At the NDT conference I often referred to the concept of “emotional momentum.” For example I mentioned that Pushing teaches the dog he can transfer emotional momentum to the owner, most especially his stress reserves, and conversely, Collecting teaches the dog he can absorb emotional momentum from others, most especially, even their stress reserves. The […]

At the 3:00 minute mark of this video there is an excellent example of how the notion of calming signals leads to a fundamental misinterpretation of two dogs interacting. The author of the video interprets an interaction between a yellow dog and a black lab in terms of calming signals, as one self-contained entity of […]

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 […]

On Dog Star Daily Rachel Friedman has posted a video in order to explain calming signals. The dogs are really cute so it’s fun to watch.   http://youtu.be/oPg_zGr6Qfg First of all, there is no intention in a dog to calm another dog. Watch the video and see if you can see the universal “force” of […]

(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 […]

Some recent questions posed by Heather really bring us to the heart of the matter. 1) Heather: “It is good that we don’t have to understand the physics when 2 dogs are in motion ;)” KB: Yes, while the laws of motion are simple, the actual computations are vast and too complicated for most of […]