Stump A Chump

What does the emotional battery, the phenomenon of neotony, and the dog’s affinity for cars all have in common?
Every debate I have with learning theorists argue that the distinction I’m drawing between dogs and other animals, for example animals such as cats and deer, are irrelevant because these distinctions can be taken into account in terms of learning theory and fixed action patterns. One person on Lee’s Psyche Today Blog actually claimed his pet rats loved to ride in the car just like a dog. On other forum sites the experts say I’m saying nothing new and that they already know all this stuff, it’s just being recast in hyped up jargon. Whereas if they understood that there was a universal operating system of animal consciousness, most vividly displayed in the ways and doings of dogs because of their heightened emotional capacity, they would be looking for such distinctions as critical information since these reveal the code of animal consciousness.
So we have all driven up to or past a dog, cat or deer standing in the road. What then is the fundamental distinction between these three animals (one wild and two domesticated so it’s a pretty wide spectrum to sample) in their responses to a car on the road or in the driveway? The answer is simple, but it leads to an understanding as to what the emotional battery, the phenomenon of Neotony, and a dog’s special affinity for cars all have in common.

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Published August 24, 2010 by Kevin Behan
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36 responses to “Stump A Chump”

  1. Russell Thompsett says:

    Is it to do with attraction? Dogs can keep feeling the attraction because their emotional capacity is greater, whereas for cat and deer that attraction collapses to fear?

  2. kbehan says:

    Yes it does, in the complex way that attraction works after it elaborates from the beginning stage, this added level of complexity being where the battery and therefore its linkage to neotony come in, but to make the linkage, one must first concentrate on the behavioral difference between the three in how they orient relative to a car and therefore interpret the car.

  3. Russell says:

    So its how their battery resonates with their perception of the car. How the car is interpreted as having elements of predator and prey. Things like the perception of its movement, reflection, angularity, noise. Each then orients in opposition?

  4. kbehan says:

    These are all elements, but there is one thing the dog does (and I don’t mean chasing cars) that a cat or deer (and therefore any other animal) do not. In other words visualize your dog or your cat standing in the drive as you pull up to them, and it doesn’t matter if the car is familiar or not, there is a profound distinction between what they do and which speaks to the universal operating system of consciousness which is most vivid in the ways of dogs.

  5. Heather says:

    Kevin, I would like to translate into my own words your model of how mammals come to to “feel” both their species-specific waveforms and their own individual waveform within that species-specific waveform, via the “booting up” process of the various bodily systems at birth (specifically the CNS and ENS). ie, specifics of how an animal “feels like itself.”

    THen also get more clear about how exactly it is that information (emotional energy) is communicated via the individual waverform over the “multiple (virtual) channels of communication” inside the animal that enable internal communication between different bodily systems.

    And then as forms are encountered (things, littermates, mother), the CNS perceives these forms via being “displaced” (disconnecting CNS from ENS) in discrete amounts based on the perceived predatory-ness of the form (induced displacements), forming over time a continuum of “form-induced-displacement values” that are stored as physical memories in the emotional battery whenever emotional energy is blocked from traveling via the individual waveform because the animal could not find a way to make contact with the form and thus “conduct” (resolve) emotional energy (there has to be a virtual transformer in there between them, to cause the induction, but that is clear to everyone because it is personally verifiable). So as forms are encountered, and induced displacements register with the CNS, there is an immediate body-mind state induced, which triggers physical memories in the battery of similar intensity. The animal thus always gets a chance to resolve stuff in its emotional battery, and as the emotional energy is conducted/flows within the animal, the animal learns, perfects (is informed, the waveform carries the information) how to relate to that form. The animal always gets a chance to be paralyzed, too (ie, have an emotional collapse, hey, I am very familiar with that sensation of falling and utter dread), if the physical memory triggered has a form-induced displacement value that is at or OVER the place on the continuum where it’s earliest physical memories were formed (e.g., the mother rolling it over or knocking it down (literally making it fall) as a pack-related upper limit on the group’s ability to inflict damage within the group in static moments).

    Thus I would say the car, with respect to the cat and deer, are both going to have their most intense/early physical memories triggered, will feel accelerated in a way that will prevent them from conducting that much emotional energy through their bodies (they don’t engage in the same sort of ritualized hunting play as dogs, so they will not perceive fast-moving objects as “preyful” where a dog will). They will have an “emotional collapse”. The dog probably won’t if it has been raised in a normal, healthy dog-way with access to littermates, hasn’t been hit by a car in the past, etc.

