“Since we don’t all “work” our dogs enough to let them fully express their natural prey instincts – we don’t all have access to sheep for herding, wild fowl for hunting, or decoys for biting), pet owners of dogs with high prey drives can really have a hard time dealing with it on a daily basis – imagine your dog going nuts on the leash whirling, spinning, vocalizing every time he sees or hears something he thinks is a prey animal and not being able to come back down to earth for another 20 minutes even after that thing is long gone!. These dogs can be very easy work with if you can focus their instincts on a toy that you control – they can be the most enthusiastic and eager to please. No difficulty in motivating these dogs! But it can also be difficult when other things that you can’t control, trigger their prey instincts at inopportune moments!”

This question is understandable from the perspective of behavioral science because if something like a “fixed action pattern” is being “reinforced” won’t it become stronger and more of a feature of the dog’s orientation? Isn’t my dog going to become more and more maniacal about incidental prey, deer, squirrels, etc. that we run across on walks or in the yard if I’m encouraging it to bite things? Revealingly, we can see in the current state of dogdom that the exact opposite is the case. Millions of owners have been successfully educated by behavioral science that they should discourage their dog’s oral urges and prey instinct in order to maximize its domesticated nature. The modern dog owner is now far more worried about teaching their dog not to bite than were previous generations of owners when it was more commonly accepted that not all dogs were friendly or should be expected to be friendly. How often do you hear the expression that’s a “one man dog” these days? The idea that one should teach a dog not-to-bite is seemingly buttressed by the theory of domestication that dogs are denatured from their wild heritage in that they are descended from scavengers that came in from the cold of the village dump, and are now so thoroughly adapted to human culture that their nature is fundamentally different from proto-dog or ancestral wolf. But the paradox has now become that currently there is so much aggression and hyper-reactivity in dogs precisely because their prey-making hardware/software was either, under-exercised or was actively repressed, distracted, and desensitized.

To understand this we need to make a distinction between prey instincts and prey DRIVE. Prey instinct is a fixed action pattern that elicits a hardwired string of reflexes. Drive on the other hand is a state of emotional suspension that is attuned to the energetic parameters of the moment, and can smoothly select from a repertoire of reflexes that FEEL most suitable to the context. Therefore, PREY DRIVE DOESN’T EXCITE PREY INSTINCT, IT CALMS IT.

Being In-Drive is the capacity to feel potential energy and the strength of this feeling enables a dog to self-modify and even limit its actions in order to maintain that state of suspension. Instinct is a sheer downloading, relief-seeking from a build up of tension state of experience. And a feeling of potential energy (rather than any kind of cognitive understanding) allows a dog to hold itself back without building up an emotional charge, in other words, actually feeling rewarded by doing nothing or working to attune itself to its owner if that is called for. An instinct is the collapse of an animal’s emotional capacity into a species-specific repertoire of reflexes whereas when a dog is in drive its feeling of potential energy is the strongest part of its awareness and its feeling of being in suspension with its owner, is its reward so that therefore the incidental prey animal IS NOT potential energy. An owner does not need sheep or birds or anything natural to induce a state of suspension with a dog. They just need to become a complex object of resistance that the dog can overcome by tuning in and attuning to.

So by encouraging a dog’s drive, and since NDT says all drive is related to the hunt/prey, it therefore lowers the dog’s threshold of excitation toward its owner while simultaneously raising the dog’s excitation toward an actual prey animal that hasn’t become integrated as part of the drive expression. Amazingly, the dog becomes more excited by the fake prey as offered by its owner than the real prey that might be encountered naturally. Drive in service to the hunt is emotional alchemy.

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2. Get The Bite Out
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The main thing to realize is that the real action isn’t in the head. The Big-Brain is fundamentally but one terminal in the body/mind as an emotional battery. There is something going on to be sure up there, but the main function of neurological activity in the Big-Brain is to put the individual into conflict. Conflict makes energy and the intensity of the energy accesses physical memory. A state of conflict accesses physical memory.

