Because it’s grounded

Dr. Dodman has noticed that many dogs that are afraid of thunderstorms seek shelter in bathrooms squeezing themselves behind the toilet or getting into the bathtub or shower stall. He believes this is because plumbing fixtures are grounded into the earth that this must afford the dog relief from the electrostatic vibe of thunder and lightning. I very much like his theory.

At the moment of making contact with anything there is the issue of dealing with a virtual electrostatic shock, quite like walking across a carpeted floor on a cold winter’s day and bracing yourself for touching the metal switch plate. This is because electromagnetism is the organizing principle by which simple behavior becomes complex behavior even though the animal doesn’t actually feel a real form of electricity or magnetism. (For example, we often think of nerve transmission when we move our fingers as if there’s a current of electricity running from our brain to our hand. But there actually isn’t. Rather there’s an action potential wending its way very, very fast, through a series of electro-chemical collapses or synaptic exchanges between neurons. The nerve impulse is a virtual electrical current.) As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the balance circuitry of the Big-Brain contributes the electrical component; the hunger circuitry invoking the little-brain contributes the magnetic component. Any perception of change displaces the individual’s sense of equilibrium and creates a “void” in the little-brain-in-the-gut given that it is aroused, but has nothing yet to churn up. So in order to make contact with another being so that magnetic alignment can take place, first the issue of “electrical grounding” has to transpire, the electrostatic energy of the Big-Brain has to be converted into smooth muscle wave action of the little-brain.

In my model of behavior, the primary function of the Big-Brain-in-the-head is to generate intensity as sheer energy, a generator of a virtual static electricity. I say it’s virtual because this “force” is attributed to anything an animal is attracted to (and before it makes contact) and if that animal can reflect the energy back at the “projector” (primarily by eye contact) the force increases. If there was a real force, then it wouldn’t be variable depending on what each individual in an interaction is doing. This pressure serves as a bubble that becomes an animals’ sense of its social space, flight distances and so on. This degree of pressure within this bubble between the animal and whatever it is attracted, to becomes its sense of safety, for example a prey keeping its eye on a predator and how near it will allow it to be. (This intensity of the pressure also triggers physical memories of grounding with its peers and can thus serve as a sense of connection. You can think here of the proverbial Velcro dog following its owner everywhere in the house because it equates losing direct physical contact with the owner with an actual popping of that bubble.) The prey observing a predator has no comprehension of a threat; rather it’s a ratio of how much pressure the prey can take relative to how much pressure it needs to feel safe. If the predator comes too near, the bubble pops and the prey flees whereas if the predator goes out of sight, the prey becomes anxious because it now feels a void.

Dealing with this virtual electrostatics is why dogs use their front paws to initiate contact when they’re tentative because if they were in fact dealing with an actual electrical shock that would hurt their wet, sensitive nose far more than their dry, rough paw. So first they make contact with their paws to secure a ground, and then they follow through and rub up against something to put more energy into that ground.

When a dog approaches a bowl of water, because the water is shiny and reflective and contained within a form, it is perceived as a complex being with a predatory aspect that reflects the energy the dog projected into it back at it. The surface tension of the standing water is thereby perceived by the dog as an electrostatic membrane and it is inhibited from making contact. So if you watch dogs closely you’ll see them brace themselves, wince almost imperceptibly when they break the surface of the water with their nose and then begin drinking.  My cats on the other hand used to first paw the water in the bowl to get it moving and only then would the cat break the surface plane with its nose to begin lapping up the water.

Because I do believe animals can feel the movement of electrical currents even though they go primarily by these virtual fields and currents, this electrostatic problem with a relative inert bowl of standing water they can completely bypass by going to the toilet bowl because as Dr. Dodman notes, it is indeed physically grounded. So dogs don’t register the surface tension as a predatory aspect and go by balance, rather they feel a magnetic pull and go by hunger.

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1. Why Do Dogs Smell Each Other
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3. Why do dogs roll over in “submission?”

There are three things I need to explain in regards to this phenomenon.

