Object of Attention

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 […]

The Reactive Dog and the Power of Will Jun 12, 2012

Impulse Control There’s a lot being said these days about impulse control given the increasing number of dogs being defined as  “reactive.” A dog that over reacts to innocuous events, does so because it feels compressed and it feels this way because it perceives itself to be the object-of-attention. After repeated sensitizations, the threshold of […]

Object of Attention To Object of Attraction Sep 11, 2011

In this video an important development occurs within the mind of the sable GSD. He can feel emotional leverage, in other words he feels grounded into the other dog and connected to his “self” and therefore because he’s in hunger circuitry, Newton’s second law of motion is enabled, i.e. every action has an equal and […]

Physical Center of Gravity Jun 24, 2010

The physical center of gravity is the kernel of a dog’s self and a dog’s sense of it is activated by external forces and sources, specifically when dealing with other beings, it is activated by eye contact. This is because a state of attention is composed of two beams, the external focal gaze by which […]

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.