As certain laws become clear I keep my eyes open for scientific evidence to attach to such principles. I know it has to be there because I’m convinced that emotion is energy and its principles of movement are the basis on which physiological systems and organs evolved. I’m confident in this conviction because this is the most conservative interpretation of evolution, the formed arising from the unformed, matter from energy. This means that various aspects of the emotional dynamic are mirrored by specific organs, systems and physiological adaptations because as hard as it is for our linear intellects to apprehend, the latter are based on the former.

Unfortunately I’m not able to mine the research directly because I would have to understand its technicalities and in all its intricacies in order to pull out what I’m looking for. Rather I have to wait until a scientific journalist, or a scientist trying to reach the public brings out some finding or paradox from which I can glean its network implications. Often what I’m looking for comes out in a throwaway line of no seeming consequence. For example, in his book “Balance” Scott McCredie observes that camel jockeys and elephant drivers, no matter how experienced, often experience motion sickness whereas equestrians no matter how novice, never do. It was mentioned as an interesting but inconsequential factoid whereas it hit me like a ton of bricks because I realized that the horse shifts its emotional center-of-gravity to include the rider, unlike any other animal, and therefore even the rank amateur on their first ride at a dude ranch is no more likely to experience motion sickness than were they walking on foot. And this explains the incredible connection between man and horse, the only animal other than the dog of which we can say is “all heart.” The horse can feel in its heart the rider-plus-its-self and then move accordingly, two beings composing one emotional body via a common wave function.

Finding just such a scientific correlate may have happened yesterday when reading the comment sections on the NPR story concerning the dog experiment I wrote about. While we should for now remain skeptical about the source until the information is fully verified, the author Margaret Hyde seems knowledgeable and credible and so I feel comfortable quoting her remarks below. I hope this exchange can prove an opportunity to vet the remarks.
It appears to be a very promising confirmation of the model of how emotion becomes unresolved due to resistance and then this physical memory is projected onto complex objects of attraction, i.e. other social beings, by way of piggybacking on primal and seemingly unrelated systems.

It’s been my experience that the most vital clues are most often seen as meaningless (junk DNA) or as accidents. For example, mainstream biologists interpret the fact that since the organs of sexuality also double as organs of elimination this is evidence of unintelligent design, nature as a haphazard random cobbling together of parts, rather than as perfect telescoping of network functions from primal systems. (See the article http://naturaldogtraining.com/blog/why-do-dogs-investigate-the-eliminations-of-other-dogs/ )

In her passage, I’ve added emphasis to what I find especially compelling.

Margaret Hyde: “Just for your information about how this part works. At 3 years of age, the frontal lobes complete the formation of the pathways that go from the frontal lobe to cells deep in the anterior medulla’s reticular formation that are responsible for informing the temporal lobe that there are changes in the baby’s external universe (these cells are mentioned below). The anterior medulla houses clumps and scattered cells all over it (reticular formation, cranial nerve nuclei, metabolic, satiety, and emotion centers). THESE STRUCTURES ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR RELATING OUR EMOTIONS TO OUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH FAMILY AND OTHER PEOPLE AND PLACES FROM THE PAST AND TO THE FUNCTION OF MUSCLES, BONES, LIGAMENTS AND TENDONS. (Why are emotions linked to the latter? An embryological accident-the mesoderm giving rise to the latter lies directly over the part of the nervous system that will develop the anterior medulla and thus is segmentally allied with it at the start). The anterior medulla also houses the pons which executes commands and sorts incoming sensory information from all over the body. Critical to the functioning of the anterior medulla is our external and internal universe–a map of what we see, hear, smell of the world around us.”

In other words, physical and psychological systems are predicated on emotional systems. What’s happening within the body and brain is a direct extension of what’s happening in the invisible emotional mind because the emotional mind requisitions these systems by virtue of how they are composed so as to interrelate in a network coherent manner.