First, in the animal mind, the form-of-a-thing, such as a human, cat, deer, etc, or sometimes even a log, is the confluence of two energies, predatory and prey. The ratio of these two energies compose a “being”, a specific emotional value, one that can change from moment to moment and hence the variety of responses a dog can manifest to the same person or thing. For example, a sensitive dog often becomes afraid of its owners if it sees them wearing a hat or a bulky coat, or comes upon them in an unfamiliar situation. In such a context the predatory value of the form is weighted higher than normal and this new energetic value knocks the dog out of balance because it does not associate that specific electromagnetic vibration as being its owner.

We can think of predatory energy as electric and preyful energy as magnetic; thus, the form-of-a-thing engenders a specific electromagnetic vibration in an animal’s perception of it, just as molecules are arranged and just as the sense of smell works (according to a new theory as detailed in the “The Emperor of Scent”). In other words, a dog doesn’t think of its owner as a Being, but as being a specific electromagnetic vibration of a predatory aspect relative to a preyful aspect along a spectrum. This value is transmitted in all things of that form, from body language, deportment and carriage, even scent. And this ratio engenders a feeling and this, rather than thoughts, is how a dog knows its owner. {A log is normally a pure preyful essence and hence has no “being” unless that is, it rolls or looms out of nowhere so that the form alerts or scares the dog and then the dog will assign a predatory aspect to some feature of the log and it will respond to it just as if its another living being. The more sensitive the dog’s temperament, the lower its threshold in this regard and the longer lived will be that impression of the log as a “Being”.}

Second, in the early imprinting phase of a dog’s life, the forms-of-things it experiences and interacts with solidify as a physical memory in its emotional battery. These physical memories become templates that are then applied to the forms of like-things because the emotional battery potentiates the brain. In the battery there are “squirrelzoids,” “catzoids,” “deerzoids,” “dogzoids,” “humanoids,” etc., etc., populating the perceptual catalogue. The first human a dog knows becomes the master “humanoid” imprint that is then applied to all other humanoids for the rest of the dog’s life and on which all subsequent experiences are catalogued in its emotional battery. (This is the essence of socialization. For example, if a dog is sequestered from other humans, it will grow up to weigh the subtle discrepancies between forms as more important than the broader generalities and perceives these lesser variants as predatory aspects, and so sensitive dogs are what I call “form sensitive”. They go by sight rather than by feel and by smell.) So when a dog is raised and socialized with a cat, this specific catzoid template is then applied to all other cats on sight and the dog “likes” cats (at least indoors, there could be a different template for cats outdoors because the ratio of predator/prey could be different given that cats are far more likely to run outdoors). If a dog was imprinted that deer = prey then this “deerzoid” template is applied to all other deer and the dog chases them on sight. A form-on-sight reflex is adaptive because in this way an animal doesn’t have to break down a form in its mind in order to arrive at an immediate impression of the emotional value of that thing. The value is acquired on sight.

Thirdly and finally, because nature is the ultimate “programmer” unparalleled in elegant efficiency, it always gets the most behavioral range for the fewest lines of code, and so it is that on the instinctual level of apprehension the animal mind does not distinguish between something moving fast and something that is novel. If a wolf is going along a trail and a tree has fallen across the way, the wolf doesn’t distinguish in that instant between something moving fast and something that has changed since the last time it cruised that trail. Either way, it could be a predator rushing at it–or about to rush at it — and so the wolf might as well be afraid of it on sight. Nature doesn’t care if this makes individuals unnecessarily nervous in other aspects of its existence. (In fact, chronic anxiety serves another and deeper agenda in the broader scale of things.) Something new equals something moving fast, and this linkage thereby increases the predatory component in the dog’s perception of its form and so the form becomes a “being”. (Stanley Coren once wrote that dogs don’t wag their tails at inanimate objects. I’ve seen dogs wag their tails at a stack of boxes, a mail box, even a pan of food.)

Now let’s put these three components together to understand the specific instance of a dog encountering a stranger at the door.

