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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When people meet and greet, they shake hands or touch in some way and they exchange pleasantries. And when dogs meet and greet, they smell each other. However people don’t reintroduce themselves periodically throughout their interaction or every time they meet especially if they know each other well, whereas dogs smell each other, each and every time they meet, no matter how well they may “know” each other and even in the middle of a game (especially if it gets rough) and even after they’ve been together for hours, and almost every time two dog housemates come in contact indoors. They constantly smell each other over and over, why?

The usual interpretation is that dogs smell each other in order to ascertain social data, health status and what-have-you-been-eating-lately kind of questions. But that doesn’t square up with the incessant nature of the behavior.

The most important observation that bears on this question is that anytime there is something new, any change, any stimulus or stimulation, and especially when stressed, dogs need to smell something.

Interestingly the only word that can precede a term such as STIMULATION is ELECTRICAL. In other words, a change in the dog’s sensory perception of a situation generates nervous activity in its brain and this of course is neuro-chemical electrical energy. My proposal is that this electrochemical energy acts just like electricity in that it wants “to run to ground.” And behaviorally, the phenomenon of grounding is manifested by an act of physical ingestion, with the sense of smell being the purest and safest manner of ingesting the essence of something. For example, we prefer to smell something funky in the fridge before we deign to taste it. Things have to pass the “smell test” before we’ll put it in our mouth.

This is because animal consciousness is the confluence of the two most primordial systems by which every animal functions, the primal circuits dedicated to balance and the primal circuits dedicated to hunger, the basic systems that keep an organism upright, in motion and attracted to the external world. And this is why every animal has two brains, the Big-Brain-in-the-head and the little-brain-in-the-gut.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/health/23gut.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1

While a two brain makeup of an animal doesn’t fit with the conventional gene-centric model of complex behavior “trickling down” from the Big-Brain above, it suits the idea of the body/mind as an “emotional battery” perfectly. All mental and physical energies combine within this emotional battery so as to create a virtual energy circuit that the external world completes. Thus, external stimuli are experienced by an animal just as if it is physically connected to these external objects and events, because indeed it is. The external world stirs internal energies in its very physiology and neurology. Therefore the animal mind is not a function of the central nervous system. The animal feels the outside on its insides and this evolves into its mind. The animal mind is an energy circuit.

In this model of the body/mind as an emotional battery, the primary function of the Big-Brain is to generate intensity as sheer energy; it is a generator of a virtual static electricity more than it is a maker of thoughts, associations, habits and reflexes. It is how the external world neuro-electrically stimulates the battery, like docking a cell phone into its charger in order to re-energize it. Meanwhile the primary function of the little-brain is to digest the Big-Brain’s electrical activity so as to render a feeling of grounding and this is its central function, more important than digesting starches, fats and proteins.The little-brain turns the static electricity of the Big-Brain into a wave function, i.e. a feeling, just it breaks down and digests nutrients through peristaltic wave action.

I’m not saying that these mental activity and digestive function aren’t important to sustaining life; I’m saying that they are nonetheless secondary to the primary function of establishing positive (prey) and negative (predator) polarities as organizing principles in the body/mind as an emotional battery.

The object of all behavior is to “ground” electrical activity of the Big-Brain into the little-brain-in-the-gut. Anytime a dog perceives any change in its surroundings, it’s just as if its front-end isn’t connected to its hind-end, the Big-Brain out of sync with the little-brain. And so an act of ingestion completes the primal circuit and allows a dog to feel conscious awareness of its “self” as it becomes connected with an object of attraction.

Therefore, a dog doesn’t necessarily know another dog just by looking at it. That can sometimes happen visually, but it always happens nasally. Smelling is that primal. It allows the dog to connect with its “self” and quite literally feel the ground beneath its feet.

Smelling is an act of ingestion that connects these two systems into one energy circuit by way of an object of attraction. Therefore, ingesting the essence of things is how a dog feels whole and smelling is the purest path of grounding because it bypasses the higher processes of the nervous system (thus bypassing instincts, habits and built up associations) and appeals directly to the little-brain-in-the-gut. Because the smell of something is unfiltered by the Big-Brain, as my father used to say, “Dogs don’t trust their eyes, they only trust their nose.”

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