Our hand moves to our heart because the middle of our chest is the focal point in our body/mind as the place where we feel our projected physical center-of-gravity (our emotional c-o-g) that physically connects us to our surroundings. This is not a mental phenomenon, it is a visceral one. Physical organisms evolved complex nervous systems in order to render complex elaborations of simple physical phenomena (energy) as the invisible architecture of social structures. In a state of resonance with others or with our surroundings our heart becomes the epicenter of our emotional consciousness. Referencing our heart we are induced into a state of emotional suspension. One can only feel flow in a state of suspension. Flow is the perception of a virtual current of energy between the individual and the surroundings, not that it actually exists, but that it is an elaboration of the internal current (physical affects of emotional experience which Damasio interprets as integral to homeostasis) connecting the two poles in the body/mind. The feeling of flow softens the experience of the e-cog moving through the body after it has been projected onto external objects of attraction so that the movements and impacts of these external elements are likewise being apprehended as part of that overall sensual experience. And if the feeling evolves to be strong enough we feel “swept off our feet” because we are quite literally suspended by our heart (in our animal mind) in a field of mutual attraction.

Heart is where we feel potential energy. Heart orients us to the exact midpoint around which two entrained individuals achieve symmetrical alignment so as to turn their surroundings into a conductive medium. In other words, feelings evolve from emotion in order to turn the environment BACK INTO EMOTION, i.e. a field of mutual attraction that induces its constituents (via their feelings that make them feel conductive) to exploit their setting and thereby add new energy to the system.

The substratum of a subjective experience is not thoughts, but is due to one’s relationship with their physical memory, (the physical cog being the seed of all physical memory) which is simultaneously a feeling of where in the circle, or group, one feels connected. So one hundred people could be riding on a Ferris wheel and as it goes round, some are rising and some are descending and this universal spinning motion is nevertheless rendering a unique subjective impression within any given individual based on where on the circle one happens to find oneself in any given moment. The same energy, the same experience, depending on where in that frame of reference one is, determines the basis of a subjective experience and well before any thought or self-evaluation can ever take place.

It’s imaginable therefore that a subjective view of experience can be rendered far below any mental awareness and which will percolate up at some point, often slowly, until expressed in some kind of action and in the case of humans, can also potentially be grist for self-reflection (but not necessarily). Nonetheless whatever actions result will to some extent move the emotional momentum that’s been invested in the organism and this energy will run its course no matter what the human intellect might come up with as a means of interpreting what they are experiencing. This is because despite whatever thoughts are being pondered, there remains a thermodynamic reality to emotion in conjunction with the principle of conservation, with feelings being its means of implementation by way of syncing up with other like-minded beings, and these laws of nature will do the work they evolved to do no matter what a human being might think about what he is experiencing.

We can think about emotion in any way that we may choose, but nevertheless it will still act on us as if it is a virtual force of attraction, like gravity. We will have absorbed a charge of momentum and until it reaches terminus, it motivates us. And we may think about a state of suspension (feeling) in any way that we may choose, but it still affects us as if we’re suspended within a field of electromagnetism buffeted by arriving waves like a radio receiver and we will be differentiated in its course simply by virtue of our very nature. Our thoughts may distort or deny this energy but this can only serve to build up a charge and sooner or later, and nature has all the time in the world, it will come out on its own terms just as every drop of rain inexorably reaches the ocean no matter how many dams might be erected to hold it back.

So Damasio is studying the nuts and bolts of the neurological machinery by which this emotional dynamic is implemented into action and solely on the level of the individual; but he’s not actually studying the emotional dynamic, i.e. the heart. (To do that one must look at animals and their behavior as an expression of energy. There’s no other way.) We must remind ourselves that there is necessarily neurological machinery because heart can’t move a muscle and so it does indeed require nerve and a central coordinating apparatus to flex tendon, bone and muscle but this doesn’t therefore mean that the neurological mechanics is the source of the emotion or feelings. For example, I believe I could design (with the help of engineers) a doggy robot that could respond to other dogs and people in a way that would perfectly mimic how dogs respond and without any software or preprogramming whatsoever in regards to the core formatting of how the doggy robot would conduct itself and “know” what to do. My doggy robot would manifest complementary traits in response to the situation (or not if the moment was not conductive) and which would conscript other dogs and people into its “wave form” so that as an ensemble they could evolve into complex social actions and structures. The core computation would take place in real time and without preprogramming and would be based on states of energy evoked by batteries, magnetos, compasses, capacitors, and so on embedded in the robot. The process for robot dealing with an actual dog or person would be “written” on the spot in perfect compliance with the emotional conductivity and energetic parameters of the moment and yet even though this would be happening in the deepest recesses of the doggy robot’s “consciousness,” nevertheless I would still need a CPU and software layered on top of all this so that all these energy states could be fed into each other and then mirrored in the “higher” nerve centers in order that this underlying dynamic of “consciousness” could be executed into actual behavior via the hydraulics and appendages of the robot. This software/CPU “nerve center” would constitute the mechanics of implementation but it would not therefore be the source of the doggy robot’s core “consciousness.”

What Damasio terms homeostasis, which he sees as being in service to an individual agenda of survival and overall well-being, I recognize as “emotional ionization” which is in service to an interconnected network agenda, a networked-intelligence. These physical affects of emotional experience are in actuality capturing energy and then later during encounters with others, ultimately converting this captured energy into a “wave form” i.e. social energy.

When two dogs encounter each other, the friction between them will polarize them toward preyful or predator poles so that they differentiate from each other in a complementary way. This immutable tendency towards variability, Damasio misinterprets as homeostasis, when in fact it has nothing to do with stasis but is wholly concerned with flow and renders for each individual a distinctive subjective perception of what it is experiencing. But in the overall one dog has transmitted energy onto the other (predator – - > prey), and sure enough months if not years later the one that manifested prey-like traits (generally mislabeled “submissive”) and which absorbed the energy, then as if out of nowhere becomes predator-like (generally mislabeled “dominant”) in deference to this underlying template which prejudiced each other’s subjective impression of what they’ve experienced, and recruited them in the overarching dynamic by which the network moves energy through the environment to suit its purposes. Meanwhile behaviorism/biology says that respect, appeasement, dominance and submission has happened between A and B. And so while we all observed an obvious transfer of energy when A first met B, we then assume that all this energy somehow went into a mental ether; a psychology, and so we therefore miss that two to three years later that internalized energy in B has then finally emerged in some vigorous expression of action. A spring inside dog B was coiled, energy captured, and then released, energy returning to the flow.

Differentiating into complementary traits in order to turn environmental inputs into social energy; causes individuals to affect their environment so as to capture new energy. Feelings are not subjective (unique to that individual) in terms of being dependant on introspection or self-reflection, experience is subjective and unique to an individual because it is immutable that individuals will manifest these primary traits, two beings cannot experience the same moment the same, and then at some point exchange them if they create a true social framework.
The problem Damasio runs into with a top down, thought-centric model is how then to bring animals into the emotional fold because if they aren’t thinking, then they aren’t experiencing a feeling. And so we end up with a bifurcated model with body split from mind, animal from human; and human culture falling outside the domain of natural evolution.

An animals’ sense of its “self” derives from its relationship to its physical center-of-gravity which via Pavlovian conditioning evolves into an emotional center-of-gravity that is then “projected” onto complex objects of attraction so that given the bipolar, two-brain makeup of an animal, complex stimuli can be broken down into simple energetic conductors (what Damasio terms “emotionally competent stimuli”), and this then serves to help the projecting individual become the equal and opposite to such a complex object of resistance/attraction. This means that an animal can’t experience its “self” except through an external source of displacement, in other words, the animals’ identity depends on the external environment affecting it physically rather than via mental thought, or via an impression or reference of its “self” as something distinct and separate from its surroundings and then relative to its surroundings.

Damasio treats fear as an emotion, and as an irreducible aspect of experience, when with but a little introspection one can see that fear can’t possibly be a basic element on the periodic chart of emotions, but rather a compound construct several steps removed from emotion. For fear to be experienced, first there must be a state of attraction (emotion) as well as a sense of flow (feeling) that then collapses by an interrupting agent (construed by animal as predatory aspect) and the resulting sensations of falling (instinct) in the absence of grounding render the composite experience we understand as fear. All one has to do to verify this thesis is simply take note of what they experience when seeing a trooper suddenly looming in the rear view mirror.

A theory of stasis is a two-dimensional linear system that cannot explain the infectiousness of emotion. We can see that if someone laughs or vomits, others (because they involuntarily project their e-cog into the forms of their fellow persons) experience an involuntary reflex to emulate such behavior. Yet a supposition of maintaining stasis would suggest the opposite. How is vomiting in the absence of an actual toxin in the body returning the observing individual to a state of stasis? Rather it is upsetting an individual already in a state of stasis. That would be like riding a bike in a group and upon seeing someone fall off their bike then having to resist an overwhelming compunction to fall off in kind. But emotion is about flow rather than stasis, and so we emotionally project our e-cog into others in order to maximize flow, which is why we feel a simpatico infectiousness with laughter/vomit as an irresistible feature of our emotional nature, and then simultaneously we experience no urge to fall off our bike if our riding companion were to founder. The fundamental purpose of emotion is flow rather than stasis.

The basis of a “self” is resistance to acceleration, the degree to which when some force acts on a self, that self is capable of reflecting that energy back at that acting agent. This services the network’s impulse for complexity. Without that sense-of-self, then a feeling can’t elaborate from the underlying and fundamental state of mutual attraction that is the substratum of all consciousness and which compels organisms to differentiate into complementary traits.

The problem with a mental approach to emotion is that it leads to a sterile and bifurcated model because it is always preoccupied with the machinery of emotion rather than the emotional dynamic itself, which is the inculcation of virtual states of energy (gravity/electromagnetism) in consciousness, perception and experience. So Damasio sees culture as distinct and apart from nature, the brain as distinct and apart from the body – - and so then where is the role of the heart, the physical center-of-gravity, the symmetry of the skeletal arrangement, the tension between the dynamic demands of internal organs – - in the role of the mind?
A mental model of emotion is mechanical and ultimately denaturing and it will logically follow that taking drugs to numb an individual to what they are feeling will be seen as therapeutic since the mental machinery is always reducible to chemicals.

Related posts:

1. Definitions
2. Distinctions Between Emotion and Feelings
3. Final Post Of 2009

KB: I think we are using emotion and feelings in two different ways, and I think this is because I’m seeing emotion as the operating system of a networked-intelligence without any thoughts whatsoever being ascribed to the nature of emotion and feelings. I’m treating them solely as energy as I shall attempt to explain below.

I do think feelings can be likened to colors, especially in regards to an electromagnetic wave form, but emotion exists on a far deeper plane, which is why I prefer to say emotion is like gravity, a virtual force of attraction, a field wherein all objects of mass are responsive to all other objects of mass, whereas feelings are more sophisticated (from our point of view) as are the wave functions of the electromagnetic variety such as light. Emotion evolves into a feeling as consciousness’ resolution of the unified field problem. What we perceive of as time; is consciousness’ connection to all the physical energies. In other words, consciousness apprehends how all things are connected even though we don’t.

Feelings (which inform organisms how to evolve) evolve from emotion just as animals evolve from emotion because I see emotion operating on a plane far deeper than our sense of awareness. For example, I go to the store to buy a variety of things and I look at the money I spend, the goods I receive as well as the work I perform in terms of my own particular frame of reference. But as a consumer I’m just one charged particle of the economy and in a way unbeknownst to me, my economic activity contributes quantitatively to such things far beyond my awareness, such as the trade deficit between American and China and the exchange rate between Iceland and Lithuania. All this deep “network” information is embedded in every transaction and exchange of goods and services that I am part of, and yet it exists far below the awareness of any participant in the economy and ends up affecting me so indirectly I (and apparently most economists) can never connect the dots. A feeling is easier to be aware of, but emotion as its organizing principle is far more subtle. If I’m Xenophobic, I have no idea I’m attracted to foreigners. I think I hate them and then I think of all kinds of reasons why my hatred is justified so that I can mitigate my fear which is based on a layer of unresolved emotion held deeper still.

In my mind emotion is a medium that physiology and neurology evolves from so that all organisms are attracted to each other and in order to implement the principle of conductivity so that no matter what they do it will end up in service to the network. In other words, if information only arises from the network, it’s not possible for any organism to generate information that is in contravention to the network. Nature doesn’t leave evolution up to individuals to decide on their own any more than an economy lets consumers print their own money and so emotion can’t be understood as a self-contained phenomenon in isolation from the whole of the network and that arrives at meaning by virtue of what it comes to mean to any given participant. I’m arguing that organisms didn’t evolve to have emotion anymore than they evolved to have gravity. Organisms evolved in response to emotion just as they evolved in response to gravity. Emotion enforces a thermodynamics on every individual, just like an economy puts everyone in debt just by being present in it, and so they must contribute or else, and so emotion works on us in ways far deeper than we can be aware since it’s the principle on which our very viscera is founded.