For most dogs, for dozens if not hundreds, if not thousands of times, the humanoid at the door was its owner, the prime humanoid by which it will come to assay all other humanoids. Hundreds of times the door opens and there is the first humanoid coming through the threshold and lavishing the dog with praise and attention. “Hey Rascal, how ya doing, I’m back buddiiiieee!” And so the dog associates the humanoid at the doorway with 200,000 volts of energy; it can plug into this first humanoid because it can feel the preyful essence of its beloved first human because this form makes it feel grounded. Then one day many, many repetitions later, the door opens and OMG there stands a humanoid, for which the dog has 200,000 volts of attraction—and yet has no feeling because the discrepancy between its form and the default template is perceived as fast movement. Indeed it’s 200,000 volts worth of fast movement. And when was the first time the dog experienced a humanoid moving fast? When its owner acted strange, i.e. rushed at it really fast because the dog as a puppy was about to piddle or poop on the carpet, or about to tug on an electrical wire, or when s/he was first corrected for getting into the garbage, or gnawing on the sofa and so on.

A dog has no idea that a stranger at the door is someone who doesn’t belong in the house or on the property. The dog is energized to 200,000 volts just like it is every time the owner comes home, and it is compelled to plug into the humanoid in order to ground out this energy. Some dogs will even run to another part of the house as if to “get” their owner and “let it know” that someone’s at the door. But what they’re really doing is feeling a pull to their owner because they can’t plug into the humanoid at the door. Other times soothing words from the owner, or even the stranger: “It’s okay Rascal. It’s okay” will trigger prey-energy value and this might help the dog feel grounded into the stranger.

But otherwise the dog still has 200,000 volts of ungrounded energy to contend wit,h and in canines the behavioral/physiological adaptive response to this dilemma is to download energy by barking in order to decrease the overwhelming pressure of energy that’s not moving. (After all, barking at kitty did get it to move.) And sure enough the person might flinch or sweet talk (acts prey-like) and this gives the dog some degree of grounding and the energy subsides below a critical threshold that then does allow for contact. (Or if the energy stays high, the dog might then bite.) At this lower level, and because of the response in the humanoid, the person at the door thereby acquires a new electromagnetic emotional signature and in most cases the dog can compose in its mind a new “Being” for this owner-acting-strange humanoid.

Interestingly, if one raises a dog to be socially confident and without intense greeting rituals when coming and going: then, unlike the average family pet, they tend not to bark at strangers. When I used to import Schutzhund-titled dogs from Germany, they performed all the protection routines beautifully, but because they were raised so holistically in their original trainers’ progressive sports-like way, they often wouldn’t bark at strangers, – even after months of living in a home and so this is where I ended up concentrating most of my training after installation. The SV (the governing sports body in Germany) even instituted a “watch dog” test so that its dogs would reliably perform this basic household service in addition to the exotic and advanced skills required of a working police dog. What good was all this fancy training if the dog didn’t bark at strangers?

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The number one motive of all animal behavior is to-connect-the-front-end-with-the-hind-end in order to “ground” stimulation. This is because when a dog is stimulated, it’s just as if the dog is cut in half, in other words, the dog’s center-of-consciousness is wholly centered in its head and it can’t feel a thing.

Generally when I tell people that an animals’ front-end-is-not-necessarily-connected-to-its-hind-end meaning that an animal needs to feel resonant with their surroundings in order to feel connected to their body, understandably they find such a notion hard to believe. How could a dog not know that its hind end is part of its front end no-matter-what? Then after one seminar several years ago a participant sent me the link below to a video on the internet. I suggest you mute the volume so that the laughter in the background won’t obscure the profound principle that is actually being revealed through this dog’s behavior.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This poor dog has no idea it’s attacking its own foot because it takes a feeling for an animal to have a sense of its body and every feeling is dependant on a sense of resonance with the external surroundings. And when a dog’s body is impacted by something that doesn’t resonate with a feeling, instincts and habits from the Big-Brain in its head run the show. In this state, such a dog is “referencing” the inner ear balance system in its head and is so preoccupied that it has no “idea” what the rest of its body is doing because it’s not feeling the rest of its body. The state of disconnect can become so total that even physical sensations from the hind end can be tuned out. So in this video while one end of the dog is gnawing on the bone, the other end of the dog, its foot, by straying into the dog’s peripheral vision is triggering the physical memory of having once been attacked by another dog and this is all it’s perceiving and experiencing by the encroachment of its foot. The unfortunate dog is doomed to relive the memory every time it’s in an analogous situation. I once witnessed a Scotty gnawing on a bone go into a full fledged attack mode when being buzzed by a fly and it acted just as if it was dealing with a huge Saint Bernard looming over its head.