When a squirrel-chasing dog sees a squirrel, the first thing that happens is that it will perceive being knocked off balance, just as if its physical center-of-gravity has been suddenly displaced, just as if something has literally pushed it off center. This response was established via Pavlovian conditioning during its infant imprinting phase. As an infant pup every time its mother or litter mates moved it was knocked off balance and therefore for the rest of its life any change in its perceptual field equals a state of imbalance because it triggers this physical memory of change. The degree of displacement equals the force of attraction. The intensity of this force activates a specific layer of physical memory. A loss of equilibrium is energizing because it provokes neurological activity as neurons fire off, just like a battery being ionized by an electrical input of a charger.

So the dog is emotionally “charged” by this sudden ionizing event upon the sight of a squirrel and typically, because the mandate of balance is engaged but the little-brain-in-the-gut doesn’t yet have anything tangible to digest, Squirrel Dog’s body tenses up like a rope twisted tight.

If we could ask Squirrel Dog where exactly its sense of consciousness is centered in its body/mind, where is the absolute center of its “self,” Squirrel Dog would point to its head, as this is the epicenter of the intense pressure of energy, the physical memory of having fallen face forward because it was knocked over by something moving fast, or it was moving too fast and tumbled before it had mastered locomotion. The point in the dog’s body it references as the center of its consciousness is the basis of its mind and will determine the nature of its perception and range of likely responses. This center point determines the nature of the physical memory to be summoned up into awareness, and then what menu (electric=balance, magnetic=hunger, or electromagnetic=heart as wave) will be activated in order to deal with this memory. If we had to reduce what’s going on in Squirrel Dogs’ mind to a human concept in order to articulate what is going on inside its head at this point, Squirrel Dog would say “I am squirrel” because as far as it can know all of its attention is fixated on a squirrel and so this is the entire scope of its consciousness in this moment. A dog has no concept of its “self” relative to other points of view. It’s view of its “self” depends on what it wants and how it feels.

It is possible that a dog might reference its little-brain hunger circuitry as its center point and in this case it could be said to be “ionized” to the negative polarity (preyful) and in this mode it has energy to absorb. It will then perceive the situation as if what is going on inside its body is pulling an object of attraction toward it, even if the dog is actually moving toward something standing still. This is a virtual state of magnetism. But in the hypothetical example above with the typical squirrel-chasing-dog it is referencing its Big-Brain balance circuitry and so it is ionizing toward the positive (predator) polarity and has energy to give. It will thus perceive as if it is pushing energy out and this pushing impulse will be the basis of whatever it learns next. The balance circuitry is the electrical menu.

Sometimes in the beginning of a squirrel-chasing dog’s career, we notice its hackles raise and it might growl and then bark at the sight of a squirrel. This is a bio-mechanical response to relieve this electrical-like tension referenced above, a pushing out of energy, especially if it is unable for some reason to pursue the squirrel as when held back on lead or when afraid of first squirrel it ever saw. It is not trying to communicate to the squirrel; rather it is off/loading energy so as to restore its body to a sense of stability. In this sense it is in fact communicating energy and this can be adaptive because barking and getting excited tends to make prey run and then the dog can flip polarity to the hunger circuitry.

But for Squirrel Dog working from the balance circuitry, it is therefore pushing energy out by pushing itself away from the spot that is so destabilizing and running to squirrel as ground, terra firma. In contrast, notice how a cat stalks its prey. It is referencing its little-brain and going-by-pull. It is feeling that its focus on the prey from its little-brain hunger circuitry is pulling the mouse toward it, in other words it has imported the essence of the mouse into its hunger circuitry and is beginning to feel what the mouse is feeling and self-regulating because it is magnetized to the prey. It stalks very quietly and then waits until the mouse quite literally walks into its waiting jaws. However, when the gap between them closes to its critical distance, this feeling will collapse given that the prey is so near (and much bigger) and the only mechanism it has that can handle such energy is the striking instinct. This is also why when we excite our kitties too much, they are prone to claw, clench and bite us, but before doing so usually run away to push off from that spot. Since dogs have a much higher emotional capacity than cats, it is possible for them to flip polarities from positive to negative, even when near the prey and this capacity would be necessary to allow the feeling to elaborate into higher expressions, such as herding the prey rather than killing it, or listening to the owner rather than chasing the squirrel. Flipping polarities causes the dog to reference its heart. (We can also see that wolves in the hunt would differentiate along the hunger/balance ratio and so each would respond to large prey differently and in a coordinated, complementary way, some would be pushing, some would be pulling.)

