Which doesn’t belong and why? Emotion, Love, Affection, Bonding, Altruism, Cooperation, Prey-Predator dynamic. Actually it’s a trick question, in my model they all belong although admittedly the final term seems jarring relative to the warm, fuzzy, comforting feeling we get from the others. I have argued, and I invite argument to the contrary, that the oldest […]

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 […]

An article, purporting to be the latest science on dogs, has been making the internet rounds in condemnation of Cesar Millan. http://yodogcast.tumblr.com/post/55504306960/the