Emotion has three phases that serve as the logic to the network, Emotion – > Unresolved Emotion – > Resolved Emotion and feelings evolve from this medium to become the message, i.e. how to resolve unresolved emotion by networking with others.

One problem with the color wheel analogy, at least as far as I’ve seen it represented, is that there’s no place for sexuality or personality. Lust is on the same wavelength as love (as in more intense-and yet incongruently at the same time more shallow) but then aggression doesn’t fit in with sexuality on that same color wavelength. We can’t get away from the linear systems of relationships.

The other problem with current ways of looking at emotion is that there’s actually no such thing as emotion, it doesn’t exist as something that can be measured in isolation from the whole body/mind as it’s the confluence of physical and nerve energies into a state of tension, the release from which is emotion, so it’s not actually present as anything tangible. We have to take the whole of the organism to understand the presence of emotion. This is why (according to Jerome Kagan: “What Is Emotion?” his answer to his title being: no one knows) no philosophy, psychology, neurology has a whole model for emotion, especially one that can accommodate animals as well as humans, sexuality, animal behavior/learning, etc.

QUOTE: “William James, in the article ‘What is an Emotion?’ (Mind, 9, 1884: 188-205), argued that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes. The Danish psychologist Carl Lange also proposed a similar theory at around the same time, so this position is known as the James-Lange theory. This theory and its derivatives state that a changed situation leads to a changed bodily state. As James says ‘the perception of bodily changes as they occur IS the emotion.’

KB: I agree that emotion on the level of the individual is affiliated with bodily changes, but this is indicative of how change is emotionally ionizing the organism in a network coherent way, i.e. formatting the emotional battery. So in my view perceptions don’t arise from a purely subjective interpretation of what’s transpiring because there is always a heavy network agenda freighted with every interaction. If emotion is how we “explain and organize our actions,” then it seems James is meaning that it’s a mental phenomenon and then there are two possibilities which I could not concur with: either, animals don’t have emotion, or they think and thus are capable of emotion.

“James further claims that ‘we feel sad because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and neither we cry, strike, nor tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be.”

BURL: This theory is supported by experiments in which by manipulating the bodily state, a desired emotion is induced.[4] Such experiments also have therapeutic implications (e.g. in laughter therapy, dance therapy). The James-Lange theory is often misunderstood because it seems counter-intuitive. Most people believe that emotions give rise to emotion-specific actions: i.e. “I’m crying because I’m sad,” or “I ran away because I was scared.” The James-Lange theory, conversely, asserts that first we react to a situation (running away and crying happen before the emotion), and then we interpret our actions into an emotional response. In this way, emotions serve to explain and organize our own actions to us.”

KB: We’re arriving I think at some good points of distinction. So in my view of emotion as energy that works as a “force” of attraction, I’m not attaching any thought to the pure emotion or to a true feeling. Also, I’m suggesting that the phenomenon of perception is involuntarily and subconsciously shaded by the emotional battery well before the thought process (in humans) can get going. As a matter of fact, by the time the “charge” reaches the brain, the real show is over. Something is happening in a discrete patterned way well before the higher processes of the nervous system has anything to deal with. First, the body/mind is displaced by change and there is an involuntary rising of the degree of tension effected upon the individual. If a preyful aspect can be sensed, then the individual senses a release from tension and this is what we perceive of as a “current” of emotion. If a predatory aspect is sensed, then there is a gap in consciousness, this disconnect triggers a fear and accesses a physical memory. Either way, the animal will feel attracted to the source of change, but already its perceptions have been organized in service to the network.

If the individual can still sense the preyful aspect through the influence of physical memory, then a feeling will evolve in order to make contact or connect with this stimulus. The stronger the arousal through hunger (sensing preyful aspect) circuitry then the stronger the feeling and more fully it can manifest as a pure force of attraction (recapitulating the underlying emotion) that simultaneously can facilitate flipping of polarity to fit with object of attraction or magnetic deflection of energy of attraction to calm the object of attraction. If at any point during the experience there’s more energy in the system than the emotional capacity of that individual can handle (and here in regards to carrying capacity is where a feeling of being connected to the network comes in to shape the nature of the perception) then ingrained habits or instincts take over, and even this can happen well before thoughts can make sense of what’s going on, and in this latter case a feeling does not even evolve into being.

In regards to crying, in my model this happens because there’s more energy going through the system than the individual can handle, which is why crying can occur throughout all kinds of states, fear, joy, laughter, pain, sadness. The crying individual is becoming more prey-like, melting the boundary between its form and others, its persona and personality are dissolving; they are moving their basic physical essence, becoming conductive and thereby attracting the emotion of others. People seeing someone crying concentrate on the vulnerability of such an individual (preyful) and this helps them get past the predatory aspect of that person and they divine a new being with whom they can attune; they feel capable of going up and connecting. When dogs smell each others saliva and tear ducts they too get past the boundary erected by the central nervous system as well as physical memories of resistance they are carrying.

Striking out (breaking one’s fall due to the violence of the emotional collapse) or trembling (radiating a lot of energy) are also overloads of the emotional capacity and a true feeling hasn’t been able to evolve into existence in order to channel this energy. Notice how when a football player gets hit on the opening kickoff of a game their nervousness (and perhaps even trembling) immediately dissipates. By being struck they are “back” in their body and their mental perception is wiped clean so that a feeling can begin to evolve. Their will, i.e. a faith in a feeling, can take over.

Since the Big-Brain can harbor mental memories of emotion, and because it is the only agency that can execute physical action, therefore everything about the emotional process is mirrored in nerve function, but that doesn’t mean it is therefore the source of emotion or what renders the deepest sense of meaning. Criminals and psychopaths are able to mimic emotion because they have the math of it in their brains (as do insects, bacterium, and viruses in their manner of organization) and they are able to convince others of the validity of their state, but it’s just the mental mechanics, they aren’t feeling a thing. So I can see how manipulating body states can induce these mental memories of emotion as can an electrical stimulation of some ganglion or brain structure. But other than therapeutic approaches that are designed to keep someone rooted in their body and cultivate their will, I believe these prove to be artificial and short term, like taking a drug to get high and artificially inducing the feeling of weightlessness, but out of context with the E->UE->RE template that must be serviced over the long haul, and therefore drugs prove transitory and self-destructive because it’s not part of a natural, organic process by which true feelings evolve. It’s akin to electrically stimulating a muscle and getting it to react as if by conscious direction, but it’s just an artificial stimulation that isn’t part of a coherent pattern of movement. In the dog world we see owners doing all this technically correct learning theory but it’s out of context of group purpose and the puppys emotional circuits are fried: too much stimulation without grounding.

Also, because emotion is the operating system of consciousness, even thoughts, no matter what they are, always contribute to the force of attraction in the system. On the deepest level of emotion, from the network’s point of view; it doesn’t matter how the individual perceives or interprets the experience. From the network’s point of view, the fundamental question, and this is the one that the individual’s very physiology and neurology is organized around, is: was more unresolved emotion acquired, or was unresolved emotion resolved? Other than this it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things what the individual does with this energy because no matter what happens the individual has been energized and one way or another, sooner or later, maybe not even in his lifetime; it will evolve into a feeling. Humans may hate but that’s merely an incredibly intense form of attraction that has overwhelmed the emotional capacity of the individual thus charged, however from the networks’ point of view: nevertheless there’s more energy (force) available to the system and when it becomes aligned in a more complex manner it will then be able to accommodate the movement of that energy and unresolved emotion will be resolved.

And then there’s another very important consideration here to return to James famous example of being frightened by a bear. Because unresolved emotion potentiates the higher centers of the nervous system, (which means that how we respond to how unresolved emotion makes us feel determines how we construct our network) where we are in the emotional process, in other words where our feelings plug us into our network, another way of saying this is where we feel we are on the circle, are we at the prey or at the predator polarity, predetermines how we will perceive the bear and interpret the experience and this is happening well before any thoughts can be thought. So in my model, a person having been scared by a bear is nevertheless first and foremost energized and thereby attracted to the bear, but in this case, with a force that is more powerful than their capacity can handle and so they run (attraction collapsed into fear). If they cry their tears are an involuntary “appeal” so to speak to the mercy of the bear’s predatory aspect. (The bear as a “being” triggers a physical memory, most likely of an intimidating father figure.) Now on the other hand, to an unarmed Indian Warrior counting coup, because of where he feels connected to his circle, his tribe, he feels an arousal in his attraction to the bear that is stronger than his balance/fear of falling and so he acts like predator going toward the bear as he tries to touch it. By acting like a predator, he can reflect the energy of attraction the bear is projecting at him, right back to bear and this might be more than the bear can handle and so we observe flipping of polarity between them happily increasing the odds of said warrior returning to his people as a hero, with bear alive as sacred totem.

If “emotion is the subjective form of physical feelings;” then this seems to me to be in contravention to the infectious nature of emotion that is such an overwhelming feature of emotion. For example, someone throws up because they have either eaten something noxious or have just learned something violently noxious to their well being, that’s their subjective perception of their bodily changes. Yet others, observing them, and who have no such subjective experience of an internal discomfort be it physical or psychic, nevertheless feel an irresistible urge to vomit. This is because by default as highly social beings they have projected their e-cogs into that individual and so when energy moves in that individual, they feel a corresponding virtual movement within their own bodies that predetermines what they will perceive; their body will change in conformance to how the network has constructed its constituents and this predetermines their subjective experience.

Similarly, we can also note that there are musical chords of universal emotional content; or a universal mathematical expression of symmetry that defines the emotional attraction to beauty in every race and society (a sense of beauty equals release from the specific kind of unresolved emotion that is caused by the instinctual aspect of the human intellect) and again these operate beneath the level of subjective interpretation. So there is a universal principle of emotional conductivity implemented through the nature of every organisms emotional make-up and which determines that all change that is experienced will become part of consciousness as a monolithic force of attraction. Feelings are the auto-tuning/feedback dynamic by which all the elements of the network will end up self-organizing so that this force will ultimately be harnessed to create new energy.

Related posts:

1. On Damasio and the Feeling Brain
2. Definitions
3. Why We Push

ENERGY: An action potential, a differential of force between two poles. Energy in animals builds up by virtue of a bipolar, two-brain makeup each with its own divergent agenda just as if they are two terminals in the body/mind as an emotional battery attracting ionized charged particles. The tension can be defined as such, the Big Brain seeks stasis; the little brain seeks input. (Thus, all physical, hormonal and neuro-chemical energies are funneled through this divergent agenda into a whole body state of tension. The body/mind is displaced by stimuli which thereby augment the underlying state of tension that must seek release. This means that the confluence of all this energy functions as a virtual “force” of attraction toward that which can render relief/release. The body/mind becomes a displaceable medium, like a standing pool of water, an elastic membrane or like the space/time continuum. Thus whatever one can say of gravity, one can say of emotion and vice versa.) The Big-Brain-in-the-head projects energy, the little-brain-in-the-gut absorbs energy. The B-B is the predatory polarity; the l-b is the preyful polarity, two halves of one circle.

CONSCIOUSNESS: Energy that reliably repeats itself by reflecting back on itself. It is therefore a circle, a circle is the means by which energy becomes information (energy traveling in a circle, or wavelength, is energy coming-into-form – - > in-form-ation). This is not as simple as it first appears because since consciousness is energy that reliably repeats itself, it must therefore create circuits with the external surroundings and therefore, given the reality of friction and fractiousness on planet earth, these circuits sustain themselves by always adding energy to the network. Thus we observe the evolution of complexity and ultimately, self-consciousness and self-awareness as the highest expression of energy reflecting back on itself.

INFORMATION: Nobel laureate Dr. Gell-Mann in his book “Quark and the Jaguar” states: “Basically, information is concerned with a selection from alternatives, and it is most simply expressed if those alternatives can be reduced to a sequence of binary choices, each of which is between two equally probable alternatives.” However I feel this is a classical view of information. The most basic definition of information is that because consciousness requires energy to reflect back on itself, the easiest way to do this is to create a field of mutual attraction around a midpoint so that all entangled particles are part of an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic to sustain the circle. Therefore all animals are motivated first and foremost by a virtual “force” of attraction so that they revolve around a midpoint. The most basic form of information is the network that sustains and regenerates itself by constantly adding new energy. Information requires a network because the easiest way to create a field of mutual attraction is by virtue of components being attracted to each other. Organisms attracted to each other in such a way that adds energy to the network is the most fundamental definition of information. Thus we see that animals are always attracted to energy in consonance with the fundamental motive of the network to add energy, and are self-organizing into complex social structures in consonance with the fundamental definition of information. Energy is motion. Form is motion that repeats itself. Consciousness is a form of energy that reliably repeats itself. A circle turns energy into form. It takes a network to make information.

EMOTION: A monolithic (dull) “force” of attraction caused by a release from a state of tension instituted in an animal’s constitution by virtue of an animals’ two brain makeup. Furthermore, it is a source of momentum that requires a discrete amount of motion in order to render a null value. Emotion comes first, and then the physical aspects arise on its template. Emotion is consciousness’ interface with the physical dimension. As the physical embodiment of the laws of nature, it is the operating system of animal consciousness so that life forms can respond coherently in the natural realm, which is likewise organized according to the laws of nature. As a “force” of attraction, emotion is always positive.

