I mean that if a dog doesn’t love to bite, then it needs to bite. If our dog loves to bite, then it will love to bite what we want it to bite because love works according to “a want.” What we want, our dog wants, this is the essence of their loving nature. (The opposite can unfortunately be true as well as when we project a need onto a dog. Then what we need our dog needs and this is one way of defining a “problem behavior.” For example, if an owner needs attention, their dog needs attention and to such an extent it will annoy the owner.) Whereas if our dog wants what we want, our dog knows how we feel and they can easily learn to do what we want them to do. Instinct on the other hand works according to a need and a need cannot be moderated because an instinct always travels the path of least resistance whereas it’s important to note that everything we want our dog to do in domesticated life is ALWAYS the path of highest resistance, “Don’t chase the cat.” “Stick around the yard.” “Don’t jump up on the counter.” Everything we want our dog to do stands in abject defiance of instincts or acquired habits. And this running to the path of least resistance is because the intensity of instinctual behavior is fueled by stored fear, (the rush of fear is due to the sudden, intense SENSATION of acceleration due to a collapse of a state of attraction) and so a dog cannot control the intensity of an instinct in the absence of a group trigger. (A group trigger converts fear back to its original desire before the state of collapse.) So we have to get the fear of a bite (which is simultaneously a fear of acceleration) out of the dog’s system in order for it to learn to love to bite. Thus, getting the bite out is getting the fear out. When fear is reconverted to desire, A WANT becomes available to serve as a group trigger and this feeling of purpose is the faculty within a dog that allows it to control an instinct. Only a feeling can travel the path of highest resistance and it is empowered by a “group trigger” (i.e. WHAT the group wants).

So if our dog will predictably manifest this love to bite in any and all settings, then our dog’s behavior will be sociably predictable in any and all settings. For example, on his first trip to the big city, “Hessian” my German shepherd was seven years old and he had only been off our farm four or five times in his life with most of these being trips to the vet. Several years ago I conducted a seminar in Manhattan and I brought Hessian in order to demonstrate my method. It was his first experience in a hotel, on an elevator, on sidewalks; negotiating honking and screeching traffic, a crowded store, in Central Park and so on. The first thing I did when I parked the car in the hotel’s underground garage and had the luggage loaded on the trolley cart was to take Hessian out of the car, produce the bite toy, have him push into me and then get the bite. I let him wrest it from my grip (fight to overcome resistance) and then carry it around for a few moments to savor all the praise I lavished on him. The valet couldn’t help but smile when he saw how happy the dog was. Then I tucked the toy in my jacket and we went about getting ourselves checked in. Now because Hessian bit the toy as hard as he does back on the farm and was willing to put his heart into fighting it free from my hand, I knew that the dog I left Vermont with was the same dog that had arrived with me in Manhattan. Because all Hessian’s energy was grounded into the thing I wanted him to bite, everything about Manhattan was going to fit into his emotional definition of normal and therefore nothing we would encounter (such as the dog in the park that jumped him trying to take his toy away (reflecting its owners need for competitiveness I’m sure) would be unmanageable for him.

Even though to our eyes it might appear that the big city meant everything was different from our quiet rural backwater homestead, this is a comparison that only the human intellect can make. For Hessian everything about the city fit into the parameters of everyday experience because I had grounded whatever intensity was being knocked loose by the city’s high rate of change into that which I wanted him to want. For Hessian it was just another day on the farm, “Oh boy, oh boy, is it time to feed the chickens?”
If a dog doesn’t love to bite in a moment of tension, then it will NEED to bite in order to relieve that tension and will become completely at the mercy of instincts and habits.

Related posts:

1. Teaching a Puppy Not to Bite
2. All In A Days’ Work
3. Why We Push

“I told my neighbor what happened and he said his dog growled at him, ONCE. Should I do what my neighbor did?”

First, step away from the dog. Step back from the edge. Don’t do anything. Take a deep, deep breath and enjoy a long steady exhale. To paraphrase Steve Martin in “Father of the Bride” in the scene when he was confronted while snooping around his prospective in-laws’ house by their two snarling Dobermans, and desperately searching for the right words to extricate himself from the jam: “Relax, Release, Renew, Repent.” In other words, don’t do anything until the right words become available to properly define the situation.

