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 […]

I mentioned earlier that the sable GSD was overly stimulated in its prey instinct and so it can’t give its energy to its handler when stimulated. This is directly related to an aggressive issue because when a dog is in this state, there’s a bubble around him and the energy isn’t flowing smoothly with the […]

This is their first time to run free together, but I kept a long line on sable GSD in order to be safe and I positioned an old dog crate for Huuney to run into if she felt overwhelmed as these can often serve as innate “time out” spots that lets a dog emotionally restore […]

So here we have two whole males, both with very strong nature, and my goal here is to convert incoherent screaming (energy ungrounded in the gut) in the ungrounded male into coherent, metered barking for food (energy grounded in the gut). We can see that the black and tan GSD has a deep metered bark […]

They blast off like a heart attack. You’re walking on a woodland trail absorbed in the forest’s beauty and stillness when out of nowhere there’s an explosion from underfoot so intense you can virtually feel the slap of wings and the jet wash from a bevy of ruffed grouse bursting out from the underbrush. It’s […]

An excellent question from the web: “Since we don’t all “work” our dogs enough to let them fully express their natural prey instincts – we don’t all have access to sheep for herding, wild fowl for hunting, or decoys for biting), pet owners of dogs with high prey drives can really have a hard time […]

True, but no one to date has discussed drive in terms of energy. Drive is focused energy. This then brings us to the question as to how energy acquires focus (the inverse relationship of emotion to stress). Drive theorists to date have not been able to articulate this process without resorting to instincts and thoughts, […]

Every new client asks me what I think about Cesar Millan the “Dog Whisperer.” They want to know where I might agree and where I don’t.  So we had the idea that I would answer questions that were posed to Cesar in an interview he conducted and then one could draw their own distinctions. Link […]

If we could ask a dog how he felt about living in Man’s civilized world, and if he could put his feelings into our human language, he would say, “Every time I get excited or nervous, I get into trouble. What am I supposed to do with my energy?” Dogs see the world in their […]