The typical squirrel-chasing dog straining at the lead upon seeing a squirrel is completely in its head and is electric. Its emotional capacity is overwhelmed because it cannot reference its body and so it will respond to form of squirrel via instincts and habits. It cannot take input from its handler precisely because it is referencing its inner-ear balance circuitry and trying to push energy out. No matter what the handler does to the dog, even if the handler’s corrections make the dog submit, or if a food reward distracts the dog from the squirrel (which isn’t likely), if the handler doesn’t constitute the full “ground” for this energy, the need to get to the squirrel for grounding is merely being reinforced. The dog is going by the form of the squirrel and is unable to discern the subtle energetic essences of the squirrel let alone that this person shouting and jerking is its beloved human. Because the Big Brain is running the show, the dog isn’t feeling. The brain can’t feel a thing which is why gray matter can be operated on directly without anesthesia. Furthermore, the only thing tangible the little-brain is getting to digest is the tactile input from being jerked around, straining into the lead and digging into the ground, and so the dog learns that this is what hunting a squirrel feels like.

The interplay between intensity of the Big-Brain and the capacity of the little-brain to ground this intensity reveals an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic by which all interactions with the environment proceed, and thereby render the dog’s mind as a function of energy. Animals have a bipolar constitution because of a two brain makeup so as to implement the principle of emotional conductivity so that all learning factors out a networked-intelligence. The following is the logic loop that drives the network: The greater the degree of displacement: the stronger the force of attraction. The stronger the force of attraction: the greater the fear of falling. The greater the fear of falling: the stronger the urge for grounding. The greater the resistance to grounding: the stronger the Drive to make contact. The more resistance to the Drive to make contact, the more sexual/sensual energy is engendered by physical memory. The more sexual energy: the easier to flip polarity in order to connect with object of resistance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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To his credit he accepted the fact that he had made every mistake in the book with his dog. But what had he done that is so different from the way most dog owners respond to dog problems? He thought that love meant hugs and kisses and that discipline meant a whack every now and again. He approached training by thinking that getting his dog to sit and lie down was all that had to be done. His dog was treated as most pets are, except that his dog, a Pit Bull cross, would tend to learn aggression, given these common handling errors.

As I studied the dog for a few minutes, the overwhelming message coming from the animal was one of fear. I moved my hand above his topline and his hair stood on end instantly, rippling along the spine in anticipation of my touch. It is commonplace to call such a dog a “fear biter”, for he is indeed afraid, but such a term misses the truth that lies beneath this dog’s potentially explosive reactions. When a dog lashes out, for one brief instant he feels free of his fear. While he may be compelled by stress to bite, he is motivated by freedom.

Biting, as well as the countless other behavioral problems which send ten million dogs to their doom each year, is completely avoidable. No matter what the temperament of the dog may be, genetics doesn’t mean that behavior is predetermined. All dogs can adapt to any environment if their wildness is acknowledged, appreciated, and then channeled into expressions of freedom that are appropriate. Such adaptability, broadened and deepened through domestication, forms what I call the dog’s “harmonic quotient”.

The Pit Bull owner in my office was deeply perplexed. Where had he gone wrong? Had he been too tough on his dog, or not tough enough? While there are a lot of handling errors to focus on, there is one simple answer to this dog’s problem that is also the common denominator in any other breakdown in the dog/owner relation. The owner had fallen into the usual trap: he had formed a pack with his dog. His mind-set had been to tame his dog so that he would be lovable. Since this approach ignored the prey instinct, the dog’s cooperative spirit was undeveloped and their home life revolved around the tension of a pack rather than the harmony of a group.

This man was not aware that a dog is biologically and emotionally designed to absorb and store stress, and that this occurs whenever the prey instinct isn’t fulfilled. In the wild, this behavioral mechanism ensures survival, which is why social tension is typical of pack life. In the absence of any prey, pack members have no target on which to vent their aggression. Thus inhibited, the stress level builds to a high pitch, finding its ultimate released when another individual acts out of place, causing a shift in the pack order. In this moment, all of the imprisoned passion in the pack is released toward the hapless pack member. Of course, the social tension of the pack may also find a release in an attack on a vulnerable prey animal and thus it becomes a group.

As I moved my hand toward the dog all the confusion he had experienced in his life with regard to his prey instinct surfaced merely by the extension of my hand. The possibility of a stranger’s touch made this dog go beyond his breaking point – were I to have gone further, I might have provoked an attack.

