Victor Ros from his web site: “The myths that man has attached to the horse, and the motives we impute to it, continue to form a set of unconscious and often unexamined assumptions about equine nature”  http://equilibregaia.com/author/equilibregaia/ Why not examine the number one assumption? Than animals formulate a sense-of-self as does a human. The number […]

“People eat physics,” said Dr. Van Vliet. “You eat physical properties with a little bit of taste and aroma. And if the physics is not good, then you don’t eat it.” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/health/mary-roach-on-studying-food-and-how-humans-eat-it.html?ref=science&_r=0 Dogs, emotional beings, construct a view of reality and experience the world through their insides. Humans, intellectual beings, experience the world from our […]

The bird in the bush is worth ten in the jaws. Potential energy is the most powerful motive within the animal mind because it is the hub of the wheel, around which collectivized, cooperative action organizes. Nature then conforms to the power of desire. Nature is not limited. Brad Higgins has made the video linked […]

Part Three (17:05) At this point in the interview the subject of the brain reward system comes up and Panksepp points out that this was an unfortunate term because it should actually have been called the “seeking system.” Panksepp’s research discovered that this system elaborates in higher cognitive processes into creative impulses and makes enjoyment […]

Panksepp, Natural Dog Training, correlations and distinctions. The interesting thing about writing this article which I initially thought would be pretty simple and straightforward, is that in order to make correlations, I have to at the same time draw distinctions. I hope this doesn’t detract from conveying how much I respect Panksepp’s work. Step by […]

The video linked below is an excellent exposition on the nature of hunting by way of Brad Higgins and his natural method of gun dog training. http://vimeo.com/61679149

Correlations between the research of Jaak Panksepp and Natural Dog Training The debates I’ve had on various forums with modern learning theorists ultimately revolve around my claim that emotion shapes learning through a process that is far more fundamental than any system of reinforcements. I argue that reinforcements aren’t instrumental, a template comes first and […]

(This is a long article to demonstrate how recent science validates the theory of Natural Dog Training as first articulated in the 1980’s.) Text: Sometimes critics ask for the math that substantiates the theory that underlies Natural Dog Training (emotion=attraction—-feelings=resistance) which is a little tough given that I’m not a mathematician. And the request is […]

It’s generally considered reasonable to say that one can never know for sure what’s going on inside the mind of a dog since 1) dogs have very different sensory apparatus than do we, and 2) dogs can’t speak and personally tell us what’s on their mind. Of course this is kind of revealing of an […]

August 22 – 25, 2013 Join Kevin Behan in Battleground, Indiana for four days of exciting training and exposure to the Natural Dog Training theory and techniques. This is a special conference for people affiliated with Natural Dog Training and members of the Indiana Crisis Response Team. From Thursday August 22nd, to Sunday, August 25th, […]

  Please join Kevin Behan as the Keynote Speaker for the Bernese Mountain Dog Club of Nashoba Valley Sunday, April 28th 10:00am To be held at the Holiday Inn Boxborough 242 Adams Pl  Boxborough, MA 01719 Cost: $35; includes buffet and speaker ticket RSVP Here Kevin Behan will join the Bernese Mountain Dog Club of Nashoba […]

Psychology Today has the right to summarily delete any column or terminate any columnist as they see fit, even on a whim, and so their decision to end Lee Charles Kelley’s column “My Puppy My Self is not censorship by any means. When it comes to privately held methods of discourse all’s fair in a […]

Recently I became aware of “The Higgins Method” of gun training developed by Brad Higgins. Brad has sent me two videos and invites commentary so I’ve added the NDT way of looking at things. http://vimeo.com/59023204 http://vimeo.com/56924329 Brad’s website is below: http://higginsgundogs.com/about-us/our-method/ It’s very gratifying to find folks from different ends of the dog training spectrum having […]

If you haven’t already, this you have to see. http://www.wthitv.com//dpp/news/local/a-dog-with-a-special-talent#.URvjfKVAsat