So a behaviorist would say that a dog chases its tail because the tail is moving and the canine prey instinct evolved to reflexively chase that which moves, especially when bored. But this explanation misses the far more fundamental point that such a dog is responding reflexively to a fundamental paradox of its hardware and which motivates it to connect with those things in its environment that can connect its front-end-to-its-rear-end. Dogs that have been chronically overly stimulated, and puppies, are those especially prone to chase the nearest thing that’s moving and they have no “idea” they’re chasing a part of their own body.

As funny or pathetic as some of these behaviors may strike us, the truth is that because a dog’s sense of its body is directly related to a feeling that connects it to its surroundings, we have identified a perfect platform for an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic that lends intelligence to how animals respond to the world. Animals need external objects of attraction in order to connect-the-front-end-to-the-hind-end and experience a true feeling. And therefore while some dogs become addicted to tail chasing in order to address the fundamental problem of their emotional makeup, nonetheless all dogs are social by their nature and so they are most vulnerable to this affliction.

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Because the dog wants its “self” back.

We often wonder how dogs see themselves. Do they see themselves as a person like their owner, or do they see their owner as a dog like themselves? However, because in my view dogs don’t think (my definition of thinking being the capacity to compare one thing to another thing, or one moment relative to another moment) these kinds of questions are only of relevance to the human mind. The human intellect, being primarily focused on comparing one thing relative to another thing, fixates on the forms of things and how these forms are connected through a linear chronology of one moment relative to another moment. The human intellect conceptualizes nature, and the only way to get beyond this filter is to consider nature in terms of energy. In my view, this is why modern physics – as opposed to modern biology and behaviorism – is a true science.

Dogs are ultimately attracted to the energetic essence of things, i.e. the energetic makeup within the form, with the signature of this energetic makeup being broadcast by how the form moves and carries itself. Visually, a dog divines this energetic signature by projecting its “emotional center-of-gravity” into the form and then feeling vicariously, but literally, what’s going on within the form when it moves – or even when it doesn’t move. This is quite literally a form of “emotional sonar” and is adaptive because the exact same emotional dynamic is at work within its own body/mind, as it is in all animals. So what a dog feels by virtue of this “mirror effect” is what it apprehends as its “self”. Nature is always a paradox; what all animals have in common is simultaneously the source of their unique individuality.

What is the emotional center-of-gravity? It is the cumulative physical memory of all resistance ever experienced; it serves within as a lump sum aggregate quantitative “mass” (like an entrepreneur’s net worth) that was acquired in pursuit of objects of desire. This emotional imprint is attached to sensations affiliated with its physical center-of-gravity, thus a dog’s sense of emotional well-being derives from its emotional center-of-gravity just as its sense of physical balance derives from its physical center-of-gravity. A dog has no idea of its “self” as a self separate and distinct from other selves. All it can ever know of the world (and this turns out to be quite a lot) is from what it feels within its body. In the dog’s mind, the world is in its body.

On the other hand, in those occasions when a dog can’t project its emotional center-of-gravity onto the form of a thing to thereby derive a feeling for it, then it will not be attracted to that thing and for all intents of purposes that thing will not exist in its body/mind in that moment.

This sense of self projected onto objects of attraction is always elaborating into higher and higher states of apprehension through the complexities of social interactions. Nevertheless, it is never a mental concept of “I am something relative to something else”. As a matter of fact, it’s a function of gravity rather than thoughts, which is why it is shared by all beings and therefore a universal platform for communication. So if a dog could talk (without thinking) and we were to ask a dog what it considers its “self” to be, it would say, “What I want and how I feel is who I am”.

When we throw something for a dog, it’s just as if a huge dose of essence shot out of our body, and since the dog has automatically attached its emotional-center-of-gravity to our form, the dog’s emotional center-of-gravity is proportionately displaced. The dog now feels driven to reconnect the missing essence with the form in order to return to emotional equilibrium. The dog wants its “self” back.