UNRESOLVED EMOTION: Energy is always conserved, it cannot be destroyed; it simply changes form. This law of conservation in conjunction with the principle of conductivity means energy can be the basis of memory because if energy moves according to a principle of conductivity, then the byproduct of resistance to such movement can serve as a record of such an event. Unresolved emotion is a physical record held in the body of the resistance experienced (no matter how slight) to the expression of emotion. The body of every animal serves as a data bank of resistance in regards to every experience it’s ever had, a track record of how things rate according to a standard of emotional conductivity. So while pure emotion as a current of energy can be likened to a current of water which requires a constant source to sustain its flow: unresolved emotion can be likened to water in its solid state, ice, and unlike emotion, it is cumulative. One can not hold on to emotion, but one can hold on to unresolved emotion. Unresolved emotion is how information of an emotional content is transmitted reliably through time, and is how animals receive information over distance. By this I mean, one animal can observe another animal that is acting prey-like and this can release unresolved emotion in the observers’ body and render it sensual over a distance just as if energy had been transmitted over distance as a wave.

RESOLVED EMOTION: The resolution of unresolved emotion is facilitated by becoming aligned and synchronized with a triggering agent of unresolved emotion. Resolved emotion can be likened to water in its gaseous state, a feeling of contentedness and well-being that is ephemeral and the most fleeting form of emotion. Unresolved emotion can only be resolved by a feeling, not by a thought. Only the heart can resolve unresolved emotion.

TRAITS: Emotion moves from a place with a higher concentration of energy to a place of a lesser one just as heat radiates from a warm object toward a cooler one. The relative heat values of two objects are their most primordial “traits.” The predator trait reflects the projection of emotion, and as an external influence on other animals, resists the expression of energy toward it thereby reflecting energy back at it, whereas the preyful trait absorbs the projection of emotion and conducts the expression of energy directed toward it. All complex traits (even personality) elaborate upon this primordial platform.

DRIVE: Emotion plus stress (triggering of physical memory) strengthened by sexuality and guided by Feeling is Drive. Drive seeks to make contact with object of attraction and resistance to contact is converted to a stronger force of attraction by Temperament, or Heart. Drive follows the path of highest resistance, whereas instincts, habits, fear follow the path of least resistance. Drive is how the animal does nature’s work of evolution.

THOUGHTS: The capacity to compare one point of view to another; or one moment to another: and all the concepts that follow from such a platform.

EMOTIONAL CENTER-OF-GRAVITY: When emotion meets with resistance, unresolved emotion (stress) is formed and this accretes around the physical center-of-gravity as the physical memory of an emotional experience. The e-cog is projected onto complex objects of resistance in order to induce a feeling.

FEELINGS: These are the emotional circuits. Emotional circuits are not contained within any individual. (Note that autistics have trouble with eye contact because this accesses the e-cog and so they have difficulty creating emotional circuits and going by feel. Autistics work off the mental aspects of emotion that are part of how the higher aspects of the nervous system execute the emotional phenomena.) When the emotional center-of-gravity is projected onto objects of resistance because the emotionally entangled parties recapitulate the principle of emotional conductivity in each other through their synchronized actions and mannerisms, (as object of resistance they first triggered each others’ unresolved emotion and by virtue of being prey-like they simultaneously attract each other’s emotion, in other words, they cause energy to reflect back onto the other and then give it the opportunity to move toward them, this is the circle again), all motion of affiliated parties eventually average out into a state of suspension, a wave function, and this FEELING when fully formed takes up residence in the heart. (This is why our hand irresistibly moves to the middle of our chest when we feel moved, whereas meanwhile emotional researchers are always focused on the brain.) All true feelings feel good because they add energy to the network. Feelings are an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic that implement the principle of emotional conductivity.

HEART: Heart is a circle; it is the source of a true feeling. When a feeling is fully formed; the movement of entangled “parties” thereby inflects and add energy and nuance to the original feeling just as if it is a chord being plucked and so that the feeling continues to elaborate and evolve into complex social structures. In other words, there are quite literally, heart strings. Feelings elaborate like light waves propagate. In other words, the heart pumps waves. Heart is an engine of light.

EMOTIONAL CONDUCTIVITY: The Brain-to-gut connection creates a “virtual” action potential in the body/mind so that on one fundamental level, consciousness functions as an emotional battery. Composed in this manner, the body/mind turns environmental inputs into emotionally ionizing events, in other words, physical energy becomes consciousness subject to the principle of emotional conductivity. A stimulus energizes the Brain in the head and this sensation of disequilibrium then needs to be “brought to ground” by being absorbed in the gut, i.e. converted into a smooth, wave action of the intestines, peristalsis. This is the principle of emotional conductivity: nerve energy of the Brain “grounded” internally within the digestive system by bringing external objects of attraction “to ground” and which thereby calms the physical organism. All complex objects of attraction either amplify or short circuit this internal connection.

SEXUALITY: The processing of the emotional center-of-gravity so that it can be reflected back and forth and onto a common object. In other words, two individuals are sensualized in a complementary way so as to form a circle in their behaviors and in their manner so that feelings can evolve between them because their mutually complementary mannerisms and actions recapitulate the principle of emotional conductivity.

TEMPERAMENT: Behaviorally, it is the mechanical aspect of heart, just as physiologically the heart organ is the mechanical pump of blood. Temperament is the capacity in an animal to perceive the predatory aspect relative to the preyful aspect and hold both in the same frame of reference around a midpoint, e-cog, in order to perceive a being composed of primordial traits, (Prey/Predator) and magnetic traits, (E,W,N,S). In the absence of this, instincts, habits (and in humans) thoughts end up running the show.

PERSONALITY: A defensive response to the movement and/or vibration of the emotional center-of-gravity.

FEAR: Fear is not emotion. It is a nervous sensation that results from the collapse of an emotional state of attraction. It is as close as the central nervous system can get to emotion and so it has been confused as such. Fear serves as a registration tag for deposits of unresolved emotion in the body/mind as an emotional battery.

SOCIABILITY: The purpose of sociability is to externalize the internal wave functions of the body/mind into an external wave function which is observable as a current of synchronized actions. This reconstitutes a wave function which is a circle, and motion along a circle becomes information so that any physical material object or environmental energy that is incorporated into that wave function is now part of consciousness in service to its evolution. Physical objects and energy thereby become information and thus are capable of causing motive, i.e. creating an external action potential between beings that seek to possess such objects. Social behavior is a wave function that repeats itself by constantly creating new action potentials as psychic motive.

HEART: The third self-contained, electro-chemical dynamo within every animal, the seat of the auto-tuning/feedback dynamic itself: the faculty of adaptability, sociability, the place in the body/mind where the energies of balance and hunger confluence and the divergent agendas of the two brains are reconciled by feeling the midpoint (the null or averaged-out value of all motion) around which all emotionally entangled parties orbit and thereby recapitulate for one and the other the principle of emotional conductivity so that unresolved emotion can be resolved. In this state, heart beats synchronize individual actions.

Related posts:

1. Why We Push
2. Glorious Accident?
3. Distinctions Between Emotion and Feelings

From a previous discussion….

LCK: That said, I still disagree with the concept of the emotional battery.

KB: The most relevant point to the notion of a battery is that it stores energy; it doesn’t have to actually be electrical, even though dogs may act just as if it is electrical in basis as when they touch the positive terminal of one to the positive (head to head) terminal of the other, and then we see sparks if not the fur fly. Also, if we are largely in agreement that there is some kind of an energy dynamo at work then we would have to recognize that there would be no point in generating energy if there wasn’t a means of storing it for times of need. This is why wind/solar hasn’t taken over the energy grid because there isn’t yet a means of storing enough energy to get past the times when the wind’s not blowing and sun’s not shining. So if it’s possible to entertain that an organism is a kind of energy dynamo, it would surely follow that there would have to be some kind of storage faculty as well, just like the body has fat reserves for lean times or a spleen as a reserve of blood. The emotional battery in my model likewise serves as an emotional spleen to carry the animal through “gaps” in its consciousness and to keep it on course when there is no readily visible path forward. It’s what keeps a body in motion tending to stay in motion until acted on by an outside force.

LCK: This idea seems a mixed metaphor to the writer in me, and much too inexact to the dog trainer/natural philosopher. If emotions could be stored as latent or potential electric energy, then there could be an emotional battery. And I could be wrong, but it seems to me that emotions aren’t compatible with electricity. For instance, emotions can be repressed and even <i>com</i>pressed, but I don’t think there’s any compression going on inside a battery.

KB: Actually, I believe inside the battery there is a form of compression as in pressure and I’ve included a link to a thread below. But I can readily appreciate the difficulty with the idea because the Emotional Battery continually evolves into more and more complex sources of energy and information beyond its simplest role as energy reserves and emotional ballast. And this is exactly the problem, emotion cannot be stored, it’s transient and this is why we need a compressed form of emotion, i.e. stress in order to reliably transmit information of an emotional content. And while there’s no compression per se, there is pressure which we experience emotionally as compression, or stress, emotion’s latent form as stored energy.

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=166904 The following is from someone who posts under Xezlec

“Think of the electrons in a metal as a sort of “gas” of electrons. They are free to move around in the metal, and they repel one another. If you pack more electrons into the same volume of metal, then they have a higher “pressure” because they are all repelling one another. The voltage between two terminals is simply the difference in electron pressure between one and the other.”

Xezlec: “Now what if you build a “pump” that pumps electrons from one piece of metal to another? Well then you have a pressure that builds in one piece of metal and a vacuum that builds in the other. The vacuum piece is said to have a higher (more positive) “voltage”. The voltage between two terminals is simply the difference in electron pressure between one and the other.”

Notice that the so called “positive” terminal isn’t actually positive by virtue of being populated with protons, carriers of an actual positive charge. Rather it’s only positive RELATIVE to the negative terminal which has a surplus of electrons collected around it. So it’s a virtual form of positive. So if Physics there is a virtual and an actual way of generating a positive charge.

Because there are divergent agendas between the two brains, when stimuli displace the body/mind it creates a voltage. The voltage is the inability to connect the front end to the hind end by ingesting something without resistance. And if that voltage can’t be reconciled through acting in a pure flow manner that also brings the stimulus to ground, then I maintain this is internalized as stress through some kind of bio-mechanical mechanism which on the surface merely appears to be fulfilling some other bodily function but I believe can one day be shown to be fundamentally about capturing this energy and holding on to it for subsequent processing in order to render a greater degree of complexity. I think Dr. Pert has put her finger on the mechanism, what she calls the psycho-somatic network comprised of the central nervous system, the immune system and the endocrine system, but she doesn’t recognize its larger network function because of course like all mainstream scientists emotion must always be made to fit into the model of it as a self-contained phenomenon within the organism relentlessly in service to the agenda of gene replication. (I predict that the psycho-somatic network will one day prove that viruses and RNA are far more important to the evolution of organisms than DNA since these can rewrite DNA in terms of the environment, i.e. the network.)

The two brains have divergent agendas which inculcate a constitutional state of conflict, the release from which we perceive of as emotion. (In this sense, the Emotional Battery is the body/mind as a displaceable medium, just like the space/time is a displaceable gravitational field, there is not yet any virtual electrical bio-mechanical stuff going on.)Then, when the act of expressing emotion encounters resistance, I believe neuro-chemical/hormonal/antihistamine byproducts are produced and/or deposited throughout the body in response to the individual’s sense of being compressed, or pressurized. (This is now the electrical component.) Then when at some point later the individual achieves emotional suspension with an emotional counterbalance, its physical center-of-gravity projected externally as the e-cog onto the midpoint, this induces a virtual form of magnetic induction which I then believe releases the natural opiates in the cells, again courtesy of Dr. Pert’s research. This loading and unloading taking place on the cellular level would be the same as electrolytes in a battery.

Since the Big-Brain can only allow action (at lower levels of organization) when the balance imperative is satisfied, when a stimulus is complex the B-B will hold the organism back from action since the preyful essence is not immediately apparent. So we have a thrust at one terminal, B-B, and a void or vacuum at the other terminal, l-b. This divergence creates a voltage, or force. Hence there is a constitutional pressure, just as if there’s an electron pump as described above so that a voltage is impressed onto the opposing terminals of the body/mind as an emotional battery. (When the electrons are grounded in the little-gut, the void would shift to Big-Brain, and when the individual is entrained with another and not concerned about balance, then B-B can serve as North Pole of the magnet, so we move beyond the electrical battery metaphor and into a magnet one.)