The body’s means of registering resistance to physical movement is directly linked to family and social relationships (and I can think of no greater source of resistance to emotional movement than a family member). This linkage is no accident. When the infant experiences physical resistance to movement toward an object of attraction, she experiences stress; and this is stored in the body/mind as emotional battery, the core repository or densest layer being what I call the emotional center-of-gravity, and this core composes the animal mind’s sense of its “self.” This is that aspect of consciousness displaced by eye-contact and deflected onto where another persons’ focus is directed.

This e-cog is then projected onto complex objects of attraction that offer resistance to emotional expression in order to divine and break down the energetic signature of that complex being. This then allows her to become the equal/opposite in order to fit (two beings aligning around a common emotional c-o-g) with this complex object of attraction, and this subsequent mutual interlocking then allows the group they thus form to overcome greater challenges by virtue of being able to work together (i.e. create an overarching feeling or bond, a.k.a., a wave) that can entangle others and other objects into its function.

Two beings so aligned comprise one emotional body and the emotional body works according to the same principles as the physical body. The emotional body has a backbone (axis of connection between A and B), a center-of-gravity common to A and B, and a brain (the heart as an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic that serves as a synchronizing meter between A and B). And just as every physical expression of a body’s movement is symmetrically aligned around the body’s physical center-of-gravity, likewise, every physical expression of the emotional body’s movement is symmetrically aligned around the emotional center-of-gravity. The physical body generates rhythms over distance; the emotional body generates rhythms over time. In some behaviors the symmetry can take days, months or even years to manifest.

Unfortunately we miss this symmetry because to our intellectual eye we think we are seeing two separate entities of intelligence endowed with two separate brains as sources of their separate and distinct intelligences. We then read thoughts into their behavior because we’re so impressed with their capacity to synchronize over time. Whereas I’m arguing that the physical body with two poles at either end (Big-Brain/little-brain) composes the animal mind as a collective intelligence rather than just the Big-Brain in the head.

Emotional resistance is processed the same way that physical resistance is processed. But of course we should say physical resistance is processed the same way emotional resistance is processed.

Just as the Brain can’t feel a thing, Heart can’t move a muscle because it doesn’t exist within any one being. It takes two to make one Heart. (No animal is an island) Heart must evolve into existence in real time; it cannot be genetically encoded because genes are too static and also because the function of genes is to receive information that Heart generates and then reliably transcribe this, genes don’t create information.

In this interplay within the body/mind, Heart cannot communicate with the Big-Brain directly; it must go through the little-brain in the gut. This implements the principle of emotional conductivity. Hence we have “gut feelings” as precursors to integration. So I call the Big-Brain in the head the executor of action, I term the little-brain-in-the-gut the social brain, and Heart is the network brain. At the moment the Big-Brain gets all the credit and seemingly is the source of all the information but I believe a proper reading of animal behavior will ultimately prove that this is as sensible as saying that what comes out of a radio, or what is on a computer’s screen logged onto the internet, was generated by the radio or by the computer’s CPU. I’m proposing that we likewise turn our attention to the invisible waves that animate and inform such complex electro/magnetic devices. I’m proposing that animals are picking up a signal that they collectively generate.

Related posts:

1. Definitions
2. Why Do Dogs Smell Each Other
3. Why do dogs fetch?

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.

Related posts:

1. Why are Dogs Afraid of Slippery Floors?
2. Set Your Moose Loose: I am not a moose, my dog is not a wolf and he doesn’t think I am a moose
3. Why Do Dogs Love Car Rides?

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.

Related posts:

1. Why Do Dogs Do Everything in a Circle?
2. Why Do Dogs Prefer to Drink From Toilets?
3. What is Natural?

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?
2. Why Do Dogs Love Car Rides?
3. Why Do Dogs Do Everything in a Circle?

Because they are orbiting within a field of mutual attraction.

