The author of Drive, Dan Pink is on TED and Google Authors http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXrMbGloMTI I have known this all my life, and have sensed I was the lone ranger. For this reason, I was bowled over when I first heard of Kierkegaard…

Academia needs to adopt Pink’s ideas and start over. Government too.

Kevin posted some great definitions awhile back, and also explains the emotional battery and the circuit formed by the gut, brain, and heart. It may seem metaphorical, but it isn’t…of course it is descriptive and ultimately words are going to get in the way sometimes. The truth of the matter is easy enough to verify with one person and one dog, however, so I am not sure why there isn’t at least more open-mindedness about simply observing to see if what Kevin describes is accurate…

Maybe it is virtually impossible for humans to see the dog in man (although humans have a myriad of ways to see man in the dog). It would be infinitely simpler and more logical to assume that man is dog+, and not that dog is man-. But that I think that gets to the whole reason why Kevin’s theory meets with a lot of resistance. When I first read books about Zen Buddhism, I could not believe that only a relatively few people were practicing in the US. Ultimately, there is not much interest in getting in touch with the inner dog (or Buddha nature) if it means giving up the notion of “self”. And although Kevin says it’s simple, I think to accept the NDS theory, a person must at some level acknowledge the nothing (as in no-thing, just a blip in the brain and nothing more) that self-centered thought is…not really consistent with any of Western thought or tradition…

re: the cat experiment – yikes, why a cat? But it’s true – forms are not fixed as they would appear to be, nothing is static and everything is connected by energy, it isn’t just a metaphor or an abstract idea and that is such a perfect example of why physics is it.

If a dog gets 5 cups, he like us; is the electrical equivalent of a trolling motor!.

When it comes to dogs thinking, who knows what it is like. Even for Kevin, who has spent so much of his life paying close attention to dogs (though I believe he knows way more than we do). You would think that with all the ‘professionals’ who deal with dog behavior and all the anecdotal data from dog owners, we would by now have a better idea of what or how this species – the one most socially connected to us – is thinking.

Humans have been too busy trying to train them to be like this or that, but they are DOGS. Let’s get some canine ethologists some big $$$ and get some answers. And let’s hold their feet to the fire of serious scientific investigation methods that prohibit anthropomorphizing dogs.

Or not. To be sure, success will not just happen, as evidenced from the historical track record for social and behavioral science. Psychologists never agree on the nature of human consciousness and behavior, and their subjects speak to them!

Dogs differ from us only in degree – this will help greatly in understanding emotionality, and somewhat in conscious mentality. Dogs have memory, they dream vividly, they learn how to manipulate their environment, they communicate to us and other animals, they have conscious sense perceptions similar to us, they have myriad emotions, etc. They are not mindless machines – unless we are too. And what I said about dogs is about all I could say about a human whom I observe but do not talk with.

Energy is like love, it is a word used by so many in so many ways that it is too imprecise, especially when used to characterize sentient creatures. Psychic energy, emotional, sexual, mental, spiritual, etc. So what is emotional energy, then?

This may interest most of you concerning humans and dogs as _physical_ energy batteries: A human that gets 2000 calories a day is consuming the same energy as a 100 Watt bulb running for 24 hours – this would totally discharge a 12 Volt, 200 amp-hour trolling motor deep cycle boat battery. My 50 lb dogs each get 2 cups of dry kibble a day (OK other treats too), enough for a 40 Watt bulb. I a dog gets 6 cups, he like us is the electrical equivalent of a trolling motor!.

However, the real question is, have you done the pushing exercise, and did you see positive behavioral changes in your dog as a result? No matter how argumentative one gets about this or that training philosophy, what really counts is whether something works. So I’m hoping that we can get some of those kinds of testimonials to motivate people who might be on the fence, philosophically speaking, to try it.

LCK

I thought you and Kevin did a good job of explaining and staking out the ground. I think the objections are more about form than substance. Is behavioral science “science? There is the use of the scientific method no doubt. But as Kevin says there are a lot of thought-based things that aren’t explained at all, and it is into that bucket that all of the anomalies are placed…which really is a problem because that’s exactly where the science should provide “answers.” That it doesn’t makes the science sort of irrelevant…the extremely detailed documentation of the obvious?

Since the primary goal of the article was to introduce people to the pushing exercise, and to explain how and why it’s so effective, I thought I would post a link here so that anyone who’s used the pushing exercise and has seen positive changes in their dogs’ behavior, attitude, etc., as a direct result, could post their comments.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/my-puppy-my-self/201001/mice-and-mutts-iv-conclusion-all-dogs-are-good-dogs-heart/comments

Thanks!

LCK