For example in Billy’s statement — “The first domesticated dog’s would have responded much the same way dog’s do now, and that is mostly from a hierarchical pack mindset. All it has to do with feelings, is where the dog feels it fits into the pack.”—is blending feeling and thinking into one thing. If a dog feels its way into some kind of order then it cannot be thinking and therefore this can’t be a pack that is headed by a leader. So is it feeling or is it thinking its way into its place within the pack? Is it overriding a feeling in deference to a thought, if so then what about the instinct component? Is it overriding the feeling plus an instinct with a thought? That would mean you can’t say dogs are pack animals according to a dominance/submissive instinct because with the injection of thoughts into the formula the pivotal issue now becomes whether the dog or wolf is thinking about overriding an instinct or not, and in that case therefore thoughts are preeminent over instinct. So if Billy is arguing that it’s thinking about the prospects of achieving dominance relative to settling for submissiveness, and then choosing between these alternatives, then why can’t a group of dogs or wolves all choose to be submissive like African Wild Hunting dogs? Why can’t they choose to be neither, is dominance and submission all they can think about? In these thought-centric models we’re presented with endless self-contradictory logic loops. The biggest one being the use of the term energy everywhere in the discussion on dogs on the web, be it pack theory or positive camp, but which apparently no one actually believes.

The presumption that Billy is working from, and yet without a critical examination of this assumption, is that there is not a universal operating system to animal consciousness, which would be odd in the natural scheme of things because for example we find photosynthesis is the universal operating system of all green plants, a pretty broad range of diverse life forms occupying all environmental niches, and we find that all genes of every organism are composed from the same two pairs of amino acids, and here we are on the internet communicating because all computers no matter their make or model run on the same binary digital system. So if Billy believes in making an argument for animal behavior based on evolution by way of common descent, then he is going to have a tough time coming up with a consistent model for animal and human consciousness without a universal operating system because that is the only possibility logically consistent with the fundamental tenet of modern evolution by way of common descent. This logical shortcoming is why in modern behaviorism/biology there isn’t a coherent explanation for sexuality, personality or the nature of emotion, it’s constantly tripping over its thought-centric interpretations of behavior since it hasn’t critically examined the notion it has taken as self-evident that there isn’t a universal operating system of animal consciousness.
On the other hand a coherent model is immediately available in an energy theory. While I don’t claim to be an expert with any animal other than the dog, the topic of all animal behavior is germane to any discussion of dogs because I’m maintaining that there is a universal operating system to animal consciousness, the human animal as well, with dogs being the easiest specimen to examine in this regard because dogs go more by feel, less by instinct (and not at all by thinking) than any other animal. This lends to an innate capacity for adaptability because dogs are able to devolve complex situations to their primal emotional values (via the neotony/sexuality phenomena) of predator relative to prey, and therefore they are able to generate coherent responses in real time and in perfect context to the emotional nuance of any group dynamic they find themselves in. In other words, they operate more generally from the universal operating system of animal consciousness which gives them a greater emotional capacity to communicate and connect with the widest array of other species and under a very high rate of change (and thus only the dog has proliferated in every aspect of human life and civilization.)

In an energy model, all behavior is a function of attraction and always proceeds from predator to prey, from that which projects emotion to that which can absorb it, be it a Robin on a worm, a horse eating grass, two lovers, a mother and her baby (“You’re so cute I could EAT you up.”) or two blue jays looking at each other. It’s impossible to have an emotional response to something without occupying either the predator or the preyful polarity, and all you have to do is examine the intuitive use of language to see this operating system functioning within the highest reaches of the human intellect. One cannot hold a conversation without alternating between projecting and absorbing energy.
Every animal has a predatory aspect relative to a preyful aspect, just as every atom has a ratio of a negative charge relative to a positive charge. A bunny rabbit is in the overall what we call a prey animal, but it still has a predatory aspect (just ask Jimmy Carter). So blue jays have both a predatory aspect relative to a preyful aspect.

Billy states that predatory energy is only concerned with procurement of food — ” The blue jay has NO predatory “energy” unless it is actually in the act of seeking food.” — this is an illogical statement if one has ever worked a protection or police dog. The strongest urge is to bite, not to eat. Dogs don’t chase cars in the hopes of eating one and neither do wolves kill the moose with the intention of eating it. To grasp the overarching importance of the prey drive one might want to reexamine the nature of sexuality, it’s too ribald a discussion for these pages but it sure looks like prey-making to me. Consider that the oldest relationship between living things on earth isn’t parent/offspring, male/female, peer to peer, but predator to prey, as in an amoeba, protozoa, bacterium, or virus making prey on other amoeba, protozoa, bacterium and ingesting something. Again if your argument is based on the evolution of animal consciousness by way of common descent, you might want to consider that the predator/prey dynamic is the only logical overarching template for all subsequent relationships that then evolved from simple organisms to complex ones, such as parent/offspring, male/female, peer-to-peer.