In the electrical schema: for the Big-Brain output (physical action) must equal input (sensory stimulation). But if it meets resistance it ends up capturing more charge and so this upsets the balance circuitry all over again and so left to its own demise it’s locked into a never ending loop, like Sisyphus pushing the rock eternally up the hill. Thus the Big-Brain tends to hold back and this increases the voltage in the system because the little-brain isn’t getting its needed input. This is how emotion according to the principle of conductivity compels action. Meanwhile, for the little-brain, input (ingestion) must equal output (output being Big-Brain nerve energy) and so unlike the Big Brain it craves movement rather than stasis. When stimulated the l-b will furiously churn and demand input. But it just can’t take in any input, the l-b is limited in its own way because this input must be digestible; it can’t ingest things arbitrarily (we’re talking about a highly evolved digestive system that can only process that which can be processed, it can’t generate new bio-chemical approaches to an input as can the immune system or the sense of smell, in other words whatever it ingests must be conductive) just to satisfy the constitutional problem of the overall organism, although dogs try their darndest by eating grass, rocks, socks, sticks, shoes, TV remote controllers, not to mention self-mutilation.

In a fundamental way the emotional “electrical” battery solves this basic conundrum. When a peak state of intensity is reached, the emotional battery as energy reserve must kick in because it’s reached its holding capacity and so outlets a brief spike of energy, (the individual feels the uprising of the physical cog along the 1^st Primal Pathway, gut/spinal cord) and this brief outburst can scare the object of resistance and compel it to move and thus make it conform to the principle of emotional conductivity, i.e. emotion’s desire for motion. (For example, the cat stalks and then pounces on the motionless mouse once it gets close enough to a critical distance, even though the stationary mouse isn’t acting emotionally conductive. Another example of this is an antelope “stotting” as a means of dissipating its battery when it’s attracted to a lion but obviously can’t connect with it. By punching the ground with its front feet it’s dissipating the drive to make contact which given the charge of a lion has pushed the antelope well over its holding capacity.)

But I immediately have to add that it is more than just an energy reserve, the emotional battery is also a source of information in terms of a specific physical memory that is summoned to the surface of awareness at that peak of intensity so that in a critical moment it can supply the memory of a preyful aspect and now the organism is given permission to release energy because the inhibiting agent is now perceived for a brief instant as a preyful aspect. (The cat perceives the motionlessness of the mouse, as a vibration, and in fact the mouse is actually quivering given how wired it is, and as an incipient flight movement.) We can see this exact physical memory being imprinted in infant pups when they begin to stalk and pounce on an unsuspecting litter mate that’s just trying to stand in one spot. Because the little pups are such pure embodiments of temperament, any tiny quiver is perceived as a significant degree of movement that does indeed elicit the principle of emotional conductivity.

Xezlec: ”And if you connect some conductive path (wire) between the two, the electrons will zoom from the higher pressure to the lower pressure, through that path. The bigger the pressure difference (voltage), the faster they will whiz through the path. The rate that the electrons zip through that path is called the “current”, and is measured in Amperes. So current through a path is proportional to voltage.”

KB: When the prey/predator roles are clearly differentiated between the two beings the principle of emotional conductivity is fulfilled and the energy runs at high “amperage” between the virtual circuit between them to resolve the charge.

LCK: “So unresolved emotions would have to be stored in something more like a reservoir. That’s why electricity works for describing the nervous system (which runs on it), and emotions are more properly (at least in my view) described through fluid dynamics. There are parallels — both water and electricity are said to flow in “currents” — but like water, emotions are more tangible. (Remember, the brain can’t feel anything.)”

KB: What I’m trying to articulate in my limited way, is that because of the principle of emotional conductivity, what starts out as gravity, and then a simple fluid dynamic, and then a simple electrical battery, then goes on to evolve into more and more sophisticated kinds of electromagnetic dynamics, nuclear fusion and even quantum mechanics. This is why the fluid model of emotion hasn’t succeeded in psychology because the range is too limited to account for the infinite variety of expression of emotion and feelings, and diversity across cultures. In my model there is only one emotion, a virtual force of attraction due to displacement of the body/mind, just like gravity. But then as a current connecting the front-end-to-the-hind-end, just like water it has three states, fluid (pure emotion as a current), solid (unresolved emotion as physical memory) and gaseous (resolved emotion as an ephemeral state of contentedness when unresolved emotion is resolved). E – - > UE – - > RE is how emotion via the organism as an emotional battery, and according to the principle of emotional conductivity, can fulfill its network function of turning energy into information by evolving through all forces of nature. It’s akin for example to how the industrial age began by harnessing water to turn potential energy into mechanical energy in order to turn waterwheels and grist wheels, and then to turn turbines in electromagnetic generators. (Apparently the evolution of consciousness bypassed the nuclear fission phase.) That’s exactly what happens in the evolution of consciousness including nuclear fusion and quantum mechanics.(The e-cog facilitates the fusion of external objects and beings into the organism’s sense of its “Self” or nucleus.)

Note that a feeling of self-satisfaction is not easily transmittable through time or from person to person, and that it is virtually impossible to transfer a state of bliss to someone else, whereas a state of stress is easily transmittable through time and it is easy to make someone anxious, or jealous, envious etc.. Note that one doesn’t wake up at 3 in the morning blissed out, but rather stressed out. This is because we are first and foremost designed to be carriers of an emotional charge that makes us feel incomplete and disconnected. Our thoughts then race to find a source of this stress so that we can take action to find a connection and drain our “juices.” Interestingly when a battery is drained we say it has no juice.

Finally, because stress is so easy to transmit, it is therefore easy to relieve a person from stress so as to help them feel more positive about a situation then to actually help them achieve a true state of bliss. This is a virtual form of giving them energy. They feel energized by the words of someone consoling them but that person didn’t actually give them any real energy, rather the person shifted their perception by which their reserve of stored unresolved emotion was converted into a sense of release.

So a virtual static-electricity between two individuals, who haven’t yet differentiated so as to induce the principle of emotional conductivity in the other, is perceived of as pressure, and this is the compressed file of information that is then internalized as physical memory, or an emotional charge, registered in the emotional battery according to intensity. It’s not that electrons have been compressed, it’s that a voltage has been impressed between the two brains, and which I believe has very real physiological and neurological consequences, that only by connecting with the source of that charge, or something of the exact same intensity value, can reduce the voltage.

Feelings then are the projection of emotional mass that has accrued around the physical c-o-g, onto objects of attraction, in order to define a midpoint and recreate a wave function. Through this synchronization process the balance circuitry is subsumed into a pure tuning device, which I believe then synchronizes heartbeats between individuals so entangled. Ultimately through the resulting emotional bond unresolved emotion can thus be resolved. No animal is an island.

I’ve taken the following schema of a battery and below each passage of explanatory text have written in italics my translation of its mechanics into my emotional model. The link has a simple rendition of a battery.

http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/projects/vss/docs/Power/2-how-do-batteries-work.html

How do batteries work? Electricity, as you probably already know, is the flow of electrons through a conductive path like a wire. This path is called a circuit.

In the Emotional Battery the circuit is the behavior that can conduct energy so as to connect with object of attraction and so as to reduce the charge to neutral. But in behavior, the circuit must constantly be refreshed with new energy so that it can reliably repeat itself.

Batteries have three parts, an anode (-), a cathode (+), and the electrolyte. The cathode and anode (the positive and negative sides at either end of a traditional battery) are hooked up to an electrical circuit.

In the Emotional Battery: the Cathode is the Big-Brain-in-the-head which can be charged by external stimuli, the Anode is the little-brain-in-the-gut that receives these “electrons,” the electrolytes are the cells in the body.

The chemical reaction in the battery causes a build up of electrons at the anode. This results in an electrical difference between the anode and the cathode. You can think of this difference as an unstable build-up of the electrons. The electrons want to rearrange themselves to get rid of this difference. But they do this in a certain way. Electrons repel each other and try to go to a place with fewer electrons.

In the Emotional Battery, displacement of the body/mind by external stimuli causes neurological and physiological activity that arouses the hunger circuitry, just as if there is a concentration of electrons at the anode so that the organism craves an environmental input in order to ground out this charge. This we experience as butterflies, morbid dread, in addition to hunger itself, and so on deep in our gut.

In a battery, the only place to go is to the cathode. But, the electrolyte keeps the electrons from going straight from the anode to the cathode within the battery.

Because cells burn energy they demand nourishment and this prevents the Emotional Battery from being self-neutralizing. It must interact with the environment to receive input. In other words, cells don’t metabolize to provide energy to the muscles as their primary function. Rather their primary function is to serve as electrolytes by burning energy to create an energy deficit which then implements the phenomenon of a virtual Emotional Battery by not allowing the organism to dissipate the charge through its own on/board mental activity. It must move, i.e. create an emotional circuit with another being.

When the circuit is closed (a wire connects the cathode and the anode) the electrons will be able to get to the cathode. In the picture above, the electrons go through the wire, lighting the light bulb along the way. This is one way of describing how electrical potential causes electrons to flow through the circuit.

In the Emotional Battery if the action that’s being expressed is moving in conformance with the principle of emotional conductivity so that a preyful essence is being perceived and absorbed by the organism, then it’s just as if its front-end-is-connected-to-its-hind-end and virtual electrons are flowing through the behavior as a virtual circuit. Ultimately when the wavelength is strong enough, there is a collapse of an electrical current into a magnetic field that collapses into an electrical current which then collapses into a magnetic field. In other words, just as a light wave self-propagates. This is what we’re seeing when we observe two dogs flipping polarity at will and developing an unbreakable emotional bond.

However, these electrochemical processes change the chemicals in anode and cathode to make them stop supplying electrons. So there is a limited amount of power available in a battery.

Because the Emotional Battery evolved to solve the problem of entropy, when the Emotional Battery is returned to neutral so that the individual feels complete, the interaction has also generated information, i.e. a wave form with its emotional counterbalance. Therefore the Emotional Battery can also be likened to a computer because when two beings encounter each other and since they have the same emotional problem to solve, the Emotional Battery is able to transcend this limited schema of a simple electrical battery and evolves into the basis of an electromagnetic dynamo so that when one individual moves in an emotionally conductive manner, it induces new energy in its counterbalance. Ultimately becoming emotionally entangled with another emotional being turns two Emotional Batteries into two cells of one Emotional Battery thus recharging the system in terms of a heightened state of complexity. In other words, raw energy has been turned into information and now this unified battery is charged anew and affiliated beings need to seek higher paths of resistance to overcome.

When you recharge a battery, you change the direction of the flow of electrons using another power source, such as solar panels. The electrochemical processes happen in reverse, and the anode and cathode are restored to their original state and can again provide full power.

Simply by being conscious and stimulated, the Emotional Battery will become recharged and the animal perceives this as becoming incomplete. And then when animals flip polarity, they reverse the electro-chemical flow of the cells as electrolytes. This is the process of emotosynthesis, capturing the energy of resistance and turning it into information, just as photosynthesis in plants turns the energy of the sun into matter. And just as photosynthesis makes life on earth possible emotosynthesis makes intelligent life on earth possible.

A Final Note. If it wasn’t for the the Emotional Battery and the principle of emotional conductivity, then animals would not be able to be conditioned because the body becomes partitioned into a positive and negative end, and then the e-cog moves around the memory of p-cog in the body along these regions and in specific ways, as if it’s travelling along circuits of more/less resistance. This virtual flow of energy through the animal body/mind as emoitonal battery becomes as reliable as water coursing through a riverbed, thus animals attune to their bodies and reliably repeat behaviors that led to them feeling good, and avoid that which makes them feel “bad.”

Also, there’s no real circuit connecting dog A to dog B, it’s just that A becomes the cathode to B as anode, this can flip in another emotional context, and so they each become the means for resolving the constitutional state of conflict they render in the other until ultimately they fuse into one battery, and set out to magnetize others in terms of this nuclear fusion.

Related posts:

1. Why Do Dogs Smell Each Other
2. Behan is too new-agey in his explanations to be taken seriously. He also dismisses large tracks of learning theory and psychology and ethology. He prefers undefined explanations like “emotional circuitry of dog and owner” Frankly I tend to dismiss and distrust anyone that talks about ‘energy’ or ‘vibrations’ to explain animal behavior.
3. Why Do Dogs Prefer to Drink From Toilets?

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?

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
2. Why Do Good Dogs Do Bad Things?
3. Why Do Dogs Do Everything in a Circle?

However, I’m not trying to convince owners not to neuter their male dogs. Every owner is entitled to do what they believe is in the best interest of their dog. From my perspective, a whole dog has more energy and this presents its own set of issues that I’m fully prepared to deal with. And from my perspective, I believe it’s easier to prevent and/or solve dog problems with energy at the surface rather than the other way around. If someone asks me my opinion, the article which follows is the basis of my response to the question. If an owner doesn’t agree with me or feel safe about going outside the mainstream conventional way of thinking, I’m fine with their choice because it doesn’t impact me. Many owners of puppies hear what I have to say, reject my advice and then we go on and work together. I will consider my educational mission in dogdom successful if owners were to say “I want to neuter my male dog because I don’t want him to have so much energy and I think he will still be healthy”.

On the other hand, I am compelled to write this article because there are those who are indeed on a soapbox and telling me and my clients that we are somehow being irresponsible, somehow contributing to the over-population of dogs in shelters, and somehow frustrating dogs with a misdirected and woe-begotten libido. Legislation and town ordinances are being proposed and enacted to compel owners of male dogs to have them neutered. In New York City a male, whole Rottweiler ended up in the shelter system after it had been stolen from its owner. When its owner finally tracked it down, he was refused his dog unless he agreed to have it neutered. It cost the man $10,000 in legal fees to get his dog back and keep him intact. This is outrageous, and it’s time to set the record straight before this propaganda campaign gets worse. There is nothing broken about a male dog and therefore it is presumptuous of us to think the most social animal on the face of the earth needs to be “fixed”.