Interestingly enough, this dog’s stress level was directly proportional to the strength of his attraction to me. The more attraction a dog has, the more aggressive he’ll be if the harmonic pathways are blocked. Nothing in nature can occur in a vacuum – a dog’s behavior always has its reasons, but it can’t be predicated on a negative motivation, such as being afraid. A dog can’t dislike, he can only like; he can only be attracted. Therefore, the Pit Bull’s fear of me isn’t a motivation to bite me. The germ of his mood was one of longing, an uninhibited urge to be with me, its purity long since scarred by incorrect handling. This is why it is incorrect to say that, genetically speaking, Pit Bulls are problem dogs. Pit Bulls that experience flow along a harmonic pathway are wildly social toward strangers.

Wildness is an innocent, unabashed attraction to that which is positive in nature. In young pups this innocence is reflected in their every impulse, which is why they are so outgoing. But of course, such an undiscriminating attitude is not a successful survival trait in the forest, and so it is that wolves must live in packs and with stress. It is necessary that each member be made extremely nervous so that he won’t ever forget an unpleasant experience. With a tautly strung nervous system, he’s less likely to be surprised by a predator or be insensitive to any power shifts within the pack. Additionally, he will be highly charged to chase and bite a large prey animal.

Because life in the wild is so oppressive, we must recognize that there is really no such thing as real freedom in nature. Canine survival is intimately connected to all other forms of life, and it is as a result of this interdependence that life and death always hang in the balance. However, the incredible beauty of the prey instinct is revealed with the realization that freedom and harmony are synonymous. When the group is coordinated by the master prey instinct, that is the sensation of freedom. That is unity. That is life. In the wild, freedom is short-lived, for as soon as a kill is made, the group becomes a pack once again. Nevertheless, that fleeting spark of harmony is what bonds each member to the group.

Our task as dog owners is to capture that transient surge of freedom and expand on it until it occupies our dog’s entire range of reference. This is not hard to do, but it seldom happens because we’re constantly seeking to tame our dogs while under the misconception that their wildness is a destructive force. Although we don’t want our domesticated dogs to be wild-like, this natural wildness is not the problem. The problem is how to get a dog to open up and to be receptive to calming influences. Calming the dog through the prey instinct is how you gain access to his most innocent and vulnerable essence, arousing his spirit in such a way as to be channeled away from a survival instinct and onto a harmonic pathway. The purpose of a pack, however, is to make each individual nervous in order to catalyze the survival instincts. This brings me back to the central theme of this book. I wish to guide the dog owner in how not to be part of this instinctive plan.

We do not want to duplicate life in a pack. The stability of a pack is destined to falter, since balances are constantly shifting over even the smallest daily occurrence. One pack member might stumble onto an object that another one treasures; an adolescent might naively press against a bitch in estrus; a nursing puppy might nip his mother’s nipple too hard. These innocent actions are out of order in a pack and unleash the packs warehouse of stress. In the wild, this is appropriate. Each individual must become a prisoner to the survival instinct in order for the species to endure. However, in man’s world, such stressed or overly charged reactions to change spell disaster. Dogs, unlike wolves, need to learn to adapt more fluidly if they’re to live peacefully with modern man.

While stress is inevitable, it can also be an ally, because the ultimate function of stress is to implement the harmonic plan. Stress brings focus and intensity to behavior, and by using it carefully and creatively we can tune our dogs to our domestic specifications. But first our dog must have a clear mind. By being with his owner, at some point the dog will get to experience prey-making. In other words, prey-making and being in harmony with his group need to be defined as one and the same.

It is rare to find a good rapport between dog and human. Often I reach out to touch an excited dog, and he flinches as if I’m about to swat him. Or I see a dog whose face is so sensitized by repeated whacks, or hyper-charged by inadequate socialization, that whenever he’s around strange dogs his muzzle bristles. Finally, the saddest situation is when a child approaches a strange dog, or even a family dog, and the years of pent-up stress are unloaded on this innocent youngster. Such an incident is not evidence of an unpredictable or a mean dog; unknowingly, the child tripped a wire that had originally been set by an owner locked in a struggle with his pet. The child is merely the final domino in a chaotic chain reaction. The owner topples the first one with a confrontation, or blow, and the child ends up being the victim.