    So I would like to explore those things in m ore detail, but the QUESTION is, what if the mother did not roll her cubs, is there really a danger that the cubs would get strong enough to take her down, and why is this something you would worry about, I am not seeing the REASON to worry about it relative to the stress that is caused by the emotional collapse.

  6. Christine says:

    Dogs always pee on tires…

  7. kbehan says:

    That is 100% correct presuming that I have interpreted the precise way in which you are using the terms, which I think I have and reading these words helps me realize how difficult a specialized jargon can be for my readers, so sorry about that. If I was a better writer I would be able to say things more clearly and simply, but some scientist once cautioned, “If you say it too simply, it is simply wrong.” The reason I prefer terms of science is that they are the most accurate because they carry the least amount of intellectual “charge.”
    After this exercise I’m going to post an article that will hopefully help you see the model in its entirety and put the little things that dogs do into their proper significance. But before we can get to that, we still have to isolate the specific behavior I’m looking for when you drive into your driveway and find either a dog, cat or deer standing in the way. The distinction between the responses of the dog versus the other two gives us an important clue to emotion as the basis of a networked-intelligence and so I want to begin from there.

  8. kbehan says:

    Very good, I hadn’t thought of that, and that’s even more revealing about what I’m driving at because it gets us right away to the connection between neotony and sexuality, however because this behavior is more subject to misinterpretation in mainstream science I’m looking for what the dog does before it might get around to that.

  9. Heather says:

    I agree with Christine that diagrams are great, because if you read a term and then see what it points to on a diagram, it smooths out some of the tangential thinking about stuff not related to the main idea, so at least the main idea can be looked at and the definitions/diagrams updated upon critical inspection if necessary.

    I don’t know how to post diagrams here but I could make some for discussion purposes.

  10. Christine says:

    So then, Kevin, hearkening back to a prior reference to Stark Trek, what you are doing/proposing could, in fact, be referred to as “The Undiscovered Country”‼ LOL

  11. Christine says:

    Diagrams…good! Kevin, your concern for your readers is noted and appreciated. For those of us who are emotionally/mentally challenged it is a struggle foah shoah, but when highly motivated it’s still very doable/digestible even though it takes us a bit longer. So it’s all good, no worries‼♥☺ Still lookin’ forward to The New Book-Your Dog is Your Mirror.
    I also was wondering what happened to your Quantum Canine Media Gallery on Fact8. They seem to have disappeared! 🙁 Is there another place where they can be accessed? I’ve been there this week and the only episodes available were #s 17-18. Any suggestions? I like to listen to them at work, it eases the boredom! LOL

  12. christine randolph says:

    hanks for all the positive feedback for previous posts which is surely not deserved, you all make the important observations here not I.

    however, i find it has been to serious here. to the point where it was actually hilarious…so. i am glad many of you think that too.

    a dog a cat or a deer…in the driveway…

    it sounds a bit like a rabbi a priest and a reverend on a plane..

    a deer sometimes gets frozen in the headlights, but that would have to be at night ????

    a deer sometimes jumps into the car..
    never could work out why they do that.
    just know that 9 times out of 10 the car is no longer driveable afterwards.
    hence. try to drive VERY SLOWLY so deer can get a chance to simmer down and take the direction of the woods.

    darn dogs pee on tires is right ! might be only because the door to the car is closed otherwise they would pee into the foot well as happened recently when I left the car door open to unload, and a friend’s dog was around…

    dog peed on the tires of my landrollers too. must be something to do with rubber or maybe i skated through some dog poop without realizing

    cat. (my cats) cat tries to work out if the bloody dogs are safely contained in the car and then makes for the door to be let into the house and get food.

    or stands by for the car to stop so he or she can lie on the hood that is warm from the motor

    what my 3 dogs do
    dog 1 . jumps up at the driver’s side window to greet the driver.

    dog 2 and 3. sidling along or behind the car, annoyingly mostly in the blind spot (the “Josie Josie come here where i can see you while i am backing out !”- command strangely does not work)

    why they do that ? because they think i will take them for a little spin around the neighborhood so they can run beside the car for a couple of miles – one of their favourite things to do….

    except if it is NOT our driveway and dog 3 feels alienated, he will try to jump into the car through the open window to feel more safe…..