Second, understand that there’s nothing wrong with your dog and there’s nothing wrong with you. If you choose to, you can now take Step One to healing. Input is becoming output. In other words, there’s something in your dog (fear) that’s trying to get out. You can choose to add more fear to the equation and drive it down deeper; or choose to turn fear back into the desire from whence it came. Fear can never be satisfied, it can only get stronger, only desire can be consummated.

Let’s begin by asking: why does a dog growl? When I began as a dog trainer I would have answered that it was contextual. In one context it could be an expression of dominance or territoriality or guarding a possession or a person, what behavioral scientists call “resources,” and then there were of course those situations where it’s an expression of fear, possibly even of pain. But I no longer make such distinctions because I believe that growling is always an expression of fear no matter the context or the situation. The dog is attracted to something but is feeling blocked at the same time. This state of emotional paralysis builds up force and for the dog this emotional surge triggers the physical memory of the worst thing that has ever happened to it. So it “attributes” this build up of force to the object of its attraction and is therefore afraid of what it’s attracted to.

In this understanding, growling is an adaptive physiological response to radiate energy out of the system, to dump energy SO THAT THE DOG DOESN’T HAVE TO ACT. The dog’s emotional center-of-gravity is “stuck” in its muzzle, just like there’s a cork in the stopper of a flask of a gas that’s being heated. The dog is trying to hold back the force that’s building behind this block and as the fear intensifies some is leaking out in order to keep the dog from exploding. This is not a signal per se but it is a communication of energy nonetheless because the vibrating sounds of the growling triggers a corresponding vibration in the emotional battery of the observer, and which unsettles it in turn and so the object of attraction be it a dog or a person is “informed” to keep away. However by the same token, when dealing with another dog that has the exact same charge the growling can actually draw the other dog in so that the two dogs end up in a fight. Then, because fighting led to a relief from pressure this fighting behavior takes on a life of its own so that such dogs seek out other such like-charged dogs in order to get these periodic purges. Of course, the relief they find is short lived since they haven’t achieved a high level of synchronicity to turn the underlying fear back into its underlying desire, and so we merely end up with confirmed dog fighters that become more and more sensitized to the stuck charges in other dogs.

Another way of looking at growling is that this behavior represents a dog pushing energy out of its muzzle in order to keep a bubble OF CONNECTION between itself and the person or dog it’s attracted to, AS A BUFFER. Every behavior is a function of attraction, but if one is attracted to something one is afraid of, then one settles into a safe distance, either physically or emotionally, in order to feel a satisfying degree of connection relative to the fear of collapse were the gap to be closed. So when a dog growls at its owner, this means that in this context there is more energy in the connection between them, and yet not enough distance between them relative to that degree of pressure. The more heat added to the system, then the more volume is needed to keep the pressure at the level associated with comfort. Too much heat and the flask will explode.

Finally, another way of saying this, and which is especially relevant to how one should solve this issue; is that your dog is attracted to you with more energy than the connection between you and your dog can channel. The dog doesn’t perceive you as a ground for its deepest energy; it sees you as a block. It’s attracted to you with an energy that simultaneously makes it feel blocked.

I’ve never experienced this with a dog I’ve raised from a puppy, however back in the eighties when I was in what I would call my super-positive phase (but I’m not saying I was practicing positive OC training so no critique intended), I had been raising and training a client’s dog in terms of its prey instinct and doing everything in as positive a manner as I could. One day after a game of fetch with this young shepherd, it was time to put him away and he followed me indoors and ran into its crate with the stick still in its mouth. I locked him in but then debated the wisdom of leaving him with his beloved stick since he was surely going to chew it to splinters and I had just dealt with a dog with an abscess from a sliver of wood embedded in its gum. So seeing the end of the stick at the front of the crate I opened the gate and reached in to get it. I was shocked when the shepherd with which I had just been playing, and which was overjoyed with joy every time he saw me, growled in a profoundly menacing tone. No question if I touched that stick he was going to bite me. I’m sorry to say but my hard-wired dog training instincts filled me with a high-octane anger: “How dare this dog growl at me after all the positive training and gratification of its prey instinct I have been doing all this time. That’s it. Boy is he going to get it.”