Billy said: “Corvids (such as Jays) use tools to solve problems, acting like a hawk would be a very useful tool.”
I’ll venture an opinion on tool use in birds in a later article, but consider the logic of what you’re saying. If a jay can use tools to solve problems by way of thinking, and can mimic a hawk to scare off its fellow jays in a strategy of subterfuge, how do you keep that thinking genie in its bottle? The only logical response is that the thinking, problem solving bird is constrained by its anatomy and physiology so that it can’t think its way outside its niche box because of physical constraints. But that argument immediately contravenes the central tenet of evolutionary biology that every component of the system has to pull its weight or else it’s discarded due to an unnecessary drain on its resources and ultimately losing out to its competitors. According to mainstream evolutionary theory, if the organism can’t expand its niche by developing an adaptation, then it doesn’t need the adaptation. In the eighties the evolutionary mantra of mainstream science was the big brain, the big brain, the big brain: and also all the dog experts and scientists were looking for the genes for aggression. (Natural Dog Training is the only model not predicated on gene-centric theories, anticipating epigentics) But now modern biology confronted with the problem that bigger brained species than homo-sapiens (Boskopf and possibly Neanderthal) went out of existence, are postulating the evolutionary advantage of the lesser sized brain over the bigger brain since it’s less a drain on physiological resources. It’s constantly contradicting itself because it has no model for animal consciousness when it should be saying, “Uh-Oh, if birds with a brain the size of a walnut are using tools, maybe the use of tools is a no-brainer. Maybe Birds aren’t actually “solving problems” in the way the human intellect reflexively thinks of such instances. Maybe we’re seeing what we think we should see just as one it sure did seem self-evident that the sun goes around the earth.
Prey drive IS the most important thing to a dog, it’s why we call them “canines” after the teeth for holding onto the prey. The purpose of sociability is to facilitate the hunt, not companionship. No other interpretation of the canine nature can encompass the phenomenon of canine evolution, the domestication of the dog, the nature of canine service in the employ of man, the adaptability of the modern pet dog to the emotional nuance of its family so as to render companionship. Natural Dog Training is an intellectually rigorous synthesis of the evidence and the criticisms of NDT and an energy model are never substantive, merely declarative. To substantively critique this energy model one must define emotion, sexuality, neotony, personality, drive, sociability, evolution, domestication, consciousness in a straight line synthesis of the evidence.

Dog training has indeed changed over the centuries. The domestic dog evolved through the hunt. Then the modern dog training industry in the sixties lost sight of it, and now all training systems are migrating back to the prey drive while simultaneously resisting the logical conclusion of what this reveals. A self-defeating logic loop.

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Again, we’re not saying that dog’s aren’t intelligent, we’re exploring the possibility of a group consciousness and if we want to extrapolate to a broader metaphysics, if consciousness is energy, in other words if one believes they have a consciousness that supersedes the form and material matter of their physical makeup, then the principles of consciousness are very likely the same principles as energy and therefore physics would be our entry point. Physics would be the mind of God playing out through the process of evolution. And if we want to know what God is “thinking” we might try divining the principles of physics in one of the most spectacular feats of creation that has evolved, the dog by our side.

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NDT overtly defines the dog’s nature (the drive to be in harmony) whereas other models either do not, or generate a definition that immediately contradicts itself. (Such as dogs have an instinct toward dominance and this must be suppressed in the interest of group cooperation. Or, dogs learn to be social and must be taught to be social because it’s not their nature. Because of these inherent contradictions, I am compelled to challenge mainstream dogma.) NDT is consistent from top to bottom because what is natural about Natural Dog Training is energy, and since energy in unarguably the basis of everything in nature therefore if a model is predicated on energy, it will be consistent and comprehensive. (If someone can show me a natural system that isn’t predicated on the laws of nature, I will close down this web site and study up on Cesar Milan and Behavioral Science.)

Natural Dog Training argues that energy not only animates but informs the dog as well. The dog feels, and then it knows. Therefore if one wants to affect a dog’s behavior we need to change the way the dog feels. So while I do indeed use all sorts of artificial props and contrived situations, I use them in order to impact how the dog’s TEMPERAMENT is processing the energy inherent in the situation. The use of artificial aids in training does not make a method unnatural. The training model makes a method unnatural. For example, a chemist can concoct an artificial compound never to be found occurring in nature, and yet the process of concoction is not arbitrary, the chemist must always work in accord with the principles of nature and therefore even a chemical artifice is composed by natural law. On the other hand if the chemist is appealing to alchemy, then that is an unnatural approach.

The nature of energy is to move and the laws of nature define the stability of natural systems. So if a training model allows the dog’s energy to move, then it is natural. If the model is blocking the free movement and consummation of energy, then it is unnatural. Most training models allow energy to move otherwise they wouldn’t be around in the marketplace, but only up to a point and this is the point to which they are successful. The point at which they stop allowing energy to move, is when they become unnatural and begin to break down. Therefore, even pinch collars and electrical collars if applied correctly can be part of a natural approach by virtue of adding “grounded” energy to the dog’s experience, and conversely praising the dog and giving it attention that ultimately makes it feel incomplete, is unnatural.

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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.

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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.”

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