The argument made by mainstream dogdom against whole males is based on two false judgments: 1) Male energy is in some way inimical to smooth social functioning 2) There is such a thing as “bad energy”. This mindset concerns me because it distorts our view of dogs. I will explain below why I don’t believe neutering male dogs is calming, healthful or sociologically justified.

I’ve been in the dog business all my life. As a boy I worked at my father’s kennel, “Canine College” in West Redding, Connecticut. My father, John Behan, began his career in the Army Canine Corps during WW Two, training dogs for deployment in the Pacific theatre of combat. After the war, Dad was one of the first trainers to install service dogs in police departments and security applications, and he could very well have been the first trainer to apply the idea of wolves organized as a dominance hierarchy to the relationship between a dog and its owner. I am well versed in this theory.

I can distinctly remember in the sixties when the question of whether or not to neuter a male puppy started to nag at dog owners. They were beginning to hear from a growing number of veterinarians and dog experts that neutering had many benefits for male dogs, behavioral as well as medical. In those early years owners often questioned this advice (this was most true of men at that time, however now women are more willing to question modern orthodoxy) and wondered why any part of a happy, healthy puppy’s anatomy needed to be removed?

I could never see why the marketplace saw any cause for concern in the first place. I grew up with whole males as our family pets. Most of the male dogs we boarded and trained were whole. We trained police and personal protection dogs, all were whole and all were social when off-duty. When dogs misbehaved, we didn’t attribute the problem to too much testosterone. In our minds, problem behaviors represented social rather than hormonal imbalances. We believed that any dog raised and trained properly could learn to get along with anyone or any other dog or animal. If something was off in a dog’s behavior, our first impulse was to find the cause of the social imbalance and redress it. I can now see that not looking for surface biological, chemical explanations for complex social behavior was my beginning as a “natural dog trainer”.

However in the seventies, as behaviorism took over the marketplace of ideas and the commerce of dog training, the debate over neutering became more like a theological schism – with folks starting to get their hackles up. By the eighties, whoever stood on the wrong side of the inquisition was viewed as a heretic. It became virtually impossible to have a reasoned exchange of ideas on the matter. If I broached the topic at a gathering of dog folk, it provoked instant anger and so I learned to tread softly. And when puppy owners came to me for consultations or lessons, I noticed them visibly squirming at the prospect of resisting what their vet, breeder, or next door neighbor was telling them in favor of neutering.

Today there is virtually no debate on the question of neutering whatsoever. Trainers, behaviorists, breeders and veterinarians have convinced the vast majority of dog owners that there are overwhelming benefits to neutering. Castrating male puppies is now considered a basic rite of passage into human society, as automatic and necessary a procedure as a rabies vaccine. A three-pronged argument in favor of neutering has stamped out the heresy.

First of all, neutering is said to calm a dog so that he won’t become sexually frustrated, or hyperactive, and he won’t roam the countryside looking for potential mates, and the most often cited behavioral benefit, the dog won’t become aggressive. Secondly, neutering is said to improve the health of male dogs. Neutered male dogs do not get testicular cancer. Thirdly, widespread neutering is said to reduce the number of pets in circulation, and as the reasoning goes, fewer pets in dog pounds means that fewer pets will have to be destroyed.

It would thus appear that the argument in favor of neutering hasn’t a downside in sight. Advocates claim that neutering improves everything about a male dog’s physical and temperamental constitution, and yet has absolutely no impact on a dog’s personality or disposition. It’s a miracle. Neutering changes everything while it doesn’t change a thing.

However, I will argue that sexuality is so vital to the canine’s social nature we must reopen the debate on neutering. In this article I am going to present a new explanation for why sexuality evolved in nature, what its real role is in behavior and evolution, and from that perspective, we will revisit each argument that’s made in favor of neutering male dogs. My objections to neutering arise from what I’ve learned about a dog’s social nature, the nature of sociability, as well as the correlation between wholeness and health. With an almost universal rate of compliance in the neutering of male dogs, in conjunction with an exponential increase in the percentage of dogs trained through nationally certified and affordable dog training programs, and with the wealth of behavioral information available through the internet, magazines, videos and television programs, we need to ask therefore, why is there an alarming rise in rates of aggression in dogs these days, at younger and younger ages and in breeds that would have been unthinkable forty years ago? Is something amiss in modern dogdom; is something missing from our understanding on dogs?

Why sex and what is sex?

It might be surprising to many people to learn that the purpose of sexuality in animals is currently in scientific limbo. Surely something as fundamental as sexuality would have been figured out by now, and yet the truth is that it remains a subject of intense scientific debate. Jared Diamond in the “Third Ape” quips that science has the right answer; it just doesn’t know which one it is yet. I would argue that if science doesn’t know which one it is, then it doesn’t know the answer. On multiple choice tests if you don’t check an answer, you still get it wrong.

We jump straightaway to the issue of sexuality because most instances of canine aggression are attributed to a “drive to dominate” and this is supposedly in response to the universal mandate within every organism to compete for mates in order to disseminate its genes. Currently gene replication is seen as the mainspring to evolutionary psychology. If males are competing to secure breeding privileges certainly this could cause social discord.

However, if we’re going to say that male dogs become more social by virtue of being neutered, then this means that male sexual energy can be anti-social, which then immediately contradicts the most basic observation one can make about the nature of dogs, i.e. they are highly sexual in direct proportion to the degree to which they are highly social. This is a particularly inconvenient fact because elsewhere in mainstream biology the sexuality of Bonobos, labeled by evolutionary behaviorists the “social ape,” is lauded as the defining feature of their sociability. Bonobos use sexual pleasuring in every interaction, between members of the opposite sex, same sex, parent and offspring. And yet when it comes to the dog, canine behaviorism represents what I call the “New Puritanism”. All of a sudden sexuality in dogs (and dogs make Bonobos look chaste in comparison) has become a bad energy.

Just as every feather on a bird contributes to its ability to fly, wouldn’t every aspect of a dog’s nature contribute to its ability to cooperate, since the overriding feature of the canine nature is an innate and compulsive sociability?

My thesis is that sexuality evolved as an emotional transformer so that emotion could move from the simple Predator-Prey modality (Instinct), through the Male-Female modality (Sexuality), on its way to elaborating into complex personality traits (Social or Drive energy.) Sexuality is a transformer through which raw energy evolves into refined energy. This is why adolescence and coming of age is considered so critical in the social development of human beings. Our sexuality is how we mature.

A Brief Overview of the Role Sexuality Plays in Nature

This is my rock bottom principle. It takes new energy to be social. Sexuality is first and foremost about making new energy because every social contact is an act of creation in abject defiance of instinct. An act of creation requires new energy in order to get past the limiting effect of an instinct. An instinct always travels the path of least resistance, whereas a social act is always the path of highest resistance and it takes energy to get water to move uphill. So just as each day plants absorb solar energy – new energy – to create the carbon bonds of new plant growth and nourish existing tissues, animals likewise need new energy (each and every time) to not only grow, but simply to maintain existing social bonds. This is the main reason why dogs can’t possibly be social by instinct, since an instinct is about maintaining stasis, whereas sociability is about adding energy in direct contravention to the status quo. The best of dog buddies are constantly smelling each other no matter how well they get along or “know” each other, because this is how new energy is added to their emotional bond.

Where does new energy come from? From old energy.

An animal by virtue of its physiological and neurological makeup acquires a “bio-static charge” merely by contact with the external world, just as a spring driven toy car that’s rolled along the ground becomes wound up with an internal tension. Simply by being sentient an animal acquires a standing, whole body state of tension just like that toy car being rolled against the floor. Then, when it perceives something in its environment as a re-leaser from this charge, it feels this as a pull of attraction, what we call emotion.

Next, when an animal experiences resistance to the expression of its emotion, it acquires “unresolved emotion” which accrues to become an organism’s “emotional mass”. Unresolved emotion serves many behavioral functions in the moderation of consciousness, one of which is as an energy reserve for critical moments. In this way we can think of an animal’s body as an emotional battery, the deepest layers of which come up to the surface in moments of crisis or dramatic change.

However, the most important understanding is that while this energy may be latent, it is by no means dormant. As a lump sum aggregate mass, it serves as an emotional beings “emotional center-of-gravity” and just like a physical center-of-gravity, it can move anywhere in the body. When the e-cog is triggered by external stimuli, this movement of unresolved emotion as a lump sum composite is experienced by the individual as sexual energy.

So first there is emotion as a release from bio-static pressure, and behavior in this modality proceeds according to the simple Predator-Prey instinctual conduit. However, when the expression of emotion through the prey making conduit meets resistance, unresolved emotion is produced, and the release from unresolved emotion becomes organized as a state of physical sensuality, i.e. sexual (Male/Female) and this is what an animal experiences as new energy. Simply by watching any two dogs interact, one can see each individual evolving to occupy one of these complementary polarities, and then even more importantly, exchanging these roles if the interaction really gets going. We call this play but what’s really happening is that they are each turning the others’ stress reserves into new energy and this makes them both feel sensual. In short, sexual animals are more social because they have a higher capacity to feel energized by being close to other beings. When another being moves, the observing animal feels just as if it’s being energized rather than destabilized (as in an instinct). Ultimately, this feeling of new energy evolves into a permanent emotional bond that is constantly renewed by physical proximity and constant physical contact. Therefore, by definition, it is an oxymoron to say that a dog is social by instinct as is embodied in the popular expression, “dogs are pack animals”. No, dogs are group animals and this is because they are highly sexual beings.

Another way of saying all of the above is that a sexual nature allows an individual to project its “self” (e-cog) out of its body and into another body. And the greater the sexual capacity of an individual, the greater the gap it can project beyond and thereby secure a new connection.

Below we will examine the myths that inspire people to believe in the benefits of neutering.

The Calming Myth

Where did the idea arise that neutering is a calming influence on a dog and why have these observed changes in behavior been interpreted as being beneficial?

It seems to me that most of our views on animal husbandry have trickled down to us from life on the farm. Animal sciences and veterinary medicine arose from the agrarian need to manage cows, sheep, chickens and horses in an efficient and cost effective way, and in tight quarters. As a boy I remember “Smokey”, a chestnut horse that my father raised from a colt into a magnificent stallion. When Smokey didn’t get enough exercise he became agitated and might even kick down his stall door. When other horses rode past our property, it was questionable whether or not the fences would contain him. I forget exactly at what age he was “gelded” as the procedure is called in horses but I remember the event and recall that the horse was far more tractable thereafter. If someone rode by our farm, he’d get excited, but the fence seemed a whole lot stronger. This mellowing effect I’m sure is the general rule in livestock. When males are castrated they become more docile and easier for the farmer to manage as tension between them abates. (Recently however, some of my horse-owning clients have told me that their stallions are far more tractable than their gelded males.)

Then in the latter half of the 20th century, as the pet market developed, the veterinary field began to concentrate and specialize on cats and dogs, however, because of these barnyard beginnings the same theory used to account for the social behavior of livestock was applied to dogs, and there has been little examination of the many discrepancies in the theory. Therefore we have a wide acceptance of the theory that the social organization of canines is analogous to large animals and poultry; that being, a society founded on a dominant and submissive hierarchy of rank, a sophisticated version of the so-called “pecking order.”

The social life of canines is universally interpreted as the struggle for status to secure the right to pass on one’s genes. Among wolves, only the dominant pair breed and the “competition” is so pronounced that inferior females don’t even come into estrus. Given this evidence, the drive to reproduce has been traditionally seen as the mainspring to any group’s workings. Therefore, were the sexual mechanism to be deactivated by removal of the sexual glands, a potentially wild animal would be tamed. And in fact, when dogs are neutered changes in their behavior are often reported, and so the prevailing model is seemingly confirmed – as well as the stream of logic that suggests a male dog be neutered as an antidote to an excitable or unruly nature. Allegedly, what is innate and wild about a male dog is what’s wrong with him.

Yet there are two flagrant flaws to applying this model for horses, cows, sheep and chickens to dogs. One, we don’t live with horses, cows, sheep or chickens. We keep them penned up, harnessed when in public, and when we’re done for the day we leave them behind in a barn, paddock or chicken coop. Dogs on the other hand, participate in every aspect of human life. Secondly, livestock are prey animals whereas the dog evolved from the wolf, a predator. While a stronger case can be made that the social life of prey animals revolves around a competition for breeding rites (which in my view still isn’t accurate), wolves and dogs on the other hand march to a more complex cadence; one far more intricate even than other predators such as lions, cats or bears which attack prey that they can overpower singly.