However I was also teaching myself during this period a new way of looking at behavior in terms of energy and most especially the idea of the emotional battery. And so I decided to step back from the situation and try to put what was happening into this frame of reference. Like Steve Martin in “Father of the Bride” I was scanning the menu for the right thing to say or do. “Relax, Release, Relent, Repent.” And then I got it.

In my mind I had been being super positive, I was the nicest, greatest and bestest dog trainer I could hope to be, and yet that still doesn’t mean that I had attracted all the energy in the dog’s emotional system. Obviously something was being left in the tank and maybe this was the source of its intense displays of personality which I was misinterpreting as “friendliness.” Maybe only now was he showing me energy he normally hid.

So I had a choice. I could say that I was doing everything wrong just like the learning theorists as well as the dominance proponents would be quick to tell me, or, I could take my emerging energy model to the next logical step and say, “Aha, the dog is feeling more energy of attraction toward me than he can give me.” The connection between us is like a pipe but apparently I hadn’t been developing it big enough to accommodate all the stress that the dog had in its system, and that perhaps I was even causing by playing stick with him. Maybe I was mousing with the dog when I should have been Moosing. Maybe the dog was now just becoming mature enough to express what it had been internalizing up until that point. Not only that, but for the first time the dog was showing me energy he normally hides from me. This was my choice; I could see it as a problem, or as an opportunity.

So the actual reason why the dog growled didn’t matter, all that mattered was that the dog was now showing me energy that he otherwise didn’t feel safe to express. Once in his crate with the prey between his paws, the dog held all the cards making him feel free to show his fear of me, to me. The dog was showing me energy I had never attracted and therefore had never to this point been available for training. The key is not to take it personally.

The simple truth was that the dog is afraid of me and so I shouldn’t respond to the dog’s fear with my fear. I went back to the kennel kitchen, got a food treat, opened the gate to his crate and said to the dog as I looked him in the eye and his muzzle began to pursed up into an emerging growl, “Goooood boy, what a goood bootiful boy, yea, get that bad stick” at which point the dog came out of the crate took the cookie and then I guided him back into the crate and repeated my pointing toward the stick and telling him how much I appreciated him giving me his fear. (Today I would have increased the degree of softening by doing push-for-food over stick in crate.) Soon he relaxed and would let me reach in over the stick and give him a good rub-a-dub on his body as he gobbled up a handful of food. From then on everyday we practiced going in and out of crate with the stick and giving-stick-to-handler when handler reaches into crate. I eventually broadened it to include juicy marrow bones. The dog lived to a ripe old age and got along famously with everyone. He only growled at me ONCE.

Related posts:

1. Crate Duty
2. 7 Steps to a Stress-Free Vet Visit
3. Why Do Good Dogs Do Bad Things?

Sooner or later, virtually every puppy, no matter how juicy the tidbit thrown into the back of its crate, is going to balk at going in once it’s now mature enough to form an association that the cookie in the crate leads to confinement; i.e. the crate equals an interruption to the flow. What now?

I often hear the advice that an owner should try to make the crate a positive experience. Letting the puppy go in and out for a cookie without getting locked up is perhaps the best neutralizing strategy of this method, but other than that I don’t recommend the philosophy and overall methodology in this approach because in the final analysis if one is trying to make the crate positive by investing in all these positive things, they are in fact working against the nature of temperament which works according to an energetic logic (-) – - > (+) i.e.: a negative is always access to a positive. In other words, an animal’s mind is constructed so that it isn’t possible to have a perception of a positive without a counterbalancing perception of a negative as access to that positive. A negative that isn’t access to a positive, we can then colloquially call “negative” because the dog will avoid it. So once the crate has acquired a “negative” value in that it is perceived by the dog as representing an interruption to the flow of energy, then the more energy someone invests in making the crate so-called “positive;” in reality the more the dog will come to associate this so-called positive energy with its perception of the crate-as-a-negative-that-denies-access-to-the-positive.

When I was ten years old, no one could have convinced me that going to the dentist was a positive experience. I suppose if someone offered me a million dollars and a million ice cream cones, and since while sitting in the chair I could think about all the ice cream cones a million dollars could buy after I had finished off my first million ice cream cones, I could have voluntarily submitted my body to the chair. But I still wouldn’t have believed that the dentist experience was positive, it was simply something I was choosing because I now perceived it as a negative that led me to a positive.

