Kevin asks the question, what is the nature of the dog?

“What is the nature of the dog?” Is the dog and our understanding of nature all figured out? Natural Dog Training believes that something profound is missing from the current training models and explains its mission in the video below.

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Published September 30, 2009 by Kevin Behan
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2 responses to “Kevin asks the question, what is the nature of the dog?”

  1. Dog’s are individuals. One of our failings as Humans is our obsession with classifying and reducing other individuals into easily conceptualized catogories. The models we use as mental shorthand inhibit our ability to see what is in front of us and live in the moment. While this same mental ability assists us to build machines and buildings and even the infrastructure of entire companies or armies – it does NOT do us much good when dealing with matters of the heart. Animals are ALL about emotions and sensations and Humans fear both. But since we Humans have cut ourselves off from sensation and emotions, we need the dog to remind us and connect us to this vital but absent dimension to our own being. As long as we insist upon ignoring our own essential nature we will continue to be perplexed by other creatures who are true to their emotions and live in the moment of sensation and being.

  2. kbehan says:

    Very well said. I’m promulgating a model wherein dogs, and animals, live completely in the immediate-moment, even instincts notwithstanding. This means therefore, that for a dog a moment is forever. And this means that they cannot think because to be wholly in the immediate-moment means that a moment is forever and therefore, it would be impossible to have any idea why, how or when something happens. With thoughts removed from our observations, this means that therefore dogs go by energy, in other words, emotion and feelings are energy and as such these work according to a non-linear logic of which we can have a glimpse if we strip thoughts away from what we project onto their behavior. We instinctively project thoughts because as you’ve noted, we are reflexively afraid of what our intellectual minds cannot control.

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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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