Some consider using food in training a bribe. In contrast many owners don’t, but then the vast majority never get past the Pez Dispenser phase and present a negative image to the use of food. In the seventies I don’t think I ever used food other than giving a dog a biscuit as […]

Many clients of problem dogs are afraid that their pet, once a happy-go-lucky pup, has gone bad. Or they fear that an evil gene is now beginning to express itself, or worse, that they have failed their dog in some irretrievable, unredeemable way. As I go on to assure them that there is nothing constitutionally […]

I recently became involved in a discussion on a Facebook Dog forum. Although these probably aren’t a good way to make friends and influence people I nevertheless persist in order to practice interfacing my way of seeing dogs (emotion) with the other way of seeing dogs (thinking). And who knows, perhaps some reader will begin […]

Remember the first time you sat on a bike before being launched down the drive, or the first time sitting behind the wheel of a car, or horror of horrors, looking down from the diving board on your very first jump into the deep end? Scary stuff… at first. So how were these feats which […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/science/fruit-flies-are-shown-to-enter-a-fearlike-state.html?ref=science   “Despite these observations, it was not possible to conclude the flies were experiencing fear, Dr. Anderson said.” “We can only know that by verbal report,” he said. “So we can’t scientifically study feelings in any creature but a human.” Or, we could simply observe behavior without injecting human thoughts into the minds of […]

We normally think of compulsion as something aversive to a dog, but there are situations wherein it can release a dog’s energy. We think this way because we humans have an outside-in perspective on change, we think the outside causes what we experience inside. But an animal has an inside-out perspective, feeling that what is […]

Occasionally the Unknown Scientist puts down the pipettes, quells the bunsen burners and graciously takes the time to critique my work. Recently the US has questioned the linkage I’ve drawn between emotion and stress as an explanation for why dogs muzzle grab. The US has employed the technique of interchanging equivalencies to see if my […]

Aggression and the Nature of Fear Since in my view all expressions of anti-social aggression are manifestations of fear, it would prove fruitful to take a closer look at the nature of fear. Fear is the collapse of a state of attraction. And because a dog doesn’t discriminate between physical and emotional equilibrium, all forms […]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029461.700-mouse-memory-inheritance-may-revitalise-lamarckism.html#.UqMFpBZAsas The transfer of physical memory from one individual to another is the function of DISfunction. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24677?cmpid=NLC%7CNSNS%7C2013-1205-GLOBAL&utm_medium=NLC&utm_source=NSNS&#.UqMdwBZAsas It’s why there is stress in life. Organisms are carriers of an emotional charge more than they are of genes. Lamarck was wrong about the mechanics of evolution, but he was right that evolution happens in real time. […]

From the New York Times “Why We Like Sad Music”   http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/why-we-like-sad-music.html?ref=opinion   The emotional experience of listening to music is an excellent way to separate thoughts from feelings and emotion from instinct because as a pure wave form music is principally apprehended and processed by the heart. Understanding how the heart works is vital […]

I started this section on body language in order to explain what’s going on in a You Tube clip of an interesting interaction between a Rhodesian Ridgeback and a Malinois. While brief, the video is rich with dynamic. In fact there’s so much going on that it’s necessary to do some theoretical backfilling before going […]

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 […]

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, […]

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. […]

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 […]

The more I try to explain an energy theory of behavior to those who are genuinely interested, the more sympathetic I am to the question: “Where’s the science?” I wish I had all day to collate the science that’s available in support of an energy theory but for now I’ll just try to call the […]

I’m commenting on the first Wolf Park video submitted wherein a moose head is brought from the cache TO THE CENTER as Energy wants to move! Any two heart cells when placed in a conductive medium synchronize with each others beat. The first thing to do is turn off the sound and learn to see […]

Donnie poses the following Stump A Chump question: “In one of the Quantum Canine episodes (can’t remember which) you explain a mama dog biting her young not as a correction but as “imprinting fear” so that when they see large prey they know not to go after the strong, healthy ones. Wouldn’t this imply that […]

Apparently Lee Kelley has the temerity to question Patricia McConnell, one of the leading lights of dogdom, over her methodology, the particulars of which she posted in public, in response to two of her dogs not getting along. In my mind Lee wasn’t “attacking” her honor, virtue, honesty, compassion, intelligence or integrity, he was questioning […]

What should I do if my dog growls at me? “I told my neighbor what happened and he said his dog growled at him, ONCE. Should I do what my neighbor did?” First, step away from the dog. Step back from the edge. Don’t do anything. Take a deep, deep breath and enjoy a long […]

Some of my definitions are scattered across this site and mostly in terms of why-dogs-do-what-they-do, but what follows is a more concise summary. ENERGY: An action potential, a differential of force between two poles. Energy in animals builds up by virtue of a bipolar, two-brain makeup each with its own divergent agenda just as if […]

Because they feel the ground is moving. In animal consciousness, just as in Einstein’s theory of relativity, there is no such thing as an absolute frame of reference; in other words, something is absolutely at rest while something else is in absolute motion. We now know thanks to Einstein that there is no ether permeating […]

Question: if dogs are social by nature as Natural Dog Training claims them to be, how could a dog ever do something “anti-social?” Answer: because emotion must move. A brief primer on emotion: Emotion is energy. And as pure energy, before it becomes entangled in the higher processes of the nervous system and either elaborates […]

Why do dogs wag their tails? The quick answer is that a dog wags its tail for a reason which seems self-evident enough, being that it’s the tell-tale mark of a friendly dog. Indeed, anyone who’s stood near the pounding tail of a prototypical friendly breed, such as a Labrador Retriever, can take a veritable […]

Behaviorists call the syndrome of a dog running helter-skelter around the yard, or zooming from room to room in the house “frequent, random activity periods (FRAPS). However this is a profound misnomer because there’s nothing random about this activity. When a dog goes zoom-zoom-zoom it is actually fear coming to the surface so that it […]