So in the absence of the capacity to think and mental time travel, we can’t make the crate positive by adding more and more positives to the equation because in reality we’re merely adding more and more energy to the impasse with the dog coming to perceive its owner as trying to control it, and which paradoxically is thereby knocking it out of CHOICE. “Wow, there must really be something wrong with that crate if they’re trying so hard to convince me it’s positive.” Every kid dopes this out when they sense their parents seem to want them to do something a little too much.

However, you can make the crate positive RELATIVE TO THE ALTERNATIVE. (For example, if a comb is run through hair it acquires a surplus of electrons so that the hair becomes positive RELATIVE TO THE COMB. No actual positives, no protons, have in reality been added to the strands of hair, it’s just that electrons have leaped from the hair to the comb and so the two become electrically drawn together. So in my analogy, if the comb is the crate and the dog a strand of hair, the dog would magically leap into the crate because it feels that the crate is a relief of an electrostatic pressure.) Therefore, when the alternative to going into the crate becomes more intense than the crate, the dog feels an electrostatic pull to the crate and it CHOOSES to go in. And once the matter of choice is invoked then the crate is assigned to the energy loop as a-negative-that-leads-to-a-positive. By this I mean that if anything ever positive ever happens again in the dog’s life, as for example if it is ever let out of the crate, then the dog’s temperament records the crate as the negative-that-led-to-that-particular positive. Eventually, as the dog’s temperament gets more and more involved in the dog’s way of being, all positives are perceived as being linked to the negatives such as crate duty. I have never owned a dog that as an adult didn’t race to get locked up in a crate, kennel or house when I needed them to, even when they were leaving something compelling outside. In their minds, getting confined was how they were going to connect with what they were attracted to. (I also didn’t have to do anything in regards to crate training because they naturally came to associate the crate, kennel, indoors as being integral to the positive, prey-making things they got to do outdoors, and this was because I never gave any thought to making the crate positive.)

So if one is dealing with a dog balking at the crate, how does one make the crate RELATIVELY POSITIVE? By objectifying the problem

In other words don’t give the dog a psychological problem to solve, “Go into the crate because I think you should think it’s positive.” Give the dog a physical problem to solve.

A woman once called me about her big dog that was destroying her apartment when she left it alone. She was about to be evicted. I told her to get a crate and confine it so that it could learn that being calm in the crate is how it WILLED her return. She bought a crate and soon called me back telling me that she was a big, strong woman, and her son was a big, strong man and yet the two of them could not get this dog into the crate. It wasn’t aggressive but it was like trying to wrestle the Samsonite gorilla into the luggage it was stomping into the ground. (Sorry for the dated pop-cultural reference.) She had a pickup truck so I told her to come over to my farm with the dog and crate.

When they arrived I put the dog on a “high collar” (snaked up tight behind its ears) with the crate positioned on the tail gate. I also placed a narrow bench as a halfway step and by cranking up on the collar, the dog became slightly uncomfortable and this caused the dog to get up on the bench so that now it was now facing the opening of the crate, and halfway committed to making the choice I wanted. There was a gap between the dog and the crate, with the crate about a foot higher.  I should have whispered into the dog’s ear. The woman didn’t notice it but as I pulled up on the collar again and pointed into the crate, the dog began to have a mini-panic attack but now its options were reduced to two physical realities, the abyss below, or the crate above. It instantly chose the crate. After a dozen repetitions, I had the woman practice the exercise and soon the dog was zooming into the crate even when the crate was on the ground. In about five minutes the dog had associated getting into the crate with getting out of the crate. (The long term goal is that once a dog will play with its owner and wants the toy the owner wants it to want, no-matter-what, then the crate becomes linked on that continuum as well, one more negative that leads to the ultimate positive, the ultimate positive being hunting with its owner.)

This dog above was an extreme case just to make the point. Usually, before we get to the moment of truth, I have already placed the crate onto a box about six inches off the ground, and the dog is dragging a lead around. I get to the lead and then walk the dog into position, I pitch a cookie inside the crate, invariably to be consumed later, and then extend my hand a few inches inside the crate and as high to its top as I can. Then I wait as the dog becomes uncomfortable. I say nothing. The more the dog resists, the more uncomfortable it becomes and the sooner it will work out the choice. Paradoxically, the question of control is shifting away from the human and onto the dog itself, whereas with the positive approach the exact opposite tends to happen. The instant the inside of the crate is perceived as being more comfortable than the outside, the dog hops in. I’ve said nothing, I’ve invested no energy into the equation, I was merely a “smart” post leaving the dog to learn for itself that it can choose either to make itself uncomfortable, or to make itself comfortable by getting into the crate.