But I understand the reasoning. If one views sexuality as being synonymous with sexual intercourse, then of course it would seem logical that the highest expressions of sexual energy are courtship and breeding behaviors, and competition for mates. One might also think that I’m saying that a whole dog needs to copulate in order to feel fulfilled. But I’m not. As a matter of fact, active stud dogs are more sexually frustrated than sexually naïve dogs when they’re not breeding and this is because copulation can never yield a full measure of wholeness. Procreation isn’t the fundamental purpose sexuality evolved to serve in nature.

In my model of animal behavior, I’m using the term sexuality in a far more neutral sense: in fact the term sensuality might be more apt. In my view, sexual/sensuality is, at its core, a feeling of resonance with one’s surroundings, be it with one’s environmental circumstances (for example a feeling of expansiveness while standing in a large, open field) or with one’s “temperamental” circumstances (for example a feeling of warm, physical rapport with a fellow human being or an animal). Another word we could substitute for my meaning of the term sexuality is “animal magnetism”. (Walt Whitman and the naturalist romantics from the 19th century would have no problem with this broader view of sexual/sensuality as I’m using it here. The idea of sexuality in its largest sense as a state of physical sensuality is in fact the traditional viewpoint. Whereas in our modern denatured times, sexuality has become a hyper sensation that is not natural and is not a true feeling.)

If an animal can feel resonance, it can likewise feel dissonance. In fact, the greater the potential of any organism to feel resonance, the greater the potential for that organism to feel dissonance. This is why animals can become stressed and possibly disoriented, whereas when insects are disturbed, they become excited and exhibit no lag time between disturbance and an automatically generated response that deals in a precise manner with the source of a disturbance. Animals being that they have a sexual nature have to “pick up” their “magnetic” bearings in order to feel how to proceed, like a homing pigeon orbiting two or three times when released before it knows the way home. So because sexual/sensuality represents a whole-body phenomenon that is primarily about inter-personal dynamics, and is not limited to the animal’s genitalia, therefore a dog does not need to breed to feel sensually fulfilled. Its body is how it connects to its surroundings and in creative ways that yield new energy, and new energy is the fundamental motive for all behavior, – not gene replication.

My premise is that sexuality is only thirdly about procreation and gene mixing, it is secondarily about recreation; and it is primarily about creation, by which I mean the merging of the emotional energies of two individuals via a process of sensual differentiation (one becomes prey, one becomes predator, one becomes female, the other becomes male, one becomes Active/Direct, to the other as Reactive/Indirect) in a synchronized response to change. These roles are interchanged (and irregardless of each one’s sex) until they form one social being.

In their book Dogs, the Drs. Raymond and Lorna Coppinger raise an important point about the domestication process of dogs. Early man could not have domesticated the wolf by deliberate intent because it would have been impossible to confine a large enough breeding population of wolves over the number of generations required to produce a domesticated version. They note how wolves are almost impossible to contain even with the high chain-link fences and elaborate gate mechanisms available to modern researchers. So even if some wolves were seized as cubs and tamed by early man, the fact remains that when they reached sexual maturation they would have fled to the wild to breed, never to return, and all the scarce resources that had been poured into them, what would be the difference between life and death for a people in the short run, would be running off with the wolves as well. The first versions of proto-dog, once it reached maturity, wouldn’t have been capable of being a companion let alone a working partner with early humans because it would have quickly left to sow its wild oats given that in their model, the dissemination of genes is the overarching principle to animal behavior.

The Coppingers’ developed the “Village Dump” scenario in order to account for how man might have inadvertently domesticated the wolf without having to house and care for breeding stock. Once humans settled in villages, a steady source of garbage was freely available and would have selected across an entire genome for the most approachable individuals. The last wolves to leave and the first to return ate the most garbage and might have developed an affinity for humans. A Russian fox breeding experiment seemingly verifies the premise that it takes relatively few generations selecting for approachability to produce a domesticated version of the fox. Also, the fact that every village in the third world has its set of village dogs that don’t actually belong to anyone is more compelling evidence that scavenging at the village dump may have brought proto-dog into close affiliation with humans.

However, the fact that when proto-dog reached sexual maturity, it didn’t head for the hills could also reinforce my argument that sexuality is inseparable from hunting a large, dangerous prey animal that lies beyond the physical capacity of such a predator. I believe this is a more plausible theory because the simple fact remains that there are no domesticated versions of the fox anywhere in the world, which as the Russian breeding experiment reveals, would have required a short span of time to effect. Where are the “fox-dogs”?

All the current scenarios for domestication hinge on the concept of neotony, i.e. the retention of infantile characteristics into adulthood. Stephen Budiansky in “The Truth About Dogs” claims this is the source of the various breeds of dogs. However in an energy model, neotony isn’t the retention of infantile characteristics into adulthood; rather it’s the phase of life when the physical/sensual channel, whereby raw emotion evolves into social energy, is at its most pronounced and the threshold of “projection” of the e-cog into another individual is at its lowest. This is why infant puppies mount other puppies. They are not exhibiting a drive to dominate or a sexual reflex out of context; rather they are manifesting the highly evolved sexual transformer.

In other words, even when an adult animal makes social contact with another animal, it’s not the adult mind that’s being engaged: it’s the infant mind coming up to the surface due to the softening effects that incur in such an individual as it perceives (and if it perceives) the pure positive, emotional value of what it’s attracted to. The resulting state of sensual alignment then secures an actual physical connection (via emotional projection) as the two parties exchange the aforementioned roles in order to become each other’s emotional counterbalance. The young of every species are much more social than when they mature into adults because this is when the higher processes of their brain are not yet highly developed. The infant mind turns the stress of change into a stronger force of attraction because the puppy mind remains intimately integrated with the sexual module. The higher processes of the nervous system detach it from this intimate degree of integration and render the adult mind. It’s precisely because there is such a channel; and that the channel persists into adulthood as the basis of social behavior (and to neutralize the limiting effects of a highly developed nervous system), that the phenomenon is even available to and malleable by selective breeding in the first place.

Just as Serpell in “The Domestic Dog” points out that the fetus in the womb is a highly specialized organism that evolved to adapt to a specific environmental niche, i.e. the womb, likewise in a “network consciousness” way of looking at social behavior and evolution, so too is the infant puppy. It’s not undeveloped in the sense of being un-evolved. Rather, I call the puppy mind a “social stem cell” capable of devolving from the adult form and re-evolving in response to whatever emotional environment it currently finds itself in.

At any rate, it doesn’t matter to my theory of behavior which domestication scenario proves true, or even what specific animal is the true ancestor of the domestic dog. My theory rests on one demonstrable, observable and testable fact, that the drive to hunt in dogs is stronger than the drive to reproduce or even to survive. This is why dogs can be trained to hunt past the point of satiation, why untrained dogs chase deer they are never, ever going to catch, not to mention that dogs chase cars that do kill them, and why it is even possible to have a police dog eagerly dash into gunfire. Not that such a dog is aware of danger and therefore capable of courage in the human sense of the term; that in fact is just the point. Because such a dog is so sensualized by the drive to hunt and craves physical contact above all else, is why it’s oblivious to the possibility of danger. No other animal can be trained to perform such a feat. Gunfire, stick hits, knock-down, drag-out fights are converted into physical stimulants by such a dog’s “puppy mind”.

Therefore, because sexuality serves a function far bigger than reproduction (i.e. the drive-to-make-contact-with-the-path-of-highest-resistance), because this makes the most energy, and because the domestication process amplified the emotional/sexual capacity of the wolf (or some other closely related ancestor), this accounts for the domestication of the dog and is also why no other species of animal but the wolf can produce a domesticated version as varied and as adaptable as the dog. The wolf stands alone in this regard because it must feel which prey is becoming vulnerable since its main prey is physically superior to wolves. Wolves evolved to project its “self” (e-cog) into prey animals and then “reads” what’s going on “out there” by virtue of what it feels “in here.”

The ability to cross the genetic/instinctual divide that separates man from beast is a matter of emotional capacity, and the one and only animal with the emotional capacity to bridge the gap between animal and human, is the dog. And since sexual/sensuality is that mechanism of trans-species communication that co-evolved with the wolf’s capacity to hunt a physically superior prey, there is no need for dog to breed in order to feel sexually/sensually fulfilled. I maintain that the highly sexual nature of dogs is precisely why they are able to eschew a life of the wild because only contact with man can complete the dog’s deepest emotional circuitry. So just as the hunt involves sexuality as a transformer between prey and predator, the connection between man and proto-dog likewise revolved around the hunt and became a means of communication and emotional bonding that was more gratifying than anything else proto-dog could possibly do.

One might counter that their male dog would rather breed with a female in heat than be by their side if the opportunity presented itself, and the Drs. Coppingers likewise maintain that the drive to hunt in dogs is not that strong. But I would counter that this is because such a dog’s emotional capacity was never developed and was actually inhibited by its manner of raising and training. (Interestingly the Coppingers are accomplished sled dog breeders, trainers and racers and I would point out that the drive to pull the sled with the group of dogs feeding off each other’s energy, and the proclivity of such dogs to howl in unison, is the very sensual/sexual capacity I’m arguing for as the fundamental essence of the canine social nature. Imagine harnessing a pack of cats together!)

Every protection dog trainer knows that a dog in drive could care less about a female in heat on the training field. It’s only after the training session when the dog comes down from its “Drive” that it would be distracted by a female in heat. I own a male and a female German shepherd and twice a year my female comes into heat. If I left my male dog outside he would indeed tear down the gate to the yard and breed with her, and this is a bi-annual period of great inconvenience around the Behan household. Nevertheless, when I let my male outdoors and he immediately runs to the gate where the female flags her tail, when I fire up my tractor and head off into the woods to gather some firewood, he immediately leaves her behind because he would rather be part of that hunt.

Now because most of the sexual/sensual behaviors that belong to this social-making domain manifest on a far subtler plane of physical expression than overt acts of copulation, they have been mistakenly attributed to other faculties of intelligence, such as thinking or instinct. For example, when a dog goes around an obstacle toward an object of attraction as opposed to fruitlessly pursuing a straightforward approach or giving up altogether, in reality this is a function of sensual alignment with the object of desire. The feat of “intelligence” does not represent a dog figuring out that one way could be better than another; sensuality means orienting according to the cardinal points of the compass. You may have noticed that when you train a dog to not go in one direction, it only means don’t go in that direction. One still has to go around the compass. Also, when dogs meet and greet, they are sensually orienting and aligning with each other, not displaying dominance and submission and thereby figuring out a hierarchy of relative rank. If this latter explanation were true, then why do dogs investigate their own urine and poop? Are they placing themselves into their own internal hierarchy of rank?

On occasion of course, a feeling of physical rapport does indeed lead to procreation (although we see with humans that it is far more often in pursuit of recreation rather than a drive to procreate), and hormones have a lot to do with intensifying a state of sensual alignment to the point of mating. However in most species, hormones raise the individual’s emotional capacity so that they can get past the limiting effects of instinct that maintain social and flight distances, whereas in dogs the exact opposite is happening. The overt sex hormones decrease the emotional capacity of canines so that their feeling of resonance collapses into sexual reflexes that are species-specific to how canines copulate. But even here we can still see the tell-tale signature of emotional fusion as the governing principle to the canine makeup as manifested by the canine copulatory tie with male and female interlocked for as long as an hour or two; a position of compromise which again defies all mainstream biological explanation.

The fundamental and most important function of sexuality is to facilitate the communication of energy between animals, and most especially, between species. Furthermore, by definition this produces sociability because sociability in the grand scheme of things is how “the network” adds energy to the system in order to offset entropy. Therefore, species of animals co-evolve to create an ecosystem just as plants co-evolve to generate a life-giving atmosphere, and just as participants in an economy through their collective purchases and services co-evolve to generate wealth, i.e. new energy as in the expansion of an economy. In all of nature, the highest expression of this evolved form of symbiotic communication predicated on a physical/sensual rapport is the relationship that has evolved between dog and man.

If all of the above is true, what happens when a dog is neutered?

Because sexuality is a far bigger phenomenon than genitalia and reproduction, even a neutered dog remains fundamentally a sexual animal, so we are just talking about a few clicks on a gradient if temperament were to be visualized on a clock face. Every dog has a temperamental “flaw”, a set point toward which it gravitates in order to deal with stress. Some dogs like to be at 5:29, some orient to 11:59 etc., and these various polarities play out as diametrically different behaviors. Each individual has the entire code, but they orient to a preferred “polarity” and in this way the phenomenon of temperament accounts for variability within a litter as it simultaneously accounts for variability between breeds. It’s a simple fractal equation elaborating into an unbelievably intricate expression on every level of organization, from the internal makeup of the individual, to the external makeup of the group, to the makeup of the entire canine genome and its inter-relatedness with other species.

Running parallel with the confusion of sexuality with reproduction is the confusion of sexuality with hormones. Hormones do not cause behavior: they support behavior in the sense that they amplify the feeling of resonance and sustain a force of attraction despite a high rate of change or a high degree of resistance in the surroundings. For this reason the military drafts young men that are at the peak of a testosterone-addled worldview because they entertain a ridiculous belief in their invulnerability. Green soldiers actually chafe for combat to break the boredom of peacetime deployment. Stephen Ambrose writes that the first wave of Allied forces hitting the beaches at Normandy were troops that had never seen combat. The assault planners knew that given the overwhelming odds against success, they didn’t want to ask combat veterans: who had long since lost the blinding flush of testosterone to the cold hard reality of warfare, to entertain that the impossible was possible.