    which role would neotony play though ? surely this depends on the age of the animal, especially cat and deer,

    and for the dogs… I read a pug is more neotonous than a greyhound (length of nose.face, i.e. looks more like a baby dog of ANY breed) so are we going to differentiate by breed ?

    and if a dog (cat deer) has already been struck strongly by a car (as happened recently to my friend who lives by a 110 km per hour highway, the dog actually passed out briefly by the side of the highway after being hit and was dazed and confused for a couple of days afterwards)

    would an animal thusly preconditioned respond differently especially if this is a recent incident ? I the heck do not know…

    i think most dogs who have seen a car before or ridden in a car before, have some kind of an expectation when they see a car and it depends on what they know.

    could even depend on the type of car (if they get to ride around in a minivan a lot and they LOOOVE it like mine, ANY minivan seems to be a GOOD thing…)

    a dog that is scared to ride in a car, for which I had one in my dog training class once, he would run and keep his tail between his legs.

    what if the dog had never seen a car before ? would it depend on his or her temperament ?

    we know border collies like to bite the tires of a moving car especially when it goes at the very inviting “escaping sheep” speed of about 30 miles per hour..

    when i had recently adopted my border collie, she got away from me on a hiking trail, went to the highway and got into a nice lady’s car who stopped for her to take her to safety.

    so she is a bit of a hitch hiker…

    so much for anecdotal car behaviour for which I cannot see a pattern that would generally apply to dogs cats deer…but happy to be enlightened.

  13. Heather says:

    Dogs seem to go around the car, in a circular manner, whereas the cat and the deer assume the “deer in the headlights” stance.

  14. kbehan says:

    Ah yes, circling is definitely related to this behavior I’m searching for, it might be prior to circling or the dog might circle to get in position for …..?

  15. Christine says:

    …peeing on the tire…sorry, just couldn’t resist that one! 🙂

  16. Heather says:

    Aligning according to sexual “poles,” the predatory (lights) aspect of the car to the rear of the dog?

  17. kbehan says:

    I’m not looking for a theoretical treatment, although the lights of the car is getting closer to the specific behavior I’m talking about.

  18. christine randolph says:

    circling for biting the tire ? not all dogs do that though

  19. kbehan says:

    No, it’s much more subtle, not an overt behavior per se, but a preliminary manner of orientation from which an action can thus proceed. It’s probably been recorded in your mind as something so ordinary and ubiquitous that it doesn’t stand out or even seem significant since it’s enfolded in what we already think we know about dogs. My point with all this is that the everyday things that dogs do, or the simple facts of their disposition, fall beyond the scope of the current learning theories. I’ve lived with a number of cats, one of who was always getting into peoples’ cars which is probably how he ended up in my neighborhood and we came to adopt him, and yet he didn’t exhibit this propensity which is distinctly canine and can give us insight into the intricacies of emotion as the universal operating system of animal consciousness, its workings easiest to see in the ways of dogs given their evolution and domestication which amplified their emotional capacity. I’ll post my answer and the implications of it in an article on Saturday. In the meantime, Keep On Pushing!

  20. Christine says:

    Wouldn’t have to do with tail wagging would it?

  21. kbehan says:

    Well of course it’s related, but it’s the wrong end.

  22. Christine says:

    Hmmmm…dead end for me!

  23. Heather says:

    This doesn’t really answer the question directly, but it may point me in the right direction in trying to “feel” the energy model.

    Would you say that in the dog-owner group mind, which is an emotional circuit with a common Will for each member (the owner’s Will), that it is possible in some weird phenomenon of quantum physics (I don’t understand quantum physics at all) for somehow the dog to automatically know what the owner wants, ie., divine the owner’s Will (and I guess if you’re religious you could see where the term “divine Will” comes from) simply from perceiving the flow of energy in the emotional circuit according to the energy model? In other words, through a mixup of waveforms occupying the same space at the same “time,” the dog somehow gets onto the waveform going in the opposite direction from the waveform that he is normally “reading”, and thus everything the owner expresses as a Want in the immediate moment is perceived by the dog as a signal of where energy is going to be? In the group hunting model, where the overarching Will, regulated by Heart, can be traced in a straight line, the dog just being part of the hunt – at the time of the dogs’ alignment with a potential prey moose, but *before* the group has gone through these steps of emotional alignment around the prey (as you’re talking about here), the simple act of the dog “feeling” how to align per this energy model automatically informs the dog which moose is diseased. Not because it is divining the Will of the group, but because the dog is moving “backward” in time, and focusing on the prey, the moose’s action, informs the dog “where energy is going to be” in the model. For example, the diseased moose mooves as the dogs are moving in from a distance, and the first movement of the moosoe (vs. what happens as a result of the cycling of energy through the model via the alignment process) identifies the “charge” or