It turned out that I never got that blank check for unlimited ice cream cones and yet I now go regularly to the Dentist. I even pay him. Sure does beat the alternative.

Related posts:

1. Quantum Canine ‘Eye Contact’ Episode Part 1
2. Quantum Canine ‘Eye Contact’ Episode Part II
3. Growling

Be the Ground

One fall afternoon about thirty years ago I was driving along a country road that ran above a house. I could see the entirety of its yard which featured a dog tied to a long trolley. Months and months of hard pounding had shaped the dog’s path into what looked like an official dirt bike course, complete with banked curves and notches carved into hillocks. As I neared the property, the dog was lying at the foot of its dog house, intently staring at the far end of its range. Then, it launched itself at a dead run at a squirrel that had come within striking distance of the trolley track. Of course, the squirrel had the calculus all worked out and by the time the dog was almost on it, was safely out of the hot zone. Strangely however the dog never slowed and hit the end of its cable at full speed, which then flung the dog high into the air from whence it was slammed to the ground in a smack-down worthy of Wrestlemania. “Oh, that’s gotta hurt,” I remember thinking to myself and yet oddly as it seemed to me at the time, the dog immediately leapt  back to its feet with the biggest smile on its face. Then with tail held high, it trotted back to its lair just as our German Shepherd dog Rommel would prance along when carrying a dead woodchuck in his mouth. It took me many years to understand what I had just witnessed.

Whenever a dog perceives any change in its surroundings, its brain of course becomes active and this generates neuro-chemical energy. No rocket science here. A stimulus would not be called a stimulus if it didn’t stimulate the brain. However, because the dog’s mind is constituted by two-brains, the Little-Brain-in-the-gut in addition to the Big-Brain-in-the-head, stimulation first and foremost invokes a sensation of emotional displacement and this makes a dog feel unbalanced, literally. Even a state of hunger is perceived as a displacement and therefore the dog searches for a “ground” (i.e. a preyful aspect) in order to return it to the pre-stimulated state of emotional equilibrium and which it simultaneously equates with being on terra-firma.

Bio-mechanically speaking, grounding means that nerve energy of the Big-Brain (which is like an electrostatic pressure with spikes of electrical charge) must be converted into smooth muscle wave action of the intestines. The most primal avenues of ingestion or grounding are smell and taste, and so smelling or eating something – even grass – has a calming effect. But sight and touch can also become available as more elaborate pathways for emotional grounding due to the sexual/sensual circuitry. So nerve energy stimulated by sensory input needs to be digested by the Little-Brain-in-the-gut just as nutritional input needs to be digested within the gut. Every input to the organism, whether nutritional or emotional, follows this principle.

In regards to training, this means that it doesn’t actually matter to a dog what logically happens in any given situation, what really matters is how a dog ends up feeling. In other words, after the dust settles does the dog feel grounded or not? For example, if 200,000 volts of stimulation was inputted then 200,000 volts of grounding has to be achieved in order for the dog to end up feeling satisfied.

Bernhard Mannel, a German Schutzhund trainer mentioned elsewhere on this site, posed the following question to participants in a seminar I attended, and this can help clarify how important the feeling of grounding is to canine learning. Mannel asked us to consider that if a wolf were to seize a deer by its hind leg and if somehow the leg in its grasp yanked free of the deer’s body: how would the wolf respond to watching the rest of the deer getting away? Would it continue after the deer or would it content itself with the leg in its mouth? Mannel argued that the wolf wouldn’t care what happened to the rest of the deer. The wolf had leapt into the air to “make prey” and ended up with prey-on-the-ground, and therefore in the canine mind, the situation was resolved.