Animals are emotional and emotion acts as a virtual force of attraction that due to its universal effects on the animal mind thereby creates a virtual field of mutual attraction. This means that every animal is attracted to every other animal just as every object of mass in the universe is attracted to every other object of mass. Anytime two animals are observing each other or are proximal to each other, or even when a physical memory of another animal is triggered by external factors, even though another animal isn’t actually present, it’s just as if the animal is moving within a field of mutual attraction. Like planets moving within the gravitational field of the solar system.

However, if it is true that animals are universally attracted to each other at all times, what keeps them from coming together into one big lump? Answer – the same thing that keeps the solar system from collapsing: the force of attraction that is pulling everything together is simultaneously deflected by the inherent momentum of the planets. In other words, planets are constantly falling toward the sun due to a gravitational pull but will never arrive because of their forward motion. Thus each planet moves in an arc along an orbit.

How then does emotion generate a constant source of motion while simultaneously serving as an ever present force of attraction? Answer: an internal state of conflict.

Emotion is composed of one part arousal to one part vulnerability and this internal paradox institutes a constitutional state of conflict in an animal’s makeup. Conflict is important because it generates energy and that’s important because energy demands motion. In other words, the internal contradiction between arousal and vulnerability in the animal’s makeup makes for motive in its mind, i.e. a compulsion to move. So an animal gets hungry and it must move because it feels vulnerable in that particular spot. A hungry deer is not fundamentally setting out in search of food, it’s fundamentally moving from a place where it feels vulnerable. And then even when feeding (and this is especially pronounced in herbivores) it will begin to feel vulnerable by staying in one spot too long which works out fine in the natural scheme of things so that animals don’t overgraze their range.

This became obvious to me once on an outing to a “Pick Your Own” blueberry field. There I was standing before a bush laden with thousands of plump ripe berries, but beyond this bush stretched rows of hundreds more and curiously, they beckoned to me even though I could have easily filled my buckets right there without even having to bend over or reach far. Nevertheless I felt an ever present urge to keep moving.  I could always feel this subtle and yet overwhelming sense that I was immersed in a current of flow, like I was on a canoe on a slow moving river and holding myself to shore to pick at a berry from a bush on the bank. And it wasn’t just me. Everybody in the berry patch was moving along as well. The children were especially interesting. The more excited they were about picking berries, the faster they moved, one boy even ran from bush to bush. (Although I noticed that women were far more focused and centered on the bush at hand than the men. Boys just want to have flow.)

So the deer isn’t actually looking for food; rather on the deepest level of consciousness it is literally being pushed from a spot that is perceived as being of an intensifying degree of vulnerability and this will ultimately habituate into a constant urge to move, not to mention that it will be reinforced when the deer does of course find food. We should also note that this constant urge to move increases the prey’s exposure to predation, and from a wide-angle lens of evolution that makes sense as well, – predators have to eat too. Animal consciousness is akin to the consumer’s dilemma whereby being part of an economy puts one immediately in debt (and thus in conflict) simply because it requires money to have food, shelter and comfort. People in an economy are constantly searching for money and often exposing themselves to unnecessary risk when they have plenty of it. Thus the default setting of the consumer’s mind is a state of tension and this creates psychic energy in the form of the motive to always be on the hunt for new money.

The more arousal, the greater the sense of vulnerability–consider the expression of abject terror on an infant’s countenance when she feels the pangs of hunger and yet is unable to move on her own–and therefore the greater the motive for motion. However this is also information because the interplay between arousal and vulnerability simultaneously serves as a force of deflection. For example, the faster one drives their car, the greater the sense of vulnerability and so the the stronger the force of deflection—i.e. the bigger the distance—we keep from other cars around us. We insulate ourselves in an imaginary bubble and we moderate our driving in order to avoid other cars and swerve around hazards, we’re trying to not “pop” this virtual bubble. This is the very same mechanism that creates social distance and critical distance between animals.

