emotional grounding

Do Dogs Believe In Magic? Apr 24, 2014

In the video below a magician plays a sleight of hand on a number of dogs.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEQXeLjY9ak   Stanley Coren in his Psychology Today blog argues that the dog’s reaction corresponds to a child’s cognitive understanding of “object permanence.” To support this view he cites a dog still retaining interest in a ball that […]

Hunger For Babies Sep 29, 2013

http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2013/09/24/study-explains-why-women-want-to-eat-babies/ “The researchers concluded: ‘These results show that the odor of newborns undoubtedly plays a role in the development of motivational and emotional responses between mother and child by eliciting maternal care functions such as breastfeeding and protection.” Researcher Johannes Frasnelli said: ‘What we know now and what is new is there is a neural […]

Smell and the Quantum Canine Jan 31, 2013

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 […]

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.