At the time of that seminar, around 1977 or ‘78, I believed Mannel was right, and since then everything I’ve learned about dogs confirms his supposition. To put his point in my parlance, the wolf felt grounded, and this fulfills the essential predicate of animal consciousness. A wolf isn’t trying to kill the deer or even eat the deer; it just wants to bite the deer’s body in order to attain grounding, and as far as the wolf is concerned, the head of the deer (i.e. its predatory aspect) is welcome to whatever is left. In a dog’s mind, it doesn’t matter what actually happens, – all that matters is how the dog feels after-what-happens happened.

This calls into question the prevailing logic of reinforcement-based theories of learning. For example, we think that praise and food rewards are necessarily experienced by the dog as a positive emotional input. However, if a dog sees a deer and is energized to the 200k volt level, and then the owner calls the dog to their side and rewards with food and praise (which for purposes of this discussion let’s say is worth only 100k volts worth of grounding to this particular dog), then the dog has been left with a shortfall of 100k and sooner or later the dog will have to get back to the unfinished business of grounding-out-deer-energy, even though it may have reliably come to its name the first several times dog and owner encountered deer. Just because a dog is interrupted from a chase by the sound of its name and then returns to its owner’s side, doesn’t mean that all its energy felt consummated and that therefore the dog is gaining the lesson we think it is learning. Because in this example, the dog remains burdened with unresolved energy which will continually vibrate away, deep within its body/mind until it resurfaces at some later point. While unresolved emotion may be latent, it is never dormant; it organizes everything.

Conversely, if the sight of a deer fills a dog up with 200,000 volts of “energy”, and then if those 200,000 volts of energy end up “running-to-ground” it doesn’t actually matter to the dog how the energy ran to ground, just that it ran to ground. If fully grounded into something, as in a bite object an owner might provide, then the dog feels satisfied even if it didn’t end up bringing the deer down. All that matters is whether the dog’s emotional battery is returned to its pre-stimulated state, so that if a deer equals 200,000 volts of stimulation and 200,000 volts of nerve energy runs-to-ground via contacting with its owner, then for this dog, this is what bringing a deer down feels like. A dog doesn’t have to bring a deer down, it just has to bring the energy to ground and therefore it is incumbent on an owner to understand that there is an emotional physics (rather than a psychology) by which a dog defines success.

I now believe that the trolley dog I observed thirty years ago had probably never ever killed a squirrel in its life, and yet nonetheless when the dog pranced its way back to its house to resume its survey of the kingdom below, it carved yet another notch on the transom. For that dog, being flung into the air and body-slammed to earth was the only tangible thing of high intensity value to ever be realized in trolley land, and that thereby came to constitute its definition of what killing a squirrel feels like. As incongruent as it may appear to our human powers of reason and sensibilities, physically speaking the dog did indeed attain a pretty high degree of grounding given that so much of its energy had quite literally been absorbed by the ground. There had been a huge transfer of kinetic energy from dog to the earth and that was enough to satisfy the energetic parameters of animal consciousness. In fact I believe the dog learned to wait at the highest point of its compound at the farthest end of its range so that it could experience the most degree of grounding by hitting the trolley at its highest possible speed. The dog would never be able to learn to lie in wait as the most efficient means of actually catching a squirrel as a cat would do, because in its mind that’s not what killing a squirrel feels like, and it didn’t really want to kill a squirrel. It just wanted to feel grounded.

So the motive of all animal behavior is for energy to run-to-ground, and given that the canine mind is organized as an energy circuit, an owner can position themselves to become the apex of their dog’s mind by becoming the pathway by which the dog’s energy thereby runs to ground. To establish such an imprint this means that if there is 200k volts worth of input, it must be discharged through actions that overcome 200k volts of resistance and that results with 200k volts of grounding. Interestingly, in the natural scheme of things the Being which constitutes this apex of emotional experience is not the so-called pack leader but the moose. I’m not aware of one recorded instance whereby an alpha ever commanded an omega to come to its side. And yet whenever the moose calls, wolves always come running.

So when I encounter a deer with a young dog, I don’t command it to do anything. I say “Gooood boy, yea, let’s get that deer. Reeeaaaaddddy?” We then run away from the deer as fast as I can go and get to the “Ready” tree where I’ve hidden the sacred moose toy. Then we beat each other up over getting that toy in my dog’s mouth. For my dog, that’s what killing a deer feels like.

Related posts:

1. The Mind of Squirrel Dog
2. Why do dogs bark at strangers?
3. Why Do Dogs Smell Each Other