Dogs are not trying to test us, to dominate us, or to put one over on us, and handling a dog is not a matter of just getting tough. That’s an old-fashioned attitude toward discipline. All the social angst in a wolf pack is not evidence of a leader struggling to the top in order to bring peace and balance to the pack. What is actually going on is the transference of stress from one individual to the next in line. It is the timeless rule of instinct, the relentless reign of stress imposing order on its subjects.

While there must be order and balance in a dog’s life, we must recognize that it is through harmony that these are achieved. Without the flow of emotion released through hunting, these qualities by themselves serve no purpose and are merely suffocating. The reason wolves need to be in balance within the pack is to remain connected to the group. Only through hunting as a group can there be freedom.

Owning and training a dog affords us the chance to make contact with our dog’s wildness so that he can live free in our lives. The experience can only help us to be more human, more deeply connected to nature. To refrain from hitting a dog is not, in itself, enough. His prey instinct must also be actively developed, for it controls a valve within him that, once opened, makes him innocent and amenable to any group purpose. It isn’t how much love you try to give your dog, it’s how much of your love your dog is open to receive. A master’s role is to expand on that brief snippet of freedom that nature affords in life until it becomes fixed as a character trait.

A dog is born wild, he learns stress; he must be trained to be free.

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In animal consciousness, just as in Einstein’s theory of relativity, there is no such thing as an absolute frame of reference; in other words, something is absolutely at rest while something else is in absolute motion. We now know thanks to Einstein that there is no ether permeating all of space as an immovable backstop against which motion takes place. Everything is in motion and so saying what-is-moving-relative-to-what, is a judgment call. The classic example of this being two ships slipping their anchor in the harbor and then currents cause them to collide. Which ship ran into the other would depend on which vessel one is on. So while we may consider time, space and mass to be fixed values in our experience of reality, these are actually relative to one’s frame of reference and are in fact malleable according to deeper influences. Time and space is dynamic, not static, and while this defies and confounds our human reason, the animal mind is not organized in such a way where it must contemplate such paradoxes.

Since animal consciousness and emotion is predicated on the laws of physics rather than a human, mental construct of reality, this means that when a dog is attracted to something and that object of attraction moves, it feels to the dog just as if its physical center-of-gravity is moving within its own body, – just as if it is moving itself, even though it may be standing perfectly still. It’s exactly like a process of magnetic induction wherein it doesn’t matter whether one moves a magnet toward and around a coil of wire, or whether a coil of wire is moved toward and around a magnet; either way an electrical current is induced in the wire. As far as the wire is concerned, the energizing effects are identical.

Therefore, a dog has no idea that it is moving relative to something motionless, or that something is moving relative to it. It feels the exact same internal movement within its body either way. This is why a dog in a moving car might strike out at something going past. The dog has no idea that it is moving relative to something that might be standing perfectly still, rather, the dog perceives that something flashing past at 30, 40, 50 mph etc. is indeed running like prey. So when a dog encounters a slippery floor for the first time, it has no idea that it is moving relative to a stationary floor. The dog doesn’t understand that because its claws are tightly clenched, it is failing to secure a purchase and so is in effect running in place. Instead it perceives the situation as if the floor itself is moving. And the faster the dog tries to run to stable ground, the faster the ground seems to move, which can be as frightening to a dog as it would be for us to be standing on ground that’s heaving and shaking due to an earthquake.

Eventually of course, most dogs get over the problem, but not because they understand there was an error in their perception, as for example a young child might do after their first experience on an escalator, or Einstein did when he contemplated the nature of light, mass and time. Rather, the physical memory of “flow” eventually will paper over this “gap” of slippery-floor-as disconnect-in-consciousness, so that the dog is able to connect the feeling of terra firma from both sides of the slippery floor. Revealingly, there is a transitional phase of acclimation, rather than an all of a sudden “AHA” moment of realization. This is because the dog’s emotional battery and its physical memory of flow as synonymous with firm footing, is gradually filling the gap in consciousness that a slippery floor causes in the sense of being grounded. This kind of learning is exactly analogous to how we ourselves learn to walk across a patch of ice. We know that if we can just maintain a constant rate of movement without any displacement from a center line, this steady pace will smooth out the temporary glitch in footing. In fact, we quickly learn in a counter-intuitive manner, that if we gradually and constantly accelerate our motion in crossing over the patch, most of our energy will be directed forward and hence the side-to-side swing of our hips will be neutralized, making us less likely to slip. This is an emotional calculus predicated on physics and the laws of motion, and this awareness arises from our animal mind and is exactly how dogs learn to negotiate the floor. They steadily accelerate as they learn to focus on the feeling of flow from their physical memory bank, and this they come to feel is what prevents the rug from being pulled out from under their paws.