    So in the example of the car, the dog in this state who is aligning with the car would see the car stopped, and feel one of two things: either “align”, or “this has a charge on it” (the answer you are looking for in this question), but it doesn’t inform the dog what to DO prospectively, it informs the dog of the “answer”, ie, what happened in the interaction that proceeded according to the Will in the situation (and I use the past tense on purpose, because the waveform the dog isnt adding energy to the waveform that happens after alignment of the dog-car, it is quite literally RECEIVING the REFLECTED waveform that was the result of the dog-car interaction on the forward waveform (waveforms not having a direction, and being able to echo).

    Then, the dog would automatically act to avoid the car (can’t conduct energy) or align with the car (can conduct energy) ON SIGHT, without actually going through the alignment process itself, like energy is moving backwards in time.

    I am not sure if this makes sense, but does it fit with your energy model in theory?

  24. Heather says:

    So if what I am perceiving is correct, then if the dog feels “charge” when he encounters and object, he has an awareness that he cannot make contact with this object, and can resolve any interaction with object in a way that doesn’t add more “charge” to the object.

    But if the dog feels “align” when he encounters and object, he knows that that object conducts emotional energy and therefore he can connect with the object to get it to conduct *more* emotional energy, and thus induce in the object the ability to conduct more emotional energy with other dogs.

    EG, that is why “conductors” of emotional energy (like Christine Randolph ;)) love Facebook, and automatically channel emotional energy from others who are connected to Facebook, even indirectly, and can pick up very, very fine distinctions about where energy is going to be.)

    When emotional-conductor type people are communicating, eg via Facebook, they are looking into the eyes of the person they are speaking with, and they are conducting emotional energy through that channel.

    The most important information one could ever hope to envision is not where “energy is going to be,” but where energy WAS (the waves of feeling always reflecting) so that energy in the immediate moment can be used 100% efficiently, there is no resistance to overcome, only awareness on the one hand (charge) and emotional momentum building up on the other (align).

    I wonder how the impact of what everyone is saying would be Amplified if everyone had a picture right next to their words, and how a self-organizing system with no violence (eg,hunting and all the energy going there) could EMERGE. That is emergence theory.

  25. Heather says:

    And also there would be the possibility of “multiple communication channels,” such as people who are having a very emotionally conductive conversation having a place where they can hear the same relaxing music while they communicate.

    There is a lot of “noise” generated by electrically-charged particles bumping up against each other (that’s why all that cross-chatter, newsreels, entertainment news, etc. on Facebook fries the circuits from tuning into the information, super-conductors of emotion get part of it but then can’t keep the signal through the noise), an environment for emotionally conductive people needs to resonate so they can align and conduct emotional energy onto one of many possible waves (sound, light, etc.)

    And ironically the “intellectuals” who would be placing logical, etc. arguments are totally tuned out in a pure emotionally conductive environment, and what does come through is the complex ways their minds have been deceitful.

    So the point I guess of this is that the mechanics of the model are probably going to remain out of reach of all but some intellectuals (who will be super-combative), but emotionally conductive people, if the noise is reduced enough and the message can travel via a path of alignment, are going to automaticallly get it by “feel.”

    My daughter (who is always dressed in pink) was working on a very complex puzzle today with pictures and words, and I sat with her and asked her how she put the pieces together, and she said in this lilting little voice, “it’s easy, mommy, I pick up one, and see what is on it, then I say to myself, ‘I WANT the PINK GIRL’, and reach into the pile to find one with the horse, then I slide them around ‘ALONG THE LINES’ to see where they fit. Then I look at them and see what I WANT next.” When I asked her what if she can’t see what she wants, she said “oh, I just throw back the piece and pick up another one then see what I want on that one.” Then she said “mommy, I can’t read the words like you can, and I don’t really want to read the words, it is so easy the way I do it.” And at the end the puzzle was of a pink girl in the middle of a kingdom with fairies and flowers and nature all around her.

    Wow.

  26. kbehan says:

    I’m going to post the article today so that you can see how this squares up with your treatment of the problem. You have all the elements in play, so in this article I think you will be able to see how I tie them together in terms of the car phenomenon I’m alluding to, the emotional battery, neotony, sexuality, alignment, and so on.