If a lust for action, which is actually a lust for energy, also invokes a blind-like faith in one’s sense of invulnerability and unlimited potential, what’s so bad about that? How does that make testosterone an anti-social hormone? Hormones do not cause sexuality: hormones support sexuality. Hormones do not create energy: they exist in service to emotion in order to make energy.

Seeing sexuality as a function of hormones also makes us think that a state of sexual attractiveness can only occur between individuals of the same species. Yet if we were to revisit how wolves hunt, or look again at dogs working livestock, we might note that they are sexually attracted to their prey because this is how a straightforward Drive-To-Make-Contact is deflected into circular, indirect manners of approach that are context specific, i.e. in resonance with what the sheep and even the human sheepherder are doing. A properly trained working dog circles the sheep with the same drive as they do were they to dive in and grab a sheep with a full-mouth bite. In other words, the simple prey drive manifests into complex social behaviors because the physical resistance of the situation is transformed by an organism’s sexual nature, into an even stronger feeling of attraction, although now one that is imbued with an incredible degree of nuance and refinement as a circular style of release. And with the emotional experience of this higher level of complexity, the dog derives an even deeper feeling of wholeness and contentedness. In fact I contend that a properly channeled dog working sheep derives more emotional satisfaction then a dog actually killing one.

Hormones do not create social behavior or anti–social behavior: their function is to support social behavior. They support an individual’s ability to go out on a social limb so to speak and take up a novel social station so as to add energy to the system by maintaining an old connection or making a new one. Making social contact means taking a risk and always goes against the grain of an instinct. Instincts seek stasis, whereas sociability means change, growth. It’s a pack instinct that compels a wolf pack to kill an alien wolf straying into its territory, whereas it’s the puppy mind that would let a lone wolf in.

Hormones are released in my theory when the dog senses the potential for a common ground with a newcomer. This makes the dog feel more energized and he becomes more active and refined about making contact. Also, hormones serve to devolve an individual back to the clear emotional channel he was born with as a puppy, only now to be reconfigured in terms of the object of attraction and by which I mean as its emotional counterbalance.

When the sexual glands are removed the dog loses the energetic support of hormones. He feels less safe about extending himself emotionally, of opening up. He gravitates to his temperamental set point and resists being displaced from it. Some believe this is calmness. And I’m not saying he’s not “friendly”, – in fact he may even become hyper-friendly, i.e. socially nervous. This is but one possible manifestation of having less energy; some of these effects are subtle whereas some are overt. For example, a dog may begin to roam less because it has less energy, and so this is seen as good. But then later in life it becomes noise-sensitive or even phobic. However, because so much time has gone by no one is likely to make the connection and the dog’s sudden aversion to a loud noise is mistakenly attributed to the dog’s personality or perhaps to some negative experience.

Because emotion piggybacks on the most fundamental systems of the body, in particular the physiological and neurological processes dedicated to balance and hunger, in order for one individual to let another into its “mood”, it must “feel open” so that the new object of attraction becomes integrated into its hunger/balance makeup. Sexuality facilitates this. (Note we say physical, emotional and sexual appetite.) Whereas on the one hand a neutered dog becomes more sensitive to changes in his social environment, (and possibly more friendly as a defensive response) and becomes more resistant to “flipping polarity” to allow for new energy to come into the system. A social brittleness begins to replace a desirable flexibility because an individual will begin to need more and more to reside at his most comfortable place within the pack, his inborn temperamental inclination. Not being supported by hormonal energy, the individual will resist being displaced and moving to a new role or personality style in order to facilitate the group purpose. Therefore, change appears more threatening to neutered males. At my kennel we have a large play yard for the dogs, and it’s our experience that the neutered males had to be supervised most closely, whereas we always find the whole dog running around with a stick in its mouth as if to say, “Come on fellas, cut it out, let’s play.”

About 15 years ago my New York clients started to report that their neutered males were attacking whole males. Owners at the dog runs were telling newcomers to neuter their male puppies or otherwise their neutered dogs would pick fights with them. At first I found this hard to believe, but not for long. The judgment against male energy held by humans is now manifesting in their dogs.

Meanwhile, it’s strange that we don’t recognize the obvious good effects that sexuality imparts to sociability. We recognize that male and female dogs get along better in the same household than same sexed pairings because the overt, complementary sexual channel between them is so readily available. Similarly, we recognize that wolves are extremely social animals, and yet in the wild no pack member is spayed or neutered. And dogs are far more social than wolves because they are to the exact same degree more sexual than wolves. A wolf isn’t sexually mature until 2 years of age, whereas dogs are fertile at six months. Wolves are selective about breeding partners whereas dogs are promiscuously non–discriminating. Female wolves come into season once a year whereas female dogs come into heat twice a year. Clearly, domestication of the dog meant a further enhancement of the wolf’s already highly developed sexual capacity.

When I wrote this article about fifteen years ago, I lived with two whole males: a five-year old Corgi and a nine-year old German shepherd. Almost every day, training clients came to my farm and most of these were aggressive dogs. The vast majority of these dogs have been neutered and the most difficult of these cases are those who have been neutered at the earliest age. And yet I can open my door, let my dogs out and they will turn themselves inside and out trying to find a way to connect with such dogs. If the other dog puts up a wall, they’ll observe it. If the other dog is receptive to contact but is tentative and unsure, they’ll make themselves soft. If the other dog clearly wants to fight, they’ll give him a wide berth or approach with the most precise and delicate form of diplomatic entreaty. It isn’t because they are smart or well trained, it’s because they can feel what the other dog is feeling and they are compelled to respond sensually, rather than instinctually because that feels better. It doesn’t feel good to put a wet nose in a hot socket.

They sense the emotional balance of the new dog, and even though according to traditional dogma my dogs are on their own territory and should therefore be the ones threatened by an intruder, the opposite is the case. Barley, the Corgi, is feisty enough to take on the world and yet he is especially seductive in these tense moments, enticing the other dog to chase him while keeping close to the car in case he needs to duck under to escape the inevitable overload that immutably precedes a softening. He waits and waits and makes little entreaties until the clouds have fully cleared. Meanwhile, Illo the German shepherd will tend to root up a stick in order to find a common ground.

So, on the one hand proponents of neutering say that the procedure will change the dog’s entire outlook on life so that he’ll stop mounting, pulling his handler down the road, trying to establish dominance, peeing on the furniture, won’t have any aggressive tendencies whatsoever… it will calm him in every sense of the word. But then on the other hand, the experts say don’t worry, neutering won’t change your dog’s personality whatsoever. It won’t change anything, just as it changes everything.

Unfortunately, researchers, behaviorists, trainers, veterinarians, dog professionals and lay people alike have misinterpreted the complexities of canine social life and have reduced it to the drive to dominate in the quest for procreation. Castration is thereby seen as helping a dog adjust to our world. This might work well enough for horses and cows, but again, we don’t have to live with a horse or a cow. We don’t require these animals to cope with the degree of change that dogs are exposed to. We don’t ask them to step outside of their instinctual frames of reference as we require the dog.

The Pet Over–Population Myth

At first glance this aspect of the argument in favor of neutering seems compelling. If more male dogs were castrated, presumably there would be fewer litters whelped, fewer puppies needing homes and therefore fewer castaway pets. The yearly slaughter of millions of these abandoned waifs is indeed a tragedy. Were neutering able to reduce the national carnage who in their right mind would deny its merits?

Yes, there are too many dogs in America’s shelters, perfectly healthy and normal dogs, many destined to be killed. But if there are too many pets in shelters, does neutering address this issue?

The logic behind the claim that too-many-pets means too-many-problem-dogs in shelters makes as much sense as the idea that limiting the number of cars manufactured would reduce highway fatalities. If there were fewer puppies, by simple arithmetic there would be fewer candidates for the pound and perhaps this is why P.E.T.A. (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an influential and in my view a radical animal rights group) is pushing for legislation that would outlaw the breeding of pet dogs altogether. Their reasoning, as it is for most advocates of neutering, is that there are too many dogs for the number of caring or responsible homes available to receive them. A reasonable argument at first glance, until one realizes that two unrelated concepts, A) an excess of dogs, and B) the condition of being unwanted, are being lumped together. And if these two concepts are accepted as an aggregate, one is then led into the faulty conclusion that it is the excess of dogs that produces the condition of their being unwanted.

First of all, has America reached the saturation point in regard to its number of pets? Consider that in France there are twice as many pets as there are children according to statistics quoted in the Reader’s Digest. (Over the last ten years however, there has been an interesting development in the northeast. It seems there aren’t enough abandoned dogs to meet demand and so humane societies are importing strays from the South as well as from around the world.) I suspect that if more American dog owners understood how dogs learn to cooperate by virtue of their sexual nature, our country could easily accommodate the number of puppies we now produce. And isn’t a high demand for pets a good thing? Life with a dog can offer one a refuge from the numbing pace of modern society, a veritable centrifuge of tension spinning us away from a sense of community and from contact with nature. Owning a dog gives one a ready excuse to go for a walk and draws one inevitably into contact with fellow dog owners. The simple act of walking a dog gives one a chance to ponder what mysteries of a vestigial and hidden wilderness are revealed by their pet’s acuity of senses.

Also, science has demonstrated that talking to and touching a pet is incredibly soothing; stroking a dog’s soft fur lowers blood pressure and reduces anxiety. Pets download the emotional burdens of an owner’s day without judgment or complaint. It may very well be that pets are responsible for preventing untold numbers of emotional and nervous breakdowns and these benefits are so widely recognized that pet-facilitated therapy is a rapidly growing field. Are there too many dogs? The politically correct answer these days may be yes, but truly, given the stresses of modern life, there are hardly enough.

In my mind, the only relevant question is where (or rather how) do unwanted pets come from? The situation is portrayed as if there are hordes of dogs sneaking around backyards, churning out puppies (irregardless of market demand) and then these winnow their way into homes across the land like an infestation of insects. Whereas most puppies (unlike kittens for example, as cats do breed freely in barns, underneath porches, in abandoned cars, etc.) do indeed start out in life wanted by someone. Pet stores, puppy mills, backyard breeders, none of which represent a source of pups that I would recommend, usually have no trouble finding willing owners for their puppies. They’re not turning out a huge surplus and then abandoning these dogs for the shelters to deal with. These outlets exist to satisfy a demand already in place; they don’t create the need, they capitalize on something already present in the marketplace. And even in those relatively rare instances when a household bitch is accidentally impregnated, in the vast majority of cases, eager people are readily found to bring the pups into their homes and lives. The linkage between too many pets, the condition of being unwanted, and the neutering issue, has been so effectively drummed into people’s minds that when I ask people if they intend to neuter their male puppy, the most common response I hear is, “Probably, we don’t intend to breed him and there are so many unwanted pets”. So what’s the problem? Don’t breed him and don’t ‘un-want’ him.

A critic might interject here that many owners get a puppy on impulse: they never would have acquired a pup if they hadn’t caught sight of that cute little doggie in the window. And when the pup outgrows the cute stage they soon fall by the wayside. This is an excellent argument against pet shops and puppy mills, but it has nothing to do with neutering. My preference is that pet shops and puppy mills be driven from business but preferably through consumer education. (However, an outright ban on inhumane breeding practices is needed.) Dogs are incredibly sensitive beings: puppies shouldn’t be put in glass cages in shopping malls and incessantly handled by curiosity seekers. But just because these operations are severely flawed doesn’t mean one can thereby link the issues of discarded pets, neutering and pet overpopulation into the same syndrome.

My critics might next counter that there would be fewer dogs discarded if only responsible people owned dogs. Yes, that would be nice.

For most of my career in dogs, my boarding and training business was located in Fairfield County, Connecticut, one of the richest areas in the country and an area that most likely has the highest percentage of neutered and spayed pets of any region in the country. By these indicators, Fairfield County is apparently a bastion of responsibility. Yet are Fairfield County’s pounds and shelters any less burdened? Are fewer pets destroyed here per capita than elsewhere? I continually heard of dogs being cast off or destroyed not because they started out as surplus flotsam, but because they developed one behavioral problem or another. Furthermore, I have never found a responsible person fail to see that euthanasia or abandonment is the most responsible approach to a serious problem. Responsible people are acting responsibly by removing a pet once they think there is no other option. A responsible owner doesn’t turn a dog loose or pawn it off on someone unsuspecting. Therefore I’ve found that affluence, rates of castration among pets or any of the so-called benchmarks of civic responsibility and compassion seem to correlate little with a pup’s chances of survival in man’s world.

And who is going to be made responsible for conducting the responsibility litmus test? I have known homeless people who have provided a companion dog with a good life. Who is going to be anointed judge of the rest of us, and what will be their standard? Were it possible to regulate, or legislate, a responsible owner into existence, responsibility without understanding still wouldn’t be enough. Education is the key. If consumers were more aware of what it takes to raise a calm, healthy companion they wouldn’t turn to pet stores and backyard breeders in the first place.