The interpretation of the experiment linked to below, claims to have discovered that dogs understand human perspective. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-21411249 Does this interpretation make sense? One entertaining and enlightening exercise through which students are taught about Operant Conditioning and its power to shape behavior, is through the game of “Hot and Cold.” A student is asked to […]

Everything is connected, everything is a repeating module elaborating from simple structures into more and more complex ones. As I develop my body language series, I will illustrate how the social sense of the canine mind is analogous literally, to the quantum mechanics of the sense of smell. This will not prove to be a […]

We see them every fall; migrating hawks, one by one streaming into a rising swirl of warm air, like children hopping onto a carousel, one that operates on a vertical as well as a horizontal plane. The raptors enter at the bottom and each go round carries them higher and higher into the bright blue […]

Recently I was asked if Natural Dog Training with its use of the Prey Drive in the training of the heel, sit, down, stay and recall regime is but another way of saying the Premack Principle. Below from “Dog Star Daily” is Ian Dunbar’s discussion of the Premack principle. “The Premack principle suggests that if […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/science/birds-found-to-have-emotional-reactions-to-song.html?ref=science&_r=0 According to this research, birds experience an emotional response to bird song in a manner akin to how humans emotionally experience music. If a female bird is primed with estrogen to simulate a breeding state, the same region of her brain is activated as is in humans listening to pleasant music. And if a […]

Recently tried to present my interpretation of “calming signals” to a group on Facebook that represented that they were a forum interesting in discussing what’s going on in calming signals. There was much magical thinking going on such as: “Dogs are good at calming signals because they had to be good at calming signals since […]

There’s several dog blogs I check from time to time to see how others think about dogs. I used to make comments on these various blogs but these don’t seem particularly productive. People project so much onto dogs, that they think they know what I’m saying without actually taking the time and trouble to understand […]

Great article below about slime mold and its capacity to time its actions, navigate a maze, retain a record of where it’s been, all of which happens without a nervous system. http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/9/why-my-slime-mold-is-better-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html So in my view an overarching template composed from the basic energetic principles of nature, organize its behavior to be in correspondence with […]

I don’t believe in using food to reward a dog. I use food to calm a dog. Food is calming because it is an emotional ground. In other words in order to eat the food, the dog has to open his jaws and swallow, and since in animal consciousness the body/mind is one organ and […]

It was quite an amazing night of viewing the other evening on PBS with Nature and Nova and their respective reports on animal bonding across species lines, and animal cognition. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/animal-odd-couples/full-episode/8009/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/horowitz-dogs.html What is so obvious from watching the behavior of the various animals profiled, but at the same time was abjectly missing in the […]

Learning To Bark Is A Wave Alwynne writes an excellent blog about her dog “Cholula” which among other themes documents the trials and tribulations of teaching a dog to speak on command. http://sweetslugabed.com/blog/2012/10/09/cholula-shows-her-speak/ What’s interesting about the bark-on-command is that some dogs get it instantly whereas for some dogs it can take a long, long…………long, […]

NPR reported on some intriguing research. http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/10/09/162401053/a-lively-mind-your-brain-on-jane-austen Professor Natalie Phillips who specializes in literature and neuroscience and who is especially interested in the nature of distractibility given that it is a prominent theme in Jane Austen’s work, engaged in a study examining the difference in a reader’s mind when deeply immersed versus skimming. “Phillips said […]

Kevin Behan of Natural Dog Training and author of Your Dog Is Your Mirror is pleased to be conducting a seminar at the New York Open Center! Sunday, November 4th 10:00am – 5:30pm New York Open Center 22 E. 30th Street New York, NY 10016 Ph: 212.219.2527 Open Heart Members: $120 / Non-members $130   […]

In this article the author conjoins two studies which demonstrate that wolf hunting behavior is analogous to the mass flocking of starlings. This is an interesting article because these studies demonstrate the exact opposite of what this author is arguing in the article entitled: “To Hunt, Cooperation Is Not Needed.” The evidence the author cites […]

As a footnote to my last post, the NY Times features a compelling piece on the interconnectedness of all life. So before we go labeling this or that wolf a freeloader by considering one aspect of its behavior as disconnected from the entire circle of behavior, first we should look for the forest from the […]