  27. Heather says:

    Does the dog feel like the car, and can’t get energy to “move”.

  28. Heather says:

    That’t it, once the dog accesses its hunger circuitry, the emotional circuit between dog-object of attraction is completed, and what the object (car) is feeling the dog is feeling, which is not a thing. So the dog feels the hind-end going faster than the front end and moves circuitously toward the car. THen the unresolved “charge” that the dog is left with in his Big-brain needs to go to a common ground between the dog-car, and that common ground is the tire – he PEES on the tire. Peeing being the result of an internal wave-like contraction.

  29. Heather says:

    I think 1 year was the perfect amount of time, thanks 😉

  30. kbehan says:

    Right, the dog must become the emotional counterbalance to a complex object of attraction or else it ends up with more charge no-matter-what-happens and hence, more incomplete. If prey acts like prey, perfect counterbalance. If prey resists acting like prey, sexual energy kicks in by virtue of neotony and it devolves and re-evolves in sympatico with it. So to synchronize it must first divine the negative as connected to the positive.

  31. Heather says:

    So the prey needs to “‘be’ the (diseased) moose” for nature to work. If the prey is not conducting, ie, not acting preylike, it by definition cannot “be” the moose. I was the moose today with Happy. My daughter says she feels hot like 100 degrees all the time. She is such a humongous moose it isn’t even funny, no wonder Happy was drawn to her like a moth to a flame…which set into motion my predetermined involvement with NDT. I am going to say that Einstein was right, everything is destined to be, it is fate because waves echo. I wonder what he thought about decoherence.

  32. Heather says:

    So the moose is hunting in reverse, to get its self back.

  33. Christine says:

    Hmmmm…it’s interesting what you note regarding your daughter. I’ve said for years now that I have a little furnace inside me (long before perimenopause set in, thank you very much LOL). I could easily live in Alaska (for a BUNCH of reasons)‼ That’s also why I have weather proof dogs…
    Einstein might be right in a big umbrella kind of way; however humans were gifted with free will, which means we can choose to or choose not to cooperate with the Big Umbrella of Universal Consciousness. We can even slipstream in/out…that is, if we’re laminar.

  34. Heather says:

    That is funny, Chrinstine, my dad just said to me on the way home just now, “people in Alaska are different. They just DO things, they do not have to wait for the right weather.”

    Also my dad just said that what you need to keep a water valve closed is teflon tape, it seals but is still slippery.

    He also told me a story about his outhouse as a kid, it had a board with different sized holes for different size people to sit on at the same time, his job was to scoop the stuff out with a bucket periodically and put it in the field. He said “if you had that job, wouldn’t you want to change? You just do it, to get OUT.”

  35. kbehan says:

    The dog feels its “self” in the car, the car doesn’t have the feeling however via Pavlovian conditioning, in effect its mass and movement has passed through the “blood/brain” barrier and entered the realm of animal consciousness by virtue of the dog having a feeling in response to the car, and yes every animal wants energy/mass to move, motion of course being inherent in the nature of energy.

  36. kbehan says:

    Although the language strikes us as strange, yes, in effect the moose has projected its self into the wolf and wants to reconnect with its “self” as well, everything is a function of attraction. If a hunter surprises a deer in the woods, as soon as it ducks into cover it doubles back into the wind to gain a scent of the hunter, even though it can see it and even though it may have been startled by hunters every hunting season for years.

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Books about Natural Dog Training by Kevin Behan

In Your Dog Is Your Mirror, dog trainer Kevin Behan proposes a radical new model for understanding canine behavior: a dog’s behavior and emotion, indeed its very cognition, are driven by our emotion. The dog doesn’t respond to what the owner thinks, says, or does; it responds to what the owner feels. And in this way, dogs can actually put people back in touch with their own emotions. Behan demonstrates that dogs and humans are connected more profoundly than has ever been imagined — by heart — and that this approach to dog cognition can help us understand many of dogs’ most inscrutable behaviors. This groundbreaking, provocative book opens the door to a whole new understanding between species, and perhaps a whole new understanding of ourselves.
  Natural Dog Training is about how dogs see the world and what this means in regards to training. The first part of this book presents a new theory for the social behavior of canines, featuring the drive to hunt, not the pack instincts, as seminal to canine behavior. The second part reinterprets how dogs actually learn. The third section presents exercises and handling techniques to put this theory into practice with a puppy. The final section sets forth a training program with a special emphasis on coming when called.
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