So while responsibility has its place, my point is that responsible dog ownership need not by definition require neutering. Especially since in my view, neutering doesn’t improve a dog’s sociability, it inhibits it and can thereby hasten a dog’s banishment to the pound or euthanasia at the clinic.

Given my interpretation of canine social nature, I view the so-called unwanted pet syndrome from a different perspective. The real problem as I’ve suggested isn’t that there are too many dogs, but that there are too many dogs being misunderstood and that it is the resulting confusion and disappointment that creates an unwanted pet. The argument is being presented standing on end. It’s the process of becoming unwanted that creates the so-called excess, not the other way around. That there are vast legions of unwanted and discarded dogs is not because there are too many dogs to go around, but because we are to that degree out of touch with the social nature of dogs. This is why I find the popular view of neutering as therapeutic so vexing, for it represents the absence and not the apex in the understanding of dog behavior. To repeat, the real problem isn’t pet overpopulation, (although I do indeed wish that only a few select dogs would be bred – and these wouldn’t be the ones show dog experts would select), the core issue is that dog and man all too often can’t learn to get along precisely because the wild, natural basis of canine behavior, the relationship of sexuality to harmonious group living isn’t understood and is in fact denied.

Therefore, when people take the time to train and regulate their dog’s activities, I don’t consider neutering as being in their dog’s best interests. But then maybe for some, neutering their dog is a way they can say to themselves they’re being responsible, and then they don’t actually have to act responsibly. They can open the door and let their dog go his own way in good conscience. It’s been my experience that the majority of male dogs discarded at shelters have already been neutered. Shelter workers tell me otherwise, but I don’t see this from my own experience. Where are these un-neutered dogs coming from? The average dog owner takes his puppy to a vet clinic for shots and is always advised to neuter their dog and most people, if they are interested in raising a well–adjusted puppy, accept it since this is the only information provided them. So if most of the dogs in shelters are un-neutered, this would indicate that these whole males come from owners who resist so–called informed opinion. Or, they are resisting out of outright machismo.

Whenever I talk to shelter people they tell me that litters are tossed over the fence or dropped off all the time. But how often, and don’t those puppies find homes? Otherwise, why would shelters be importing dogs?

The Health Myth

Another myth in my view is that neutering promotes health in male dogs. Medical matters are outside my expertise but I’ll share my opinions nonetheless because I believe that whole, heal, hale and health are synonyms.

In my opinion, carcinogenic dog foods contaminated with steroids, antibiotics, chemical additives, diseased food animals processed into feed, highly-processed and therefore de-vitalized rations are the real source of most modern ailments. Fifty years ago, my father in his commercial kennel, as did most pet owners, fed mostly meat scraps and very little processed dog food as it wasn’t widely available in those days. No question dogs were much healthier then. Modern Veterinary medicine is so aligned with big dog food business that I believe they’ve conveniently forgotten how hardy dogs used to be. I now hear of dogs diagnosed as being allergic to grass. What’s coming next, an allergic reaction to air?

Once when I owned my boarding kennel, I used to care for an Irish setter over a number of years. When he was about ten years old I gave him a bath and noticed how incredibly soft the skin on his underbelly had become. And then one day, about a year later, I let him out into our exercise yard to play with other dogs and later when I checked back on things, I was horrified to see him grabbing hunks of his skin and ripping them off his belly. He was covered in blood; I wrapped him in a blanket to keep him from inflicting any more damage and then rushed him to the vet. I had never seen anything like it, but the vet then informed me that this happens sometimes with older, neutered Irish Setters.

And then there were many older, neutered male dogs that had to be given hormone additives to their diet because they had become incontinent as they aged. Strangely, when owners ask their vets about any health consequences to neutering, they never seem to mention these long-term effects. It’s always presented in a completely rosy light.

I don’t see why a dog fed a natural diet can’t live to a ripe old age with all of his glands functioning free of disease. Also, most neutered males end up fat, if not obese, which can hardly be a prescription for health. Their owners could feed them less, but they don’t, and being neutered they tend to be less active and so they don’t burn up the calories; the weight piles on. They acquire a top-heavy flaccid body conformation with an overall appearance of unfitness. Ironically, in this age of holistic medicine, whole foods, an “un-whole” dog is considered more healthful. We need to ask, how might the whole organism, particularly the endocrine system, be subtly unbalanced in ways that science is not yet able to measure? Certainly the explosion of thyroid dysfunction in dogs over the last twenty years might have something to do with the neutering, and early spaying policies that have taken hold during this same period. And amazingly, the current fad in behaviorism is now diagnosing many incidents of aggression as being due to a thyroid imbalance.

While the removal of sexual organs will preclude the development of cancer in that particular organ, has any study been done to indicate a lessening in the rate of other cancers or diseases elsewhere in the body? (Links to such studies are provided below.) Perhaps all neutering really accomplishes is to shift the site of a cancer to another organ and the real source of cancer isn’t addressed. I remember as a kid, it was a common medical practice to remove a child’s tonsils because tonsils were considered an irrelevant vestigial appendage. Our family doctor didn’t buy it, and fortunately my parents listened. Now medicine recognizes the tonsils are the first line of defense and serve to trap infectious agents before they go deeper into the body and take a more dangerous manifestation. When will we learn that every component of the body is an integral component of the whole? If health is our concern, how could neutering be healthful? I advise my clients that they should feed their dog a diet free of contaminants and industrial processing and that nourished with whole foods, a whole male is more likely to lead a vigorously healthy life than a neutered one.

Some science below:

http://www.dogcancerblog.com/bladder-and-prostate-cancer-neutering-male-dogs-increases-risk/

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2. Definitions
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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:

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2. Why Does the Universe Do Everything In A Circle?
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To date, the study of evolution has only considered two kinds of capacities: a physical and a mental capacity. But a third evolutionary track is “emotional capacity”. This is a carrying capacity, how much emotional energy the organism can hold and/or conduct (and therefore go-by-feel) before an instinct (or a thought in the case of humans and perhaps other primates) is triggered and displaces the ability to feel the pure emotional context of the moment. While physical and mental capacities are governed by genes, emotional capacity is governed by the laws of nature (gravity, laws of motion, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, even quantum mechanics). Since all animals feel these energetic effects the same way, therefore emotion as the physical embodiment of the laws of nature is the basis for communication even between individuals of different species, and the canine/human connection is the most profound example of this in nature. Emotion is a universal medium within which individuals can synchronize their actions and generate spontaneous order, the source of which has traditionally been mistakenly attributed to genes, instincts and thinking.

Species of animals vary primarily in terms of emotional capacity. Predators have a higher emotional capacity than prey animals, predators that hunt in a group have a higher capacity than solitary predators, and predators that hunt as a group against a large, dangerous prey that fights back via a coordinated herd defense, have the highest emotional capacity of all.

The main prey of wolves (moose, bison, Musk Ox) is physically superior to the wolf even when confronted by wolves in numbers. Therefore, because a canine is attracted to a prey it cannot overpower physically, it must do so emotionally (by inducing a state of confusion in the prey thereby decreasing its emotional capacity so that a flight instinct takes over in its head). The prey’s ability to feel its “self” must be overwhelmed before such a formidable beast can be brought to ground. This means that a wolf evolved to feel what the prey is feeling in order to sense which prey in a herd are susceptible to confusion and can be engaged in relative safety.

There are only two land dwelling predators that evolved along the path of a high emotional capacity, canines and human beings. And contrary to the idea that domestication meant tamping down the wildness of the wolf, in reality domestication meant an amplification of the wolf’s emotional capacity, the essential kernel of its wild nature. For this reason the domestic dog has a smaller brain than its wild ancestor given that the brain is not the chief faculty of an emotional intelligence.

The higher a species’ emotional capacity the greater its behavioral plasticity since actions can take shape in real time and evolve to precisely fit the energetic circumstances of any given moment. This is because “group triggers” (i.e. common objects of attraction) as opposed to instinctual triggers become catalysts to a self-organizing system (sociability) as a means of responding to change. Most species are limited by stereotypical behavior when confronted with too much change in their circumstances whereas the domestic dog’s high emotional capacity neutralizes the limiting effects of canine instincts and allows it to perceive order when other animals cannot, and then respond in a coherent way. Because emotion is based on the laws of nature, and because the environment changes in accord with the laws of nature, an emotional response proves to be highly adaptive because it turns change into information.

Whenever any two dogs meet and greet, it is possible to see step by step the evolution of sociability (the emergence of a network) unfolding in accord with the laws of nature right before our eyes. And while their sociability is automatic, spontaneous and innate, nonetheless it is not reflexive. It does not arise from instinct and not by “figuring” things out. It evolves. Therefore, it is incorrect to say that dogs are “pack animals,” meaning that dogs are social by instinct. Dogs feel each other’s “energy” and because energy works the same in all living beings, feelings guide them as to how to connect. These properties of energy and its principles of movement are felt by an animal in its heart, not its head.

On the other hand whenever dogs do not get along, then we are indeed watching instincts at work because of a diminished emotional capacity. In fact whenever an instinct surfaces in a dog’s domestic life (instincts are generated by the brain) an anxious call to a behaviorist or trainer by the pet owner is likely to follow.

The premise of Natural Dog Training is that when a dog has failed to adapt to an owners’ lifestyle, it’s because of a denial by the owner of the dog’s fundamental nature, not because of the dog’s nature. My argument is that dogs are social by nature (nothing is “broken,” nothing needs to be “fixed”) because they perceive the world and respond to it according to its laws rather than according to human reason. This will prove to be the best explanation for everything canine, from the evolution of the wolf, the domestication of the dog, and most especially, for the incredible emotional bond that evolves between a dog and its owner.

The purpose of the “Natural Dog Society” is for dog owners to become their own experts by way of understanding and experiencing these natural laws for themselves. An owner can learn to change a dog’s mind by directly tapping in and affecting how these energies are at work within their dog. One can help a dog get-out-of-its-head and into its heart. This theory is observable, demonstrable and testable. In this vein I will be introducing such new terms as emotional conductivity, emotional projection, emotional battery, emotional suspension, emotional center-of-gravity, emotional fusion and many others, all of which flow from the concept of emotional capacity, in other words, Heart. (Soon a glossary of such terms will be posted at the end of this section.) I wish to caution the reader however that before one can learn to see these as common sense concepts; these ideas may strike one as radical: one might find oneself becoming defensive, offended or perhaps even guilty because one is begining to move outside the conventional mainstream. (Confusion on the other hand, is good.) As you begin to explore, I recommend not trying to place these ideas into familiar frames of reference. Just try to see.

Seeing dogs in a new way is like looking at a two-dimensional drawing of a three dimensional cube. On first glance the cube might appear to be oriented in a particular direction given that the eye has immediately adopted that view in construing the lines on the page. But then, if one were to shift their visual interpretation of which way the angles are configured, lines that once seemed to stretch off into the background, suddenly flip around and now project toward the viewer. Before that shift, all the evidence seemed to point to one and only one way to interpret the drawing. But then in a second the front of the cube becomes the back and a completely different picture appears in complete contravention to what at first had seemed self-evident and obvious. This is what happened for me in the nineteen seventies when I began to see dog and animal behavior in the light of the immediate-moment. Once I stopped projecting thoughts onto behavior (such as territoriality, dominance, submission, jealousy, anger, etc.), once I stripped my mental mind with its filters out of  what I was observing, all that remained was energy. I began to discover an energetic logic that animates, organizes and informs everything animals do, and which turns the evidence inside out on why animals-do-what-they-do. This model while visible in all animals is especially vivid in the things the average dog does every day.

My aim is for the Natural Dog Society to become a forum to explore the natural dog theory to help owners “feel” what I’m trying to say. The dividends will be well worth the effort because once one understands how their dog goes by feeling they will own the “happiest dog on the block.”

Because dogs are emotional beings, looking at dogs in a new way also means we’re looking at emotion in a new way and this is at the heart of what might first appear to be unsettling about these notions. Our entire life is wrapped around the enigma of emotion and the mysteries of why we feel what and how we do. And because our mental mind fears what it cannot control, it subconsciously resists true information about the nature of emotion because it desperately seeks to keep emotion in its box. So at first don’t try to figure this out. Simply set the prevailing theories and conventional thinking aside so that a necessary shift of perspective can occur. I’m not asking that my ideas not be subjected to intellectual scrutiny. In fact that’s all I’m asking for, as opposed to the automatic reflexive judgments traditionally assigned to emotion as something irrational, impulsive, wild, not to mention self-destructive and dangerous.

And finally, no behavior is too small, trivial or familiar to merit our attention; all the things dogs do contain a universe of meaning. While the entries follow in a progressive unfolding of understandings, one can feel free to jump around and go to any topic of immediate interest. At the end of this tutorial I trust the reader will understand why we all intuitively say of our best friend, “My dog is all heart.”

Related posts:

1. Why Are Dogs Attracted to Human Beings?
2. Why Do Dogs Do Everything in a Circle?
3. Definitions

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