At some point an animal may experience more energy than its emotional capacity can handle and this is the precise point at which the sense of vulnerability collapses into abject fear, and arousal is knocked off line and an instinct takes over. This limit on the capacity to creatively adapt to circumstances is what locks the various species of animals into their specific network niche and so we see a level of organization in an ecosystem (speciation) akin to the planets entrained within the solar system along specific orbits.

In other words, a feeling is a circle because a feeling of vulnerability, if it doesn’t collapse into an abject state of fear, deflects the straightforward force of attraction into a circular, circumspective way of making contact with the object of attraction. And so when guided by arousal/vulnerability as an auto-tuning feedback dynamic, a dog falls into orbit around the object of its attraction, and if the interaction can continue to evolve according to the principle of emotional conductivity, the individual feels connected to what it is attracted to. This feeling of connection then takes on a life of its own and happily, it can even be supported by the higher processes of the central nervous system because there is indeed a payoff, to wit: an individual can realize a far higher rate of return on energy it expends by being in sync with others as opposed to working according to its instincts (or a high-powered intellect) which evolved to keep it separate from others.

So given the universal characteristics of an emotional makeup with arousal in direct proportion to vulnerability in order to create tension, animals operate at all times as if they exist within a field of mutual attraction and yet at the same time as if each is invested with an innate momentum that keeps them from just running into each other like an asteroid slamming into a planet. Arousal keeps them attracted and vulnerability keeps them deflected. Animals then self-organize by feel according to their emotional capacity. This auto-tuning/feedback dynamic can account for all relationships: predator and prey, parent and offspring, male and female; peer-to-peer, man and canine. And because dogs go more by feel; less by instinct (and not at all by thinking) than any other animal on earth, everything they do is along an orbit, i.e. as a circle. And because dogs have such a high emotional capacity, this circular stereotypical pattern, while discernible in all animals, is easiest to see in dogs.

This then allows us to define sociability in the following way. Social behavior is a circle because energy moving along a circle is the easiest (not to mention only) way to get energy to reliably repeat itself and by so doing thereby become information that adds new energy to the system. (This is necessary because unlike planets moving through the vacuum of space, life on planet earth is characterized by friction and a winding down of complex systems due to entropy and this degradation must be offset by a constant replenishment of new energy.) Emotion and a high emotional capacity is the basis of altruism because individuals become linked into a collective network and once entrained and bonded as one “emotional being,” one such individual can’t feel good unless the other with which it’s emotionally entangled feels good as well. They are innately inspired to work together so as to focus their collective energies on greater and greater challenges and this constantly adds new energy to the network so as to sustain the perpetual motion that is invested in every animals’ consciousness.

Related posts:

1. Why Do Dogs Love Car Rides?
2. Why Does the Universe Do Everything In A Circle?
3. Why Are Dogs Attracted to Human Beings?

I’ll never forget the first litter I helped my father raise when I was a young boy. They were housed in a stall set up in the back of our boarding kennel. It was quiet there and so the mother and her pups wouldn’t be disturbed by the hubbub of daily kennel activity. One morning I was in their pen cleaning up newspapers, and soon they forgot about me and resumed tumbling over each other with their roly-poly bellies making them look like cement mixer trucks playing bumper cars. At some point my father walked into the room to check on how I was doing and even though the pups were only a few weeks past opening their eyes and able to see no more than ten or fifteen feet, at the sight of a human they wobbled as fast as they could to the front of the stall and then pressed against the wire mesh, mewing, whining and jockeying for position. They seemed even more intensely attracted to the form of a human than when they saw their mother being returned after her exercise session. From then on I remained struck by how profoundly dogs are attracted to human beings and virtually at the start of life. I knew this revealed some fundamental principle of nature and I was never satisfied with the catchall explanation into which it seems every mystery of dogs is placed: “due to domestication.”

From my study of animals as emotional beings, I’ve learned that animal consciousness is a medium of displacement, just like the time/space continuum of the universe is displaced to yield gravity as a virtual force of attraction. Human beings displace the emotional continuum of consciousness more than any other animal, just as large objects of mass displace time and space more than smaller objects. Thus, animals are more attracted to man than they are to any other living being, even their own kind, because humans have the most emotional mass.