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While “submission” may at first appear to be fundamentally different from “dominance,” in reality they are opposite and yet equal expressions of the same urge to make contact (indirectly, i.e. via sexual contact) with something they are attracted to but, have associated a strong feeling of resistance toward. A state of sexual arousal is the common denominator in both reflexes tracing back to the same physical memory of being stimulated by their mother as infant puppies when they were unable to eliminate on their own. We could say they are presenting themselves to be cleaned.

But on a deeper level what we call submissiveness is actually dogs acting “prey-like.”

Why would a submissive dog act prey-like: what’s the advantage to this behavior? Because in the natural scheme of things, the prey-controls-the-predator by which I mean that the predator can’t act like a predator unless the prey acts like the prey.

When a dog rolls over, tail wagging intensely side-to-side, squirting urine, lip licking, it is “vibrating” like prey and being emotionally attractive gives it leverage, if that is, it can feel how to exploit being the object-of-attraction. (Watch a cat train a dog if one wants to see a master in action.) Once a dog feels its leverage, it then quickly learns to press in and exercise its “control” over its so-called superior. So while we tend to think of the dominant animal as in control over the so-called submissive one, we would be well advised to look again. Who is really in control of whom?

By going belly up and vibrating intensely, and then pressing in on the dominant individual, the “prey-like” individual is taking over the dominant dog’s nervous system. This is exactly how infant puppies enervate and “control” adults. The mother is emotionally attracted to the pup given that it is the pure embodiment of prey energy, but then the infant pup acts like a predator, i.e. it goes toward the mother and squeals when disturbed (prey animals typically die in silence which is why the American Indian revered the deer, as opposed to the bear or mountain lion, as the model in stoicism and courage that warriors should emulate) and so the mother is induced to tend to it in order to keep it calm.

On the other hand if the pup doesn’t generate a predatory nature to inhibit the mother’s urge to make prey on it, it is therefore sickly and the mother will eat it. But in the case of healthy pups, by ingesting the placenta and umbilical cord, and then thereafter the urine and feces, the mother’s attraction to the pup as prey is satisfied and so their relationship will continue to evolve into a deep emotional bond as the pup matures.

And so it goes full circle. As adults the softer natured dogs when they become the object-of-attention in the face of pressure; roll over to expose themselves in order to gain “control.”

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But if that’s true, why would a dog want to expose itself to an inanimate object?

First, let’s review the traditional/behavioral interpretation of leg-lifting. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in “The Hidden Life of Dogs” noticed that the higher a stain appears on a post or wall, the next dog along would go to great lengths to hike its spray just a bit higher, the contortions being especially impressive if it was a small dog. She interprets this as a dog’s attempt not only to cover the preexisting mark with its own but to produce one somewhat higher in order to make itself appear larger than it really is and intimidate dogs that come along later. Supposedly this indicates that dogs can think ahead and that they’re thinking about territorial and social status. In this interpretation dogs hose upright objects because they serve as prominent venues for display.

Interestingly however, if leg lifting is fundamentally about competition, one rarely if ever sees two dogs fight it out after the so called contest. And this should strike us as odd because if it is true that a competition for rank is an organizing principle of canine social behavior, how could it be that once every dog’s cards are on the table they invariably agree on their relative status? That’s the opposite of competition. This would be like two people sitting down for a game of poker and were they somehow able to compare their respective winnings over the years; the one with the better record can just scoop up the money and walk away. It would be like two basketball teams eyeing each other during warm ups with both teams coming to a consensus as to which team is better and so no need to actually play the game. In human competition even when a winless team squares up against an undefeated team, the team with a losing record nonetheless contests every shot, rebound and pass. The game is played even when their respective standings won’t be affected by the game’s outcome because this is the essence of the competitive struggle. So in human competitive activities the struggle always follows the preliminaries with the struggle especially intense when there is some degree of question as to which is the stronger team.

