Roger Abrantes: “Bottom line: we need to be nuanced about stress. Events causing healthy stress responses are necessary for enhancing attention to details, formation of memory, creation of bonds, and learning—and too much stress or for too long works against it.” http://ethology.eu/bonding-and-stress/   For a nuanced treatment of stress Abrantes might be interested in my […]

When some encounter an energy theory of behavior, they recast it as something it isn’t, such as telepathy, creationism, intelligent design, mysticism. You know the drill. http://dogbehaviorscience.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/dog-evolution-denier-ken-ham-i-mean-kevin-behan/ I believe that life evolves according to principles of energy, not by random. I also believe that the earth, the moon and the stars evolve according to principles […]

Have you ever heard a dog owner observe, usually plaintively, that their dog has a lot of energy? Do they mean their dog is mysteriously plugged into an invisible power grid, or it’s in the beam of an astral projection filling them with some kind of cosmic radiation, are they speaking gibberish? Throughout this site […]

I began in dogdom with the assumption that dogs were descended from wolves given what I learned from my father. At first this meant that an owner should aspire to be the vaunted Alpha pack leader figure. But through my work with protection and police dogs, and which led me to the German view of […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/books/review/social-by-matthew-d-lieberman.html?ref=books&_r=0 NYT Review of “Social” by Matthew D. Lieberman The premise of this book, while overly weighted to the neurochemical basis of behavior, nevertheless is getting deeper to the core and fits nicely with NDT tenet that there is only one drive, the Drive To Make Contact, and emotional affects evolved to compel organisms to […]

One of the best parts of the NDT conference was the variety and quality of the various venues we visited. The Von Liche Kennel tour took us through the greatest privately owned working dog kennel in the world, an inspiring example of a dream coming true through the power of passion. We also rode on […]

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/29/john-locke-human-understanding/?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=bufferdd457&utm_medium=twitter   “The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires an art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own object.” John Locke If one would like to make their thoughts an object by setting […]

In order to understand why dogs do what they do I believe that one must first realize that a profound error is made by projecting human thoughts onto animal behavior. At some point it just clicks that transposing the human intellectual capability of comparing one point-of-view to another point-of-view, or one moment-in-time to another moment-in-time […]

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 […]