Be the Ground

One fall afternoon about thirty years ago I was driving along a country road that ran above a house. I could see the entirety of its yard which featured a dog tied to a long trolley. Months and months of hard pounding had shaped the dog’s path into what looked like an official dirt bike course, complete with banked curves and notches carved into hillocks. As I neared the property, the dog was lying at the foot of its dog house, intently staring at the far end of its range. Then, it launched itself at a dead run at a squirrel that had come within striking distance of the trolley track. Of course, the squirrel had the calculus all worked out and by the time the dog was almost on it, was safely out of the hot zone. Strangely however the dog never slowed and hit the end of its cable at full speed, which then flung the dog high into the air from whence it was slammed to the ground in a smack-down worthy of Wrestlemania. “Oh, that’s gotta hurt,” I remember thinking to myself and yet oddly as it seemed to me at the time, the dog immediately leapt  back to its feet with the biggest smile on its face. Then with tail held high, it trotted back to its lair just as our German Shepherd dog Rommel would prance along when carrying a dead woodchuck in his mouth. It took me many years to understand what I had just witnessed.

Whenever a dog perceives any change in its surroundings, its brain of course becomes active and this generates neuro-chemical energy. No rocket science here. A stimulus would not be called a stimulus if it didn’t stimulate the brain. However, because the dog’s mind is constituted by two-brains, the Little-Brain-in-the-gut in addition to the Big-Brain-in-the-head, stimulation first and foremost invokes a sensation of emotional displacement and this makes a dog feel unbalanced, literally. Even a state of hunger is perceived as a displacement and therefore the dog searches for a “ground” (i.e. a preyful aspect) in order to return it to the pre-stimulated state of emotional equilibrium and which it simultaneously equates with being on terra-firma.

Bio-mechanically speaking, grounding means that nerve energy of the Big-Brain (which is like an electrostatic pressure with spikes of electrical charge) must be converted into smooth muscle wave action of the intestines. The most primal avenues of ingestion or grounding are smell and taste, and so smelling or eating something – even grass – has a calming effect. But sight and touch can also become available as more elaborate pathways for emotional grounding due to the sexual/sensual circuitry. So nerve energy stimulated by sensory input needs to be digested by the Little-Brain-in-the-gut just as nutritional input needs to be digested within the gut. Every input to the organism, whether nutritional or emotional, follows this principle.

In regards to training, this means that it doesn’t actually matter to a dog what logically happens in any given situation, what really matters is how a dog ends up feeling. In other words, after the dust settles does the dog feel grounded or not? For example, if 200,000 volts of stimulation was inputted then 200,000 volts of grounding has to be achieved in order for the dog to end up feeling satisfied.

Bernhard Mannel, a German Schutzhund trainer mentioned elsewhere on this site, posed the following question to participants in a seminar I attended, and this can help clarify how important the feeling of grounding is to canine learning. Mannel asked us to consider that if a wolf were to seize a deer by its hind leg and if somehow the leg in its grasp yanked free of the deer’s body: how would the wolf respond to watching the rest of the deer getting away? Would it continue after the deer or would it content itself with the leg in its mouth? Mannel argued that the wolf wouldn’t care what happened to the rest of the deer. The wolf had leapt into the air to “make prey” and ended up with prey-on-the-ground, and therefore in the canine mind, the situation was resolved.

At the time of that seminar, around 1977 or ‘78, I believed Mannel was right, and since then everything I’ve learned about dogs confirms his supposition. To put his point in my parlance, the wolf felt grounded, and this fulfills the essential predicate of animal consciousness. A wolf isn’t trying to kill the deer or even eat the deer; it just wants to bite the deer’s body in order to attain grounding, and as far as the wolf is concerned, the head of the deer (i.e. its predatory aspect) is welcome to whatever is left. In a dog’s mind, it doesn’t matter what actually happens, – all that matters is how the dog feels after-what-happens happened.

This calls into question the prevailing logic of reinforcement-based theories of learning. For example, we think that praise and food rewards are necessarily experienced by the dog as a positive emotional input. However, if a dog sees a deer and is energized to the 200k volt level, and then the owner calls the dog to their side and rewards with food and praise (which for purposes of this discussion let’s say is worth only 100k volts worth of grounding to this particular dog), then the dog has been left with a shortfall of 100k and sooner or later the dog will have to get back to the unfinished business of grounding-out-deer-energy, even though it may have reliably come to its name the first several times dog and owner encountered deer. Just because a dog is interrupted from a chase by the sound of its name and then returns to its owner’s side, doesn’t mean that all its energy felt consummated and that therefore the dog is gaining the lesson we think it is learning. Because in this example, the dog remains burdened with unresolved energy which will continually vibrate away, deep within its body/mind until it resurfaces at some later point. While unresolved emotion may be latent, it is never dormant; it organizes everything.

Conversely, if the sight of a deer fills a dog up with 200,000 volts of “energy”, and then if those 200,000 volts of energy end up “running-to-ground” it doesn’t actually matter to the dog how the energy ran to ground, just that it ran to ground. If fully grounded into something, as in a bite object an owner might provide, then the dog feels satisfied even if it didn’t end up bringing the deer down. All that matters is whether the dog’s emotional battery is returned to its pre-stimulated state, so that if a deer equals 200,000 volts of stimulation and 200,000 volts of nerve energy runs-to-ground via contacting with its owner, then for this dog, this is what bringing a deer down feels like. A dog doesn’t have to bring a deer down, it just has to bring the energy to ground and therefore it is incumbent on an owner to understand that there is an emotional physics (rather than a psychology) by which a dog defines success.