What is emotional mass? Just as physical mass is resistance to physical acceleration, emotional mass is resistance to emotional acceleration, i.e. being moved by a feeling. I think it’s safe to say that we are more  attracted to huge boulders than to little pebbles, but it’s easier to pitch a pebble than move a boulder. If it wasn’t for emotional mass, animals would be like a boat without a keel in the water, skimming aimlessly across the surface whichever way the wind was blowing.

The main point I wish to make in regards to the dog/human connection is that the higher the emotional capacity of a species, the more emotional mass they acquire through experience, and the more emotional experiences they have simply by virtue of living longer, the more “gravitas” they acquire and the more they displace the emotional tipping points (i.e. consciousness) of other beings, and so therefore, the stronger the force of attraction other beings experience toward such high capacity beings. (Consider how awe struck we are by a great predator such as a lion or grizzly bear, or a huge, powerful animal such as an elephant or whale. The bigger and more powerful an animal, and the longer it lives, the more emotional mass it displaces.) Likewise, while all animals are profoundly attracted to human beings, nonetheless it’s hard for most species to feel emotional movement towards us.
So just as a large object of mass displaces more of the time/space continuum and thereby generates a stronger force of attraction than smaller objects, a species with a high emotional capacity will more profoundly displace the continuum of animal consciousness and thereby generate a stronger force of attraction than animals that carry less emotional mass.

So all animals are attracted to man given that human beings carry the greatest emotional mass, however, given the high emotional capacity of canines, only the dog can fully cross the species divide and connect with man, emotionally. Only the dog can go by feel in man’s world whereas all other animals must go by instinct, and it’s a two-way street as well. The dog as a fellow high capacity emotional being, triggers feelings in us that accelerate our emotion. Dogs put our resistance into motion and so humans feel especially close to their dogs. While this explanation may at first seem technical and clinically cold, in truth adopting an “energy theory” of emotion and realizing that nature is itself constructed in accordance with emotion, can serve to open our eyes to the amazing magic by which nature (and our dog) works.

Related posts:

1. Why Do Dogs Do Everything in a Circle?
2. Why Do Dogs Chew Up Squeaky Toys?
3. Why Do Good Dogs Do Bad Things?

Dogs see the world in their own way. When we humans think of dog training, we think about our dog learning all kinds of skills such as heeling by our side, listening to commands, doing this or not doing that. We think in terms of teaching the dog a wide range of rules. It appears to us as if the dog has dozens and dozens of things to learn. Meanwhile, the dog only has the one issue of energy in his heart. No matter how different one situation may look from another to us humans, to the dog they all involve the same question: What is he to do with his energy?

Regardless of how well we may think we have taught our dog to heel, or to sit, and what the rules of the house are, if we haven’t addressed this fundamental concern of the dog, he will never be 100% reliable. In fact the likelihood is that he will never have learned how to be under control in the first place and that a great degree of resistance between dog and owner will lay unresolved and brooding towards future encounters or nervous outbursts. So instead of trying to solve a thousand little problems without regard to an overall balance, (which would be like building a house without consulting a blueprint), I suggest that we break each problem down to its most fundamental element as it pertains to the flow of energy, which as I have outlined earlier, precisely conforms to the parameters of the hunt. We’ll find at the core of every problem, the same central element and by taking heed of this standard, every area of our training will be in balance with every other area. Each step will dovetail neatly into the next step on a smooth and steady progression with social resistance melting away in seemingly unrelated areas of the dog’s life.

When we arouse the dog and then channel its energy appropriately, the dog is put into a mood of calmness and this is the only condition in which he is ready and able to learn what a command means. The traditional way of commanding the dog and then trying to show him what the command means is the wrong way to train one’s dog. It causes the dog to associate the command with the shock or discomfort of having to change moods. Before the command to heel for instance, the dog may have been in the mood for examining buttercups. Arbitrarily changing the dog’s mood without a good instinctual reason grates on his nervous system precluding his ability to learn in a positive manner.