So I return to the point that when dogs engage in scent marking, and remain focused on scent marking and are allowed the time and space to let things run their natural course, they rarely if ever fight. How then can the essential thrust of canine behavior be a competition for rank if they invariably end agreeing about their relative status once it’s been broadcast through a spray of urine? Why would dogs ever fight if the distinction between dogs is so unambiguous and easily revealed? Therefore it does not make sense to me that in the mind of the dog leg lifting has anything to do with a competition for rank or a delineation of territory.

In my view the biggest flaw with the traditional/behavioral theory is that it requires a dog to be able to think about such abstract concepts as territory and relative status and perceived future costs and benefits in regards to moving up or down the social ladder. And if a dog can think about all this as Stanley Coren would say they can, let’s then return to Elizabeth Thomas’ astute observation that dogs try to paint its mark higher than the mark of the previous dog that hit the post.

In my mind it actually demonstrates the opposite for if it is true that dogs can think about dominance and rank, why then would dogs only react to the stain of a bigger dog after they’ve encountered it, why not be proactive, why wouldn’t a little dog contort itself into an exaggerated position in order to leave the biggest possible stain before it encounters a bigger one? Why doesn’t a dog go for an impossible height on a blank slate? If it is true that a dog can think about a future consequence why not end all debate on the matter before it begins? This is how athletes compete. When I ran competitive long distance in college my coach taught us to always pass a competitor on a hill, the steeper the better and always pass your rival by a lot rather than by a little. Even better try to be talking casually as you pass by; now that was forward thinking.

Therefore if competition, rank and thinking don’t explain why dogs lift their legs, why would a dog want to expose itself, i.e. become sexually aroused to a fire hydrant, sign post or a tuft of grass? Answer: physical memory

In animal consciousness, there is the expression of energy and there is resistance to the expression of energy. Things that move conduct emotion, things that stand still resist the expression of emotion. Anything that resists the expression of energy triggers physical memory as it creates a feeling of resistance and this is the source of sexual energy.

When a dog encounters an inanimate object that stands out by virtue of being upright and apart from its surroundings, and the more tension that happens to be standing in the dog’s system, then the more it projects the physical memory of resistance onto such an object, and then it responds to it sexually, i.e. it exposes itself and relieves the feeling of resistance by urinating because it feels to the dog just as if it is encountering another dog. And the fact that there often is the scent of dog urine on such prominent objects greatly reinforces that emotional impression that arose from the emotional battery.

Finally, the higher the mark on the post, the more the dog must look up and therefore the deeper into the physical memory bank such an object of resistance triggers. In other words, upright objects and things overhead trigger deeper physical memories than smaller objects and lower things (sorry to add one more level of complexity, unless the physical memory of a little or lower thing is especially intense). And the deepest physical memories are from the earliest days of a dog’s “litter-hood” when its mother constantly licked its anal/genital area because infant puppies cannot urinate or defecate unless stimulated by their mother. So when dogs encounter objects of resistance, they feel sexually energized by virtue of physical memory and this energy is how they are equipped to either align with or overcome said object of resistance. They are exposing themselves due to that physical memory, and then they are then going to attempt to mount the object not because they are trying to dominate it or to copulate, but because they are trying to resist being rolled over.

So in the case of the very high stain, the dog isn’t trying to out do the previous mark: it’s acting just like a little dog trying to mount a bigger one. It’s just trying to get a leg up.

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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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An ambulance, fire truck or police car zips through a neighborhood and its wailing siren leaves all the dogs in its wake howling. Dogs hear sirens, or another dog crooning, or a person imitating a howling wolf and most can’t resist joining in the chorus. This brings us to an important precept of emotional physics. Emotion is a virtual current of energy that just like electricity moves according to a principle of conductivity.

In the natural scheme of things, some things conduct emotion and some things resist the movement of emotion. In this way, emotion is like a virtual current of electricity. A feeling on the other hand is a wave, and if a feeling can impose a wave on the external environment through the sheer force of desire, then many things that – under most circumstances – would resist the flow of emotion, can in this manner be made to conduct the flow of emotion. It’s not that the thing itself changed of course, rather, the way the dog feels causes these elements of the environment to be realigned in its perception of reality. And this restructuring of perception is quite akin to a metal becoming superconductive when placed in a strong magnetic field. The atomic lattice structure of the material realigns and becomes superconductive. Thus the dog feels energized rather than inhibited. In this way, a feeling is like a virtual magnetic field.