I now believe that the trolley dog I observed thirty years ago had probably never ever killed a squirrel in its life, and yet nonetheless when the dog pranced its way back to its house to resume its survey of the kingdom below, it carved yet another notch on the transom. For that dog, being flung into the air and body-slammed to earth was the only tangible thing of high intensity value to ever be realized in trolley land, and that thereby came to constitute its definition of what killing a squirrel feels like. As incongruent as it may appear to our human powers of reason and sensibilities, physically speaking the dog did indeed attain a pretty high degree of grounding given that so much of its energy had quite literally been absorbed by the ground. There had been a huge transfer of kinetic energy from dog to the earth and that was enough to satisfy the energetic parameters of animal consciousness. In fact I believe the dog learned to wait at the highest point of its compound at the farthest end of its range so that it could experience the most degree of grounding by hitting the trolley at its highest possible speed. The dog would never be able to learn to lie in wait as the most efficient means of actually catching a squirrel as a cat would do, because in its mind that’s not what killing a squirrel feels like, and it didn’t really want to kill a squirrel. It just wanted to feel grounded.

So the motive of all animal behavior is for energy to run-to-ground, and given that the canine mind is organized as an energy circuit, an owner can position themselves to become the apex of their dog’s mind by becoming the pathway by which the dog’s energy thereby runs to ground. To establish such an imprint this means that if there is 200k volts worth of input, it must be discharged through actions that overcome 200k volts of resistance and that results with 200k volts of grounding. Interestingly, in the natural scheme of things the Being which constitutes this apex of emotional experience is not the so-called pack leader but the moose. I’m not aware of one recorded instance whereby an alpha ever commanded an omega to come to its side. And yet whenever the moose calls, wolves always come running.

So when I encounter a deer with a young dog, I don’t command it to do anything. I say “Gooood boy, yea, let’s get that deer. Reeeaaaaddddy?” We then run away from the deer as fast as I can go and get to the “Ready” tree where I’ve hidden the sacred moose toy. Then we beat each other up over getting that toy in my dog’s mouth. For my dog, that’s what killing a deer feels like.

Related posts:

1. The Mind of Squirrel Dog
2. Why do dogs bark at strangers?
3. Why Do Dogs Smell Each Other

The number one motive of all animal behavior is to-connect-the-front-end-with-the-hind-end in order to “ground” stimulation. This is because when a dog is stimulated, it’s just as if the dog is cut in half, in other words, the dog’s center-of-consciousness is wholly centered in its head and it can’t feel a thing.

Generally when I tell people that an animals’ front-end-is-not-necessarily-connected-to-its-hind-end meaning that an animal needs to feel resonant with their surroundings in order to feel connected to their body, understandably they find such a notion hard to believe. How could a dog not know that its hind end is part of its front end no-matter-what? Then after one seminar several years ago a participant sent me the link below to a video on the internet. I suggest you mute the volume so that the laughter in the background won’t obscure the profound principle that is actually being revealed through this dog’s behavior.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This poor dog has no idea it’s attacking its own foot because it takes a feeling for an animal to have a sense of its body and every feeling is dependant on a sense of resonance with the external surroundings. And when a dog’s body is impacted by something that doesn’t resonate with a feeling, instincts and habits from the Big-Brain in its head run the show. In this state, such a dog is “referencing” the inner ear balance system in its head and is so preoccupied that it has no “idea” what the rest of its body is doing because it’s not feeling the rest of its body. The state of disconnect can become so total that even physical sensations from the hind end can be tuned out. So in this video while one end of the dog is gnawing on the bone, the other end of the dog, its foot, by straying into the dog’s peripheral vision is triggering the physical memory of having once been attacked by another dog and this is all it’s perceiving and experiencing by the encroachment of its foot. The unfortunate dog is doomed to relive the memory every time it’s in an analogous situation. I once witnessed a Scotty gnawing on a bone go into a full fledged attack mode when being buzzed by a fly and it acted just as if it was dealing with a huge Saint Bernard looming over its head.

So a behaviorist would say that a dog chases its tail because the tail is moving and the canine prey instinct evolved to reflexively chase that which moves, especially when bored. But this explanation misses the far more fundamental point that such a dog is responding reflexively to a fundamental paradox of its hardware and which motivates it to connect with those things in its environment that can connect its front-end-to-its-rear-end. Dogs that have been chronically overly stimulated, and puppies, are those especially prone to chase the nearest thing that’s moving and they have no “idea” they’re chasing a part of their own body.

As funny or pathetic as some of these behaviors may strike us, the truth is that because a dog’s sense of its body is directly related to a feeling that connects it to its surroundings, we have identified a perfect platform for an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic that lends intelligence to how animals respond to the world. Animals need external objects of attraction in order to connect-the-front-end-to-the-hind-end and experience a true feeling. And therefore while some dogs become addicted to tail chasing in order to address the fundamental problem of their emotional makeup, nonetheless all dogs are social by their nature and so they are most vulnerable to this affliction.

Related posts:

1. Why Do Dogs Wag Their Tails?
2. Why Do Dogs Smell Each Other
3. Why Do Dogs Zoom-zoom-zoom Around the House?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

1. Why Do Dogs Investigate the Eliminations of Other Dogs?
2. Why We Push
3. The Mind of Squirrel Dog