Because they feel the ground is moving.
In animal consciousness, just as in Einstein’s theory of relativity, there is no such thing as an absolute frame of reference; in other words, something is absolutely at rest while something else is in absolute motion. We now know thanks to Einstein that there is no ether permeating all of space as an immovable backstop against which motion takes place. Everything is in motion and so saying what-is-moving-relative-to-what, is a judgment call. The classic example of this being two ships slipping their anchor in the harbor and then currents cause them to collide. Which ship ran into the other would depend on which vessel one is on. So while we may consider time, space and mass to be fixed values in our experience of reality, these are actually relative to one’s frame of reference and are in fact malleable according to deeper influences. Time and space is dynamic, not static, and while this defies and confounds our human reason, the animal mind is not organized in such a way where it must contemplate such paradoxes.
Since animal consciousness and emotion is predicated on the laws of physics rather than a human, mental construct of reality, this means that when a dog is attracted to something and that object of attraction moves, it feels to the dog just as if its physical center-of-gravity is moving within its own body, – just as if it is moving itself, even though it may be standing perfectly still. It’s exactly like a process of magnetic induction wherein it doesn’t matter whether one moves a magnet toward and around a coil of wire, or whether a coil of wire is moved toward and around a magnet; either way an electrical current is induced in the wire. As far as the wire is concerned, the energizing effects are identical.
Therefore, a dog has no idea that it is moving relative to something motionless, or that something is moving relative to it. It feels the exact same internal movement within its body either way. This is why a dog in a moving car might strike out at something going past. The dog has no idea that it is moving relative to something that might be standing perfectly still, rather, the dog perceives that something flashing past at 30, 40, 50 mph etc. is indeed running like prey. So when a dog encounters a slippery floor for the first time, it has no idea that it is moving relative to a stationary floor. The dog doesn’t understand that because its claws are tightly clenched, it is failing to secure a purchase and so is in effect running in place. Instead it perceives the situation as if the floor itself is moving. And the faster the dog tries to run to stable ground, the faster the ground seems to move, which can be as frightening to a dog as it would be for us to be standing on ground that’s heaving and shaking due to an earthquake.
Eventually of course, most dogs get over the problem, but not because they understand there was an error in their perception, as for example a young child might do after their first experience on an escalator, or Einstein did when he contemplated the nature of light, mass and time. Rather, the physical memory of “flow” eventually will paper over this “gap” of slippery-floor-as disconnect-in-consciousness, so that the dog is able to connect the feeling of terra firma from both sides of the slippery floor. Revealingly, there is a transitional phase of acclimation, rather than an all of a sudden “AHA” moment of realization. This is because the dog’s emotional battery and its physical memory of flow as synonymous with firm footing, is gradually filling the gap in consciousness that a slippery floor causes in the sense of being grounded. This kind of learning is exactly analogous to how we ourselves learn to walk across a patch of ice. We know that if we can just maintain a constant rate of movement without any displacement from a center line, this steady pace will smooth out the temporary glitch in footing. In fact, we quickly learn in a counter-intuitive manner, that if we gradually and constantly accelerate our motion in crossing over the patch, most of our energy will be directed forward and hence the side-to-side swing of our hips will be neutralized, making us less likely to slip. This is an emotional calculus predicated on physics and the laws of motion, and this awareness arises from our animal mind and is exactly how dogs learn to negotiate the floor. They steadily accelerate as they learn to focus on the feeling of flow from their physical memory bank, and this they come to feel is what prevents the rug from being pulled out from under their paws.
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This makes no sense, what about the inner ear? It provides us with the required frame of reference, it tells us if we are moving or not when our vision/touch tells us if there is movement. Does a dog not posses an inner ear capable to perform the same function?
Dogs do not have the capacity to identify themselves but they do understand the difference between their movement and the movement of the environment.
Both my dogs and I have benefited from your methods but this is fallacious.
I think this makes perfect sense, particularly once you realize that dogs have no “sense of self and other,” meaning that they don’t have an ability to perceive themselves as being separate from their experiences or, in fact, from other beings: their owners, other dogs, cats, squirrels, etc. Dogs feel connected to everything that holds and sustains their interest for any length of time.
This isn’t easy to grasp because we unconsciously project bits and pieces of our own identities onto our dogs and as a result they become a part of our psyche. So we tend to think of them almost automatically as if they were just mute and somewhat less intelligent versions of ourselves.
Meanwhile, science tells us that a dog’s intelligence is equal to that of a 3-yr. old child, etc, which doesn’t help at all when it comes to explaining this huge gulf in cognitive ability that separates our species.
But Kevin’s explanation of how the human body (not the mind, necessarily) learns to negotiate the process of walking on ice shows how accurate his view of the dog’s first experience walking on a slippery floor really is.
Have you ever read anything by Temple Grandin? She can be pretty valuable when trying to wrestle with the differences between the human and animal mind. She’s like an intermediate step between the way traditional science explains behavioral phenomena and the way Kevin does.
LCK
I agree that the physiology of vision and hearing can accommodate the distinction between that which is “moving” and that which is not; but only to a point. In fact it is remarkably easy to trick the senses into an amazing array of false impressions, even out of body experiences in rational human beings. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/science/24body.html?_r=1
And as a matter of fact according to modern physics our very conception of time is an illusion perpetrated by the human intellect. So we would be advised to not presume that animals see and think about the world as do we. That they must live in a world of time as defined by human thoughts. So my argument is about the dog’s perception of the phenomenon, not about the specific hard wiring. And of course the question remains all the more glaring that if it is true that the dog can determine an absolute frame of reference from inner ear orientation, why then is a dog afraid of slippery floors? Why doesn’t such a sure-footed four-legged animal that is not even likely to fall, simply readjust its balance and be on its way unperturbed?
