussion of several distinctive modern roles of dogs underscores the social bond between dogs and people,” the author said.

Morey, who earned a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and was a guest researcher for a year at the University of Copenhagen Zoological Museum in Denmark, has published dog-related studies in numerous journals, including popular science outlets such as American Scientist and La Recherche.

“Darcy Morey is one of the world’s great experts on dogs,” writes University of Washington anthropology professor Donald K. Grayson in the forward of the book. “When I want to check my facts on the earliest known dogs of any given part of the world, it is to his work that I turn.”