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2. What is Natural?
3. Why Do Dogs Prefer to Drink From Toilets?

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

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

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

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In contrast, calm behaviors were always cooperative in nature and appropriate to the context the dog was in. The run of this gamut was especially vivid in the police dogs I trained. The better they bit the sleeve, the harder they fought the criminal, the gentler they were with children, the more they loved contact with strangers and were easy to kennel in down time. Therefore if I could learn how to change a dog’s emotional state from electric to magnetic, which should be possible because in nature electromagnetism is but one phenomenon, then I could turn a “problem” behavior into an appropriate or “drive” behavior.

For this reason I realized that the fundamental problem for a dog was to “make contact” with whatever it was attracted to, because once it is emotionally grounded into this object of attraction, its emotional juices as a virtual electrical energy could flow. And in basic physics when electrical energy flows this then induces a magnetic field, and this virtual emotional magnetic field was now something the dog could socially navigate. In other words, animal magnetism didn’t stop evolving with the ability of geese to fly north or south, or salmon returning to their natal waters, it continued to evolve into social behavior. Perhaps this is why every mammal, even if it has no migratory cycle in its evolution, nonetheless has a tiny crystal of magnetite in its inner ear canal.

So when a dog feels grounded it becomes magnetically and therefore emotionally, aligned with the object of its attraction because it can feel which way points north. So I developed the jumping-up-to-make-contact technique so that a dog felt connected to its handler.

Meanwhile Operant Conditioning was hitting the marketplace and I found myself strongly resisting what it had to say since I couldn’t abide by the notion of nature as a random scattering of variables that an animal randomly makes sense of through a schedule of reinforcements. Knowing that nature and emotion were mirror templates to each other, I dug in my heels and didn’t want to use food, or perhaps only sparingly because I did make the exception with dogs that were fearful or too sensitive to want to make contact with me.

My guiding principle was that the prey instinct was the conduit for all emotion and it existed in service to the one drive, the Drive-To-Make-Contact. The prey instinct is the main pipe by which emotion moves (this is true of humans as well) and this movement is a matter of emotion as a virtual problem in electrical conductivity. A predator acquires an intense electrostatic charge, and then the prey absorbs it. However, this can simultaneously induce a virtual magnetic field so that if the prey resists being made prey on; then the predatory impulse in the predator evolves into a whole body state of sensuality, in other words, animal magnetism. Energized in this way, a dog is simultaneously informed as to how to make social contact with the object of its attraction. I wrote “Natural Dog Training” featuring the Drive-To-Make-Contact in service to the prey instinct as its overarching principle.

I have learned nothing in the meantime that contradicts that premise, however one day in the mid-nineties my understanding of animal electromagnetism made a significant improvement. I had trained a particular dog by inducing physical contact and he learned to heel, down, stay and recall and looked pretty good doing so. He became “light on the leash,” stopped jumping up on people and would settle himself when nothing was going on. Then while he was in a down/stay on the training field, I secured a particularly active dog to a post so that this dog was twenty feet or so off the path my dog in training would have to take to get to me when I called it on command.

When I called the dog, he instantly leapt into a full dead-out run, but even though he wasn’t even looking at the other dog, he couldn’t resist arcing towards him. While he was still looking and coming straight at me, there was this growing bow in the trajectory of his path. It was just as if he was a satellite almost being captured by the gravitational pull of a planet, or more precisely, a steel projectile being influenced by a powerful magnetic field it was trying to pass through. The dog never actually made contact with the distracting dog since his “emotional velocity” to get to me remained intense, but his drive was clearly bent.

It wasn’t that I had never seen such a deflection of behavior before, but what struck me now was the involuntary nature of what was happening to him. He was trying to come to his name, but it was as if he had to fight through this invisible field of energy that surrounded the other dog. And if I had a way to measure it in terms of the dog’s perceptions, I know the strength of the field would be inversely proportional to the distance from the source, just like a real magnetic field.