Behavior flows from a mood (not a thought!!) and so we must first use the flow of energy through a dog being in drive toward its owner, and then this automatically creates an appropriate mood relative to the situation. Once the mood is established and the desired behavior is elicited, the dog is NOW ready to have the command associated with this flow of events. We’re looking for straightforward expressions of drive so that the dog works in a straight line, in parallel with his handler. Also when drive flows directly, his behavior is pure and so he works with a happy attitude, and so these are the moods that we want our commands to evoke. To meet these criteria, training must always be approached from the issue of drive so that energy can flow.

In dog training we need to answer these questions: If we want to train the dog to our command, how are we going to first attract his drive? And, if the dog’s drive is already aroused, how are we going to permit the dog to find relief?

We also have to consider that there are certain situations so unnatural that an evolved instinct isn’t available to handle the flow of drive. A stranger knocking at the front door is a highly charged event and the social instincts of many dogs can’t plug in here so that drive can be calmly fulfilled. Excitement turns to nervousness if a course of action isn’t clear while they’re high in drive. The dog just can’t have energy once he has been energized: he’s stuck with it like a car approaching a curve at high speed. What is such a dog to do with his energy? In this case, the owner needs to deepen the group mood through praise and constructive obedience work so that drive will flow into a calm resolution of the moment.

Dog training is channeling drive away from a wild-like direction into an appropriate, domestic direction. To do this we have to develop the harmonic pathways so that drive can be steered smoothly in the direction the handler wishes.

The first step is for the handler to be able to attract his dog’s drive, not just some or the majority of it, but all of it. A simple test is to try to get your dog enthusiastic about you, or something you have, when in a new place or around strange dogs. If he can do it, next, observe the length of time the dog can sustain an active form of interest. The longer the interest, the greater the flow, and the greater will be the dog’s ability to resist something naturally appealing as another dog or a cat when the owner requires control. Many dogs considered well trained, will fail this test miserably.

Dogs don’t choose to ignore their owners: they are forced to because they have been trained to relate to their owners via their pack instincts. A pack instinct is designed to store stress, and to set overload thresholds, not to conduct drive in a calm manner. Through constantly being rebuffed when excited, the dog learns that he can’t be with his owner whenever he’s high in drive. His drive can only be expressed in the pack through warped distorted behaviors as his mind and body is clouded by the survival instincts. This precludes our control in a critical moment because if the owner is a source of nervousness, how can the dog be attentive to him? And if the dog is nervous, how can he be controlled? The truth is: it’s impossible to control nervousness.

Unless the dog is in a group mood, he can’t be both attentive to his handler and willing to calmly admit strangers, whom his natural instincts have defined for him as “trespassers”, into the family group.

Related posts:

1. On Training a Dog to “OUT”
2. CORRECTION: Why Do We Correct a Dog?
3. Born Wild, Trained to be Free

For this and other reasons, behavioral science has called into question the popular wisdom that dogs wag their tails out of friendliness. The definition that behavioral science prefers (and which an energy model finds wanting) is that a dog is wagging its tail as a submissive overture to a superior member of its pack. For example, if one observes an inferior wolf approaching a superior one, tail-wagging is a pronounced feature of his body language.

But this isn’t wholly satisfying either because when adult wolves regurgitate food to their cubs, the cubs’ tails are wagging and so are the adults’. Are the adults being submissive to the cubs and the cubs to the adults all at the same time? That seems like a confusing scrambling of signals and it’s my experience that the nature of behavior is never that ambiguous.

The recurring theme of this blog will be to make the point that submission and dominance, while expedient, convenient, and seemingly reasonable means of making sense of canine behavior, can’t really accommodate the data. For if a dog is showing submission to a human out of respect, why then would he bite such a person? Such paradoxes plainly call into question the traditional scientific interpretation.