Back in the 1980’s I remember hiring some Portuguese masons to build a patio and in preparing the site, they had to move several large rocks out of the way. They synchronized their efforts by singing traditional songs and it was not only a moving experience to watch, but the boulders seemed to move as if by magic as well.

So we can think of a feeling as being a virtual magnetic field that causes elements of the environment to shift in the animals’ perception, and then all of a sudden, the animal feels empowered and the force of its will is imposed on its surroundings. Sure enough things yield to the underlying power of desire.

Dogs howl and things sound seductive to their ear because energy moves according to principles of conductivity, emotion being no exception, and becoming in sync with an external wave (howl, siren, song) amplifies the internal current. It can then become so strong that external action emerges. Not only that, but it allows an individual to link up with others that manifest a like-desire. In other words, because the default setting of consciousness is one of an internal conflict, this constitutional state of resistance is smoothed out when in an externally conductive medium. So by resonating with a wave, stress in the dog is converted to a feeling of flow. I believe this is also why music is so powerful and motivational for human beings. In fact, it’s but one more thing humans share with canines.

Despite the Darwinian/Malthusian premise that nature is a realm of limited resources locking organisms into a competition of the fittest, nothing could be farther from the truth. The story of evolution is that which doesn’t conduct energy can be made to conduct energy by virtue of cooperation. Synchronizing by virtue of a wave function is how cooperation takes place. Dogs are here to show us that nature is unlimited and when organisms synchronize emotionally, they can align physically and thus tap into new sources of energy unavailable through singular action. Nature conforms to the power of desire. This is why dogs howl.

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2. Why Do Dogs Smell Each Other
3. On Damasio and the Feeling Brain

Every so often when I’m walking around my property and step into high grass or some leaves, I hear a little squeak underfoot. For a second I wonder if I’m crushing some small critter, but it always turns out to be nothing more than a plastic air bladder from a squeaky toy, torn apart by a dog after a play session.

I’ve lived with a number of cats and have taken care of thousands in a commercial boarding kennel, not to mention knowing hundreds of cat owners, and yet I don’t believe I’ve ever seen or heard of a cat having chewed up one of their toys. Cats stalk their toys, pounce and bat them around with great enthusiasm, but even when two cats are playing tag-team/take-down on a stuffed, furry animal surrogate, the toy always seems to live to fight another day. But this isn’t so with dogs. Beyond toys, I’ve known dogs that have eaten plywood dog houses, roof and all; steel belted radial tires, steel wire and all; galvanized metal buckets and things you might only expect to find in the belly of a Great White Shark. There are dogs without teeth because they’ve pierced, chewed and masticated stuff that enameled ivory isn’t meant to gnosh on. So why do dogs eviscerate toys and set their squeakers free?

The basic feature of the canine temperament, the rock bottom kernel of canine consciousness from which everything about the dog’s nature arises, is that dogs are endowed with an emotional appetite that far outstrips their physical capacity to consummate it. This has many behavioral implications, the most important one being that they are attracted to each other with a force that can’t be consummated by simple social contact and companionship. This also means that dogs end up being attracted to large, dangerous animals or some other type of challenge (these various challenges come through all manner of endeavor, otherwise known of as breed traits) that when overcome does indeed consummate the chronic state of internal pressure that the canine emotional appetite induces. But one of the lesser manifestations of the canine emotional makeup is that dogs can’t just play with a toy, they must make prey on a toy with an intensity commensurate with their constitutional state of frustration and this leads them to shake, rip and tear it into oblivion. Unlike a cat that hunts by instinct, dogs hunt by appetite (emotional hunger) and setting that squeaker free is as close as the dog can get to feeling free when all it has is a fluffy toy to make prey on.

Related posts:

1. Why Do Dogs Chew Up Squeaky Toys?
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3. Why Do Dogs Do Everything in a Circle?

To release themselves.