Interesting read. I have seen many dogs fall on slippery floors. Running along, they slip, and sometimes they fall. Crazy as it may seem, many dogs that I have encountered don’t like falling. Go figure.
Taking a fairly simple topic and complicating it beyond belief with references to physics, while entertaining, seems incorrect. But then again. It would never have occurred to me to ask why a dog would be afraid of a possible injury to himself, however slight it might be.
While you may see me as taking something simple and making it hopelessly complex: on the other hand I see folks trivializing something that is extremely profound. If the phenomenon of a dog afraid of a slippery floor is simply a function of falling and getting hurt, in other words, the capacity to compare one moment in time to another, why then aren’t cats or chimps afraid of slippery floors to the same degree of overwhelming terror that dogs are capable of. I have known dogs that have gone into abject panic when their owner tries to cajole them down a corridor at the far end of which they must negotiate a polished marble passageway onto an elevator. It gets so bad the owner ends up taking four flights of stairs to accommodate this fear. And the dog never ever actually fell and/or was hurt in its experiences with the floor before the fear took over. Also, why aren’t dogs afraid of slippery ice. I’ve seen dogs take hellacious upending bone jarring crashes on ice and yet this never generalizes into a fear of frozen surfaces in the outdoors. While using scientific sounding terms sounds scientific, these really mean inserting a thought into an imaginary bubble over the dog’s head.
I also notice that no scientist actually answers the question; rather they accuse me of being unscientific. The question remains unanswered, why are dogs afraid of slippery floors? The reason I turn to physics is that it does in fact provide us an explanation. I don’t see what could be a more conservative and scientific statement to say that ultimately, everything is a function of energy, even behavior.
I have never had a satisfactory answer for why a dog has a slippery/shiny floor problem.I say shiny as i have seen differences in dogs depending on the degree of polish or shinyness, the shinier being the worse they are. At times i have thought it may have been to do with the dogs visual perception and the dog percieves the shiny floor as some thing they may fall into.It is very difficult for us as humans to reconcile what is going on in the dogs head. Some people have speculated it may seem like water yet some of these dogs are confident swimmers. Some dogs have seemed fine up until a certain age and then have fallen apart.I have noticed at times an association between this problem and a fear of hieghts.
Kevin what would be the programme or process to fix this based on your theory?
Nature isn’t random. Some things absorb and conduct emotion and thereby give an animal the feeling of flow and of being “grounded” literally. However some things reflect and interrupt the flow of emotion rendering the opposite sensation of being destabilized. Furthermore that which interrupts the flow of emotion an animal perceives as a predator and then it wants to get away from the place that makes it feel as if it is falling.
You are quite right that shinier things by virtue of being reflective, are more likely to interrupt an animal’s sense of the continuum and therefore these things are what I call predator energy. And you are even more quite right that this involves the dog’s balance mechanism because animals respond to predators just as if the ground is moving and so they become unsure about their footing. A dog’s first encounter with standing water reflects this same problem for them, but its surface is easily broken and it yields to their probing, not to mention that they can ingest it, and so they can more quickly acclimate to a shiny body of water than a shiny hard floor.
For animals the experience of grounding isn’t an abstract or metaphorical representation of experience, rather it’s the most visceral, down-to-earth component of consciousness that there can possibly be. This is why dogs constantly smell the ground when in a new setting or when the terrain changes in order to return to a feeling of grounded-ness when stimulated by something new. By smelling, they are picking up “preyful aspects” scents of other dogs and dirt, grass, etc., because such things absorb and conduct emotion reassuring them that their footing is firm. And this is the key to helping a dog overcome a fear of falling which is what slippery floors represent in their body/mind.
For example, when an object of attraction is moving in a conductive, prey-like manner, then within the observing dog’s body/mind it feels grounded and thereby perceives itself as standing on terra firma and this is the case even were it to be on a high chase running down a prey at breakneck speed. The ground feels firm beneath its feet because it feels “grounded” literally into the object-of-attraction, i.e. the prey. So I take a dog that’s afraid of a slippery floor into the area it’s afraid of, and see if it will eat something. I will only feed it in such a setting in order to resolve this issue as soon as possible. Once the dog is eating, I then induce it to push-into-me, i.e. give up its footing to me. The more energy that flows from the dog to me, the more it feels grounded. Finally, I will try to get such a dog to play and bite a prey toy as an even higher expression of this feeling of being grounded. I want to become the dog’s “ground” and at some point the dog will play with me on the slippery floor and then finally slippery floors don’t make it feel ungrounded.
You also mention the time delay factor. Often, dogs will build up a charge over months and years, and since unresolved emotion in the body/mind as an emotional battery is only attracted to predatory energy and therefore needs such a trigger in order for the dog to find relief, months or years later in its life a dog seemingly out of the blue will manifest a fear of slippery floors that it had passed over without concern earlier in its life. But this is merely an excuse (so to speak) to download energy that has been building up so that the dog can find some measure of relief. And because an expression of panic works in that the dog gets to express stress and temporarily get it out of its system, the dog’s fear of these things becomes reinforced and we see the dog becoming more and more neurotic. But there’s nothing wrong with the dog’s mind because this makes perfect sense once we understand how the emotional battery works.