From this observation, I next realized that while I had built up an enormous electric charge between me and the dog, nevertheless my “magnetic field” must not be as strong as the other dog’s, which made total sense to me since I am an upright human being with a predominant predatory aspect, as opposed to a more prey-like animal such as a four-legged bouncing, barking dog. The training dog would play with me, but I had to concede now that he really wasn’t “making-prey” with me as a police dog in training would be.

So I finally began to turn to food in earnest because hunger is the only way available to us by which we can turn electricity, which is generated by the neurological circuits dedicated to the sense of balance, into magnetism, which is generated by the neurological circuits dedicated to the sense of hunger. (This is why working with prey objects was so powerful because obviously the prey instinct/drive is the confluence of the balance and hunger circuitry into one composite value. Thus the predator can compute the movements of the prey and intercept it.) By focusing exclusively on the hunger circuitry I wouldn’t be simultaneously invoking the balance circuitry and therefore inadvertently reinforcing whatever emotional values had built up in the dog’s mind over the years.

But I want to point out that I still wasn’t using food as a reward. Rather I was trying to increase the dog’s perception of me in a magnetic sense. While at first this distinction might not seem worth making, it ultimately factors out to be of overwhelming significance. I wasn’t using food as a reward because I wasn’t giving it to the dog to encourage him to perform an obedience behavior. I wasn’t after obedience, I was after something else.

During this time I was also giving a lot of thought to what I came to call the “emotional battery.” In other words, the canine mind wasn’t a straightforward electrical switch. It was a circuit capable of regenerating itself and so canine consciousness has a means of internalizing and storing energy so that it is available for later use when in a time of greatest need. For example, it doesn’t do any good to have wind turbines generating energy if there isn’t some means of storing the energy for peak load times or for when the wind isn’t blowing. Therefore the dog’s energy cycles through its emotional battery.

This emotional battery is “formatted” in that it is composed of layers of stress, physical memories of states of attraction that didn’t come to fruition because the resistance encountered was too intense for the individual’s capacity to overcome at that time. Any given layer of stress corresponds to the degree of intensity that caused it to be internalized and stored in the first place. This is the basis of canine memory. (The emotional battery determines its perceptions of things. In other words a dog doesn’t experience the world directly, first its battery is triggered, then it feels, and then it experiences the world, indirectly.)

The most important understanding of the emotional battery is that this latent energy was only triggered and available when that specific and originating degree of intensity was encountered again, but now with this stored reserve available to draw on, the individual could pack a bigger emotional punch and this “new energy” allowed it to make contact with the object-of-resistance. The trigger doesn’t have to be the exact same stimulus, just the exact same degree of intensity.

Of particular interest to me was the deepest layer in the battery that had been caused by the most intense experiences, what I came to call the last .01% because so many of my clients would say to me “99.9% of the time my dog listens to me.” I realized the truth was that when that last .01% was triggered and came to the surface, not only was this behavior likely to be explosive since it had to burst through so many layers of inhibition, but in these instances the dog never ever listens to its owner.

Ultimately, this came to mean that I had to gain access to this last .01% by offering the dog a high degree of resistance in order to trigger the deepest layer in its battery. Once the dog overcomes the resistance I’m offering, he is immediately inspired to align with me, which is in the final analysis is how the emotional battery computes for cooperative behavior in a wolf pack on the hunt, or when a working dog is in drive.

This deepest layer in the battery is like a master valve. And when those oldest, deepest, virtual electrons flow, the dog experiences a whole body state of magnetism and cannot resist the magnetic field it feels toward the object of resistance. So if a dog pushes into me with all its might, I am using hunger to turn stored electricity into an active state of magnetism. In the dog’s mind an object of resistance becomes is new true north.

I developed the pushing technique because in dog training, just making contact isn’t enough. A dog has to make contact with its owner with that last .01%. The truth is that if we don’t have 100% of a dog’s energy, we’re in control of nothing.

Keep On Pushing!

Read more about the Pushing Technique.

Related posts:

1. The Mind of Squirrel Dog
2. Why Do Dogs Prefer to Drink From Toilets?
3. Why We Push