The traditional interpretation is that dogs investigate other dogs’ eliminations because they are assaying status and relative ranks. But the real reason has to do with the nature of emotion and animal consciousness. Because animal consciousness is composed of a two brain makeup with each brain compelled by its own separate and divergent agenda (the Big-Brain is consumed with balance and output, whereas the Little-Brain is consumed with arousal and input), the front-end-isn’t-connected-to-the-hind-end, and this means that animal consciousness is characterized by a constant state of tension. Subsequently, that which connects the front-end-to-the-hind-end generates a sense of release in the body/mind and this is what we experience as emotion.

Nature is not random. The animal mind perceives the natural realm as being divided into things that either conducts emotion (preyful essences) versus things that resist the movement of emotion (predatory aspects). But this doesn’t mean that things are fixed and predetermined. Rather, this is infinitely scalable and malleable due to what I call the “supermarket theory of consciousness”. For example, every item on a grocery shelf (excluding cleaning products, etc.) is a nutrient, and yet some of the items are only nutritious when in combination with certain other items and then only in a proper proportion and after a specific process. So eating a can of baking soda is wholly noxious if not lethal (as for that matter is ten pieces of chocolate cake), but a pinch of baking soda in a slice of chocolate cake is delicious and (fortunately) nutritious. Furthermore, some shoppers only consider a limited range of items in the market conductive: anything that requires too much preparation is “too much fuss” (too high a resistance value) and so they walk past such items without feeling any arousal of their hunger circuitry. Whereas accomplished chefs find potential in a far greater range of items and they find themselves aroused on every aisle and even in regards to certain foodstuffs others find disgusting.

So the interplay between nature and the animal mind is dynamic, not static, and can render an infinite variability in perception and behavior. That which in one context might not be conductive: one wolf relative to one moose, might become conductive in another context: ten wolves relative to a weakened moose.

As mentioned above, pure conductive aspects are “preyful essences” (readily ingested and easily digested) and are universal features of every animal’s perception no matter the species, just as an open logic gate that conducts the flow of electrons is universal to all computers no matter the make or model. And whatever a dog smells is a pure preyful essence, which turns out to be anything that is of the earth (freshly disturbed dirt, fresh snow or dew) or is of a physical body (scents, urine, blood, feces, flesh, musk, carrion). These emotional conductors, “ground” the Big-Brain into the Little-Brain and completes all internal physiological and neurological circuitry so that the animal feels just as if there is a “current” of energy connecting its front-end-to-its-hind-end and thereby draining its emotional battery to a neutral rather than a “charged” (tense) state.

Since emotion is a release from the tension created by organs in dynamic conflict with each other (as Joseph Campbell once explained in an interview), therefore any byproduct of the physical body (urine, blood, musk scent, hormones, feces, saliva, flesh, etc.) constitutes a resolution of that internal conflict, given that these are the physical precipitates of how energies have successfully moved within the body. Any product of organ function is a statement of an internal resolution and so their chemical constitution means they will be perceived as emotional “grounds” by animals. (Interestingly, Chinese medicine considers each organ as a site of emotional experience more so than it is performing a specific function. For example, the liver is the site for anger more than it is an organ that filters blood.) So it is incorrect to think of a waste product of the body as a nonessential commodity that the body is just getting rid of, rather it is the substrate of network communication in animal consciousness just as the deposits of pheromones are how ants find and follow the trails of other ants.

The physical body as the source of emotional conductors that release body tension is why dogs rush over to investigate each other’s eliminations; akin to motorists on the L.I.E. rushing from their cars to grab $20 bills flying out of the back of an armored truck, even at risk of their survival – it is free energy, an emotional conductor, the universal motive to animal consciousness.

This is also why dogs like to eat and roll in you-know-what. They aren’t trying to mask their scent; rather they are feeling a release and returning to a state of wholeness. The signature of this can be found all the way up the phylogenetic tree in human beings as in the propensity of children, (and unfortunately to my taste, some adults) to be grossly entertained by scatological humor. However, this is also why on a more rarified plane people crave the smell of those they love. We ingest the essences of a loved one because it satisfies the most primal circuit of consciousness. Emotional grounding reduces the sense of internal tension that is the substrate of animal consciousness.

Related posts:

1. Definitions
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3. Why Do Dogs Do Everything in a Circle?