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 […]

CRITICAL THINKING IN DOGDOM ”Many theories have been advanced but there is a mass of confusion about social signaling among animals,” Dr. Weldon said. ”Mimicry of age, alarm calls and other characteristics, as well as sex, often cause misperceptions among observing researchers.” http://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/19/science/guile-and-deception-the-evolution-of-animal-courtship.html?pagewanted=2   Another SPARCS conference on the canine mind is being held in […]

Answer:  Because IT can only get out the way IT went in.   Hexie and Hessian, my two German shepherds, one day suddenly started muzzle grabbing Cousy, my neighbors’ rambunctious and incessantly playful lab. I’ve never seen them do it to each other or to any other dog. In fact, you rarely see dogs do […]

Also on Dog Star Daily is an article by Roger Abrantes on how to resolve the controversies about training methods. http://www.dogstardaily.com/blogs/dog-training—lets-end-fighting Abrantes divides the debate into the moralistic, the naturalistic, and the scientific camps. However what’s missing is an understanding of flow, a serious omission given that flow is the organizing principle of  nature. I suggest we […]

I think Roger Abrantes is the best expositor of the new version of dominance, and so I’ve focused on his writings in a number of articles in order to draw contrast with the model I’m promulgating. Recently a reader brought my book to his attention on his Dog Star Daily blog and so in the […]

System: 1) A complete exhibition of essential principles or facts, arranged in a rational or organized whole, or a complex of ideas or principles forming a coherent whole. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary   When a personality theory (one animal relative to another animal as in a dominance/submissive interaction) introduces a principle of energy in order […]

It’s my premise that whenever one tries to explain a natural system (such as the animal mind) with a personality theory (the animal as a self-contained entity of intelligence) one will always generate self-defeating logic loops and this will require more and more complex rationales to keep these self-annihilating principles from running into each other. […]

The old definition of dominance meant a social hierarchy of rank, high status being sought because it accorded breeding privileges and since genetic proliferation is held as the mainspring of evolution. This definition was propagated by scientists who had gathered the data and interpreted the statistics, and was then disseminated by trainers and behaviorists to […]

Without a model for the animal mind, Dogdom must always return to the notion of dominance in order to explain social structure. Learning theory hasn’t been able to fill the bill and neuroscience merely reduces behavior to its biological nuts and bolts. Furthermore the notion of dominance seems consistent with evolutionary theory, given the assumption […]