Whenever Coppinger inquires into the nature of the dog, conventional thinking and cherished romantic notions are quick to fall by the wayside. In “Work”  Coppinger has pushed the limits of the current paradigm to its breaking point, which is why it is a seminal book. Yet at the same time, the power of his argument […]

If you have an appetite for evolutionary theory, and enjoy bearing witness to the shift of a long standing paradigm, the three links below make for a hearty feast indeed.   http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/the-man-who-may-one-up-darwin/39217?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=OZYpost&utm_campaign=SA_T   http://aeon.co/magazine/science/how-horizontal-gene-transfer-changes-evolutionary-theory/   http://aeon.co/magazine/science/why-its-time-to-lay-the-selfish-gene-to-rest/   There is a lot to ingest in all this, but this passage leaps out from the article on […]

The video below is interpreted as showing a dog playing the role of peace maker by stopping things between two other dogs before it gets out of hand. While the “Good Samaritan” dog here does indeed interrupt the two other dogs, is that its intent? Because if such an interpretation were correct then we would […]

What is body language? I’ve been working on an e-book concerning body language and came across this video which purportedly debunks Monty Roberts’ “Join Up” method of horse training. I’ve written about this video before but want to revisit the topic as an exercise in critical thinking. http://www.coffscoastadvocate.com.au/story/2012/07/13/horse-training-methods-questioned/ This article demonstrates how interpreting behavior in […]

My reading of animal behavior has led me to understand the principle of emotional conductivity as the connective glue of animal consciousness, and hence, a new way of understanding what constitutes information in the animal mind. Information equals consciousness converting environmental inputs into emotional, temperamental values. Since I can see the same primal code at […]

Little by little, science is coming closer to understanding emotion as the universal operating system of animal consciousness. In this study, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329873.100-primal-pull-of-a-baby-crying-reaches-across-species.html#.VBzBnsZ3RBV various species of animals are found to respond to the distress calls of other species’ infants. This is because an infant no matter the species is an emotional ground, a preyful essence. Similarly, […]

I’m the object of a regular beat-down on the site of the Unknown Scientist and I return to these “discussions” because they so clearly demonstrate the internal contradict at the heart of modern Behaviorism. {Of course these are the same theocrats who criticized me in the seventies, eighties and nineties when I argued that wolves […]

“It is a fact that we have only to set the most simple and primary into action, to find, without our having to import any further complications, that more sophisticated considerations are already implied, inherent within them.” Lawrence Edwards   The principle of emotion as a function of attraction, implies flow, resistance to flow, and […]

PBS this week featured two excellent shows on animals. One was a Nature episode about the Turkey man, Joe Hutto, who grafted himself into a flock of wild turkeys and learned their ways. In this new documentary he makes contact with mule deer simply by being among them for two years. http://www.wgbh.org/programs/Nature-26/episodes/Touching-the-Wild-51073 {It seems to […]

Music, Natural Dog Training, Panksepp and the Constructal Law   http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40285693?uid=3739664&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102652666731 My argument is that the locomotive dynamic is the basis for our aesthetic appreciation of music, however not in the manner which is theorized in the article below, i.e. that synchronizing footfalls renders a beat of silence which then makes it easier to hear […]

John’s Question: “So …when a dog is growling he’s not digesting , the incoming information is not making is way through the pipe to where it is grounded in its gut , it’s all stuck in it’s head , I was mistakingly under the impression the pipe (mind/body) was flow out , the idea of flow […]

“Movement is the only way we have of interacting with the world, whether foraging for food or attracting a waiter’s attention. Indeed, all communication, including speech, sign language, gestures and writing, is mediated via the motor system.” Daniel Wolpert Phd. http://cbl.eng.cam.ac.uk/Public/Wolpert/WebHome To repeat, full emotional conductivity is moving without restriction. This kind of movement is […]

“Movement is the only way we have of interacting with the world, whether foraging for food or attracting a waiter’s attention. Indeed, all communication, including speech, sign language, gestures and writing, is mediated via the motor system. Taking this viewpoint, the purpose of the human brain is to use sensory signals to determine future actions.” […]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/21956798   This experiment featuring robotic ants illustrates how a simple principle of conductivity can elaborate into intelligently adaptive behavior without the benefit of advanced hardware or software. An ant-bot’s “mind” is organized around a principle of flow through which collectivized action spontaneously emerges as the solution to a foraging problem. Here again science demonstrates […]

Leah asks if the video below of synchronizing metronomes is akin to the trampoline analogy I offered recently. To repeat, a trampoline is analogous to consciousness as both are a displaceable medium, i.e. when stimulated an organism is induced into sensations of disequilibrium. So two people standing and especially moving on a trampoline displace the […]

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 […]

http://www.wimp.com/throwstick/ Does this dog need its head examined, or does this video reveal something profound about the nature of information? Modern ethologists, behaviorists and many trainers argue that dogs and wolves organize into social structures according to a rational calculation relative to gaining control over resources. Supposedly dogs compute a cost/benefit analysis, while taking in […]

My profound gratitude to Joyce Miller, Scott Hamilton, Dr. Jean-Marie Thompson (and of course “Romeo”) for introducing Natural Dog Training to the academic community. Our talk was well-attended and I was gratified to see more than a few light bulbs going off in the eyes of the audience. As always, my challenge was not to […]

Panksepp, Natural Dog Training, correlations and distinctions. The interesting thing about writing this article which I initially thought would be pretty simple and straightforward, is that in order to make correlations, I have to at the same time draw distinctions. I hope this doesn’t detract from conveying how much I respect Panksepp’s work. Step by […]

Correlations between the research of Jaak Panksepp and Natural Dog Training The debates I’ve had on various forums with modern learning theorists ultimately revolve around my claim that emotion shapes learning through a process that is far more fundamental than any system of reinforcements. I argue that reinforcements aren’t instrumental, a template comes first and […]

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’m surprised, as a matter of fact stunned, that modern behaviorism isn’t taking notice of the Constructal law as articulated by Adrian Bejan in his book “Design In Nature.”  To me the implications of the Constructal law are overwhelming and yet no behaviorist or biologist is taking note. So about a month ago I had […]

On Dog Star Daily Rachel Friedman has posted a video in order to explain calming signals. The dogs are really cute so it’s fun to watch.   http://youtu.be/oPg_zGr6Qfg First of all, there is no intention in a dog to calm another dog. Watch the video and see if you can see the universal “force” of […]

“The verb “to design” has been monumentally unproductive in our quest to understand design in nature for three main reasons. First, it led to the common view that the things humans design are “artificial,” in contrast to the “natural” designs that surround us. This is wrong, because we are part of nature and our designs […]

Generally the discussions I get into on/line don’t go anywhere. When I make a point it is typically ignored. This is easy to do because for one thing there are too many points of contention in play at once which mean one can radiate off in a tangential direction and evade the logical consequences of […]

“For some reason we take pleasure in synchronizing.” Steven Strogatz     The debate on Marc Bekoff’s blog on Psychology Today about the nature of “dominance” in social behavior has caused me to revisit the Ted lecture on the nature of synchronization by Steven Strogatz.   http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_strogatz_on_sync.html I fail to see how someone deeply involved […]

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 […]