“The verb “to design” has been monumentally unproductive in our quest to understand design in nature for three main reasons. First, it led to the common view that the things humans design are “artificial,” in contrast to the “natural” designs that surround us. This is wrong, because we are part of nature and our designs […]

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-infants-ascribe-social-dominance-larger.html I believe that the interpretation of this experiment is a case of leaping to a foregone conclusion. I temper this however with the acknowledgment that social dominance is indeed possible between human beings because human beings are capable of comparing one moment or one point-of-view to another. Thus it takes a certain amount of […]

Like Sang, I am reading “Design In Nature” and I’m going to post a series of quotes as I go through, some of which are instantly translatable into NDT terms. I don’t want to leap to a conclusion without reading and digesting the book in its entirety, but the resonance is so far pretty overwhelming. […]

System: 1) A complete exhibition of essential principles or facts, arranged in a rational or organized whole, or a complex of ideas or principles forming a coherent whole. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary   When a personality theory (one animal relative to another animal as in a dominance/submissive interaction) introduces a principle of energy in order […]

It’s my premise that whenever one tries to explain a natural system (such as the animal mind) with a personality theory (the animal as a self-contained entity of intelligence) one will always generate self-defeating logic loops and this will require more and more complex rationales to keep these self-annihilating principles from running into each other. […]

Generally the discussions I get into on/line don’t go anywhere. When I make a point it is typically ignored. This is easy to do because for one thing there are too many points of contention in play at once which mean one can radiate off in a tangential direction and evade the logical consequences of […]

The old definition of dominance meant a social hierarchy of rank, high status being sought because it accorded breeding privileges and since genetic proliferation is held as the mainspring of evolution. This definition was propagated by scientists who had gathered the data and interpreted the statistics, and was then disseminated by trainers and behaviorists to […]

“For some reason we take pleasure in synchronizing.” Steven Strogatz     The debate on Marc Bekoff’s blog on Psychology Today about the nature of “dominance” in social behavior has caused me to revisit the Ted lecture on the nature of synchronization by Steven Strogatz.   http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_strogatz_on_sync.html I fail to see how someone deeply involved […]

“As a culture we are still caught in the mental/physical divide, prone to thinking of psychiatric illness as either “all in your head” or, conversely, as “chemical imbalances” or “organic brain diseases.” None of these is a helpful or accurate description of any psychiatric condition. We cannot isolate the brain from life experience and the […]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/08/kyle-dyer-kusa-anchor-bit_n_1263246.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false From a discussion on a rescue group it is clear that many people have taken umbrage that the news anchor woman, Kyle Dyer, didn’t approach the dog with proper canine etiquette. http://www.facebook.com/WGSRescue Fortunately one writer on the website wrote: “I have not seen the video nor do I say the dog is at fault. […]

Thanks to Lee for the following: Intuitive Physics http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120124113051.htm   “In a review of related scientific literature from the past 30 years, vanMarle and Susan Hespos of Northwestern University found that the evidence for intuitive physics occurs in infants as young as two months — the earliest age at which testing can occur. At that […]

(Thanks to Russell for bringing this research to our attention.) http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-retreat-circuit-links-hunger-pursuit.html Emotion begins with “a want,” no matter how complex or sublime a feeling, it always crystallizes around “a want.” This is a common denominator that runs true from the most complex to the most primitive organisms. If something is perceived as conducive to a […]

Join author Kevin Behan for a discussion about his new book, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves. Learn how Behan came to understand the true nature of dogs and his unique approach to training, plus hear stories of his long training career and the dogs who’ve helped him form his […]

Without a model for the animal mind, Dogdom must always return to the notion of dominance in order to explain social structure. Learning theory hasn’t been able to fill the bill and neuroscience merely reduces behavior to its biological nuts and bolts. Furthermore the notion of dominance seems consistent with evolutionary theory, given the assumption […]

Generally we think of a rabid animal, foaming at the mouth, sinking its fangs into  the nearest warm blooded victim, as a crazed, frenetically enraged beast, a “mad dog” on a berserk rampage. Yet if we more closely consider the behavior of a rabid animal, we observe that there is a coherent and time-deferred string […]

In addition to “How The Dog Became The Dog” by Mark Derr, which is a stunning affirmation of the hunting paradigm in the domestication of the dog, I would like to call your attention to the book “Incomplete Nature” by Terrence Deacon. While this is a complex book that will be difficult for me to […]

Barbara King is writing a scholarly treatment on the question of whether animals experience grief and her findings are being previewed on a NPR discussion forum at the link below. http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/10/20/141452847/do-animals-grieve?sc=emaf King argues that “from a combination of observation, evolutionary logic, reading the peer-reviewed science literature, and talking to insightful animal people, I’m convinced that […]

Have you ever noticed that when you see amazing pictures of people getting along famously with wild animals, it doesn’t seem that they’ve ever taught them the standard dogma of “No Bite” and “No Jump” that’s prescribed for the raising and training of domestic dogs?

(Be advised that this a long essay on theory.) Recently there was a productive discussion (except for you know who) on Lee’s Psychology Today blog in regards to the differences between dogs and cats in terms of their respective social capacities. I would like to springboard off this discussion in order to more thoroughly develop […]

  Thanks to Elise Fussell for bringing our attention to the great article below on the gut and the mind. http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424053111904265504576566820066488938-lMyQjAxMTAxMDIwMDEyNDAyWj.html?mod=wsj_share_email_bot And then Lee recently highlighted this important story. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110914154408.htm

Here’s an interesting finding reported on in the NY Times that confirms my model that where the individual finds themselves within the group dynamic, which is a function of Temperament, then alters their hormonal/biochemical processes, rather than the other way around. So hormones don’t cause the behavior, rather they support integration into the group mind. […]

An emotional midpoint is a place or object that dogs can deflect their emotion onto as a substitute means of making contact with another dog. This is what’s going on when dogs are lifting their legs on things, these then can serve as midpoints around which they can orbit and thus they are emotionally aligning […]

The point of training a dog to bark on command, is that it becomes a way to stress the dog, and then he resolves the stress by a clean, clear, deep bark. Why is this important? Because it gives the dog a way to express fear without having to act on fear. In this sequence […]

If a dog doesn’t love to bite, then it needs to bite and a dog that guards something (food/resting place/body region/owner’s attention) is how that dog gets the opportunity to express that last .01%. It’s not that it wants the food/toy/resting place/attention etc., but that it needs these things in order to be granted instinctual […]

In this sequence of play we can see the sable GSD exhibit a soft mouth, which is evidence that his puppy mind is beginning to run the show. This means he is becoming equipped under a high rate of change to find new focal points for his Drive energy, so that he can shift what […]

Once a dog is able to become the object of attraction then it can make a trait on demand in order to complement the object of its attraction. This is the first instance of the sable GSD being able to handle the intense pressure of a male dog of high resistance value and allowing this […]

In this video an important development occurs within the mind of the sable GSD. He can feel emotional leverage, in other words he feels grounded into the other dog and connected to his “self” and therefore because he’s in hunger circuitry, Newton’s second law of motion is enabled, i.e. every action has an equal and […]

The prey drive, manifested by a full, calm grip on a bite object and most importantly, by the body moving along with a smooth flowing gait, is like the Central Processing Unit in  a computer: as the CPU turns electrical inputs from the key board into information—the prey drive turns neurological inputs from the brain […]

I mentioned earlier that the sable GSD was overly stimulated in its prey instinct and so it can’t give its energy to its handler when stimulated. This is directly related to an aggressive issue because when a dog is in this state, there’s a bubble around him and the energy isn’t flowing smoothly with the […]