Here’s an excellent video courtesy of Brad Higgins Gun Dogs showing strongest degree of impulse control. Because the dog’s attraction to the prey is the basis of how he has learned to hunt with humans, again courtesy of Brad, the strength of his attraction to the prey is the strength of his capacity to self-control […]

http://icouzin.princeton.edu The core tenets of NDT theory—– (1) Emotion acts on the body/mind as a virtual “force” of attraction (2) Emotion always moves from the predator to prey polarity (3) Complex canine behavior emerges as a function of the prey drive —– might initially seem to be radical, outside of the mainstream ideas. But science […]

I didn’t attend either the conference linked below or log onto its streamed content Society for the Promotion of Applied Research in Canine Science (SPARCS). but Eric Brad wrote a good overview of his experiences there– http://lifeasahuman.com/2013/pets/dogs-the-best-friend-we-hardly-know/ Since I’m familiar with the work of the various speakers I feel qualified to make the following comments. […]

At the 3:00 minute mark of this video there is an excellent example of how the notion of calming signals leads to a fundamental misinterpretation of two dogs interacting. The author of the video interprets an interaction between a yellow dog and a black lab in terms of calming signals, as one self-contained entity of […]

Recently I was asked if Natural Dog Training with its use of the Prey Drive in the training of the heel, sit, down, stay and recall regime is but another way of saying the Premack Principle. Below from “Dog Star Daily” is Ian Dunbar’s discussion of the Premack principle. “The Premack principle suggests that if […]

The prey drive, manifested by a full, calm grip on a bite object and most importantly, by the body moving along with a smooth flowing gait, is like the Central Processing Unit in  a computer: as the CPU turns electrical inputs from the key board into information—the prey drive turns neurological inputs from the brain […]

Pavlov discovered that the best time to CORRECT a dog is when it is performing a task CORRECTLY.   The theory of Natural Dog Training (wherein emotion runs to ground through physiological states that then produce behaviors in conformance with the prey drive) can also be expressed in terms of Pavlov.  Note that the prey […]

Of the millions of cats in America, a few indulge in a kind of tug-of-war with their owners, and if one does a survey of the video record on the internet one can find such offerings. These are excellent examples of comparative behavior between cats and dogs as a means of understanding the phenomenon of […]

One of the reasons the energy argument I’m making on this website strikes some as stupendous is because unless one can articulate the distinction between emotion and instinct, and between a feeling and a thought, then one doesn’t know what emotion is or what a feeling is, which means the terms will be used loosely […]

Kevin Behan and Trisha Selbach discuss dominance in dog training and Kevin Behan’s Immediate Moment theory of social organization in wolf packs.