A thinker on dogs who I respect quite a bit, (although once again lacks a model for what’s going on inside the dog’s mind), is Desmond Morris. For our current purposes I call on his book Dogwatching wherein he writes at length on the phenomenon of tail-wagging. He states: “The only emotional condition that all tail-waggers share is a state of conflict. This is true of almost all back-and-forth movements in animal communication. When an animal is in conflict it feels pulled in two different directions at the same time. It wants to advance and retreat simultaneously. Since each urge cancels the other out, the animal stays where it is, but in a state of conflict. Essentially the animal wants to stay and wants to go away. The urge to go away is simple–it is caused by fear. The urge to stay is more complex.”

I agree that tail wagging indicates a state of conflict, there is an inherent momentum pulling/pushing the dog forward, but something is causing it to hold back as well. A state of attraction in conflict with fear: this is why dogs wag their tails.

It also needs further elaboration, for example, if we consider a dog who we can be sure is never going to bite anyone but who nonetheless is wagging his tail, what possible fear might there be for this dog in a situation where it’s only about to be petted, or fed, or any other number of pleasurable experiences?

The full answer to that question will be covered in an upcoming article entitled, “The Nature Of Fear”. However, Desmond Morris’ assertion that the the urge to go away from the person or dog because of fear, is simple, is mistaken. Fear is a little more complex than he has presumed. But putting that dynamic aside for the moment, for now I would simply like to elaborate on Desmond Morris’ insight by going a step deeper into the phenomenon of the friendly dog wagging his tail.

Tail wagging is indeed a state of conflict. But the conflict is arising from the following condition: it is the state of the body vibrating with more energy than the body at that moment is able to conduct given whatever action is currently available to it. In other words, there is more energy trying to go through the pipe, the dog’s body, then the pipe can accomodate. Wagging the tail is the body’s physiological response for dissipating the excess energy. And while it would feel better to the dog if its body could process the energy in a straightforward active range of behaviors, for example by making hearty physical contact, but for a number of reasons which we’ll discuss when we consider the nature of fear, it can’t. Hence the state of conflict with the tail going a mile-a-minute beating out the energy just like the utility meter spinning at high speed on the side of a house .

Related posts:

1. Why Do Dogs Zoom-zoom-zoom Around the House?
2. Why do dogs chase their tails?
3. Why do dogs roll over in “submission?”

Inside your dog is a battery, an emotional reservoir filled with “unresolved emotion”. Unresolved emotion is created when emotion, a primal force of attraction, meets resistance and doesn’t come to a point of complete resolution. Unresolved emotion is an emotional “charge”, a concentration of energy that builds in intensity in order to overcome resistance.

Individuals do not have access or control over the unresolved emotion they carry in their emotional battery even though resolving it is the fundamental motive underlying all behavior. Unresolved emotion can only get out the way it went in; it is attracted to objects of resistance. In other words, any given layer of unresolved emotion can only be activated and ultimately resolved by the degree of resistance that caused it to be formed in the first place. It takes an external trigger of specific intensity to bring a given layer of unresolved emotion to the surface. And because unresolved emotion can-only-go-out-the-way-it-went-in, the emotional battery “tunes” the animal to that which can potentially resolve it.

Normal activity, positive experiences and physical exercise cannot resolve the deeper levels of unresolved emotion because they cannot trigger this energy. Therefore I train a dog to “PUSH” – i.e. to overcome resistance in order to get something I want the dog to have – for two reasons. First, I want to access the energy held in the dog’s emotional battery, particularly the deepest layers. This teaches the dog to tune in to me no-matter-what. Secondly, I want to be the means of its resolution. This teaches the dog to attune to me, no-matter-what.

Read more about the Pushing Technique.

Related posts:

1. How I Developed The “Pushing Technique”
2. Set Your Moose Loose: I am not a moose, my dog is not a wolf and he doesn’t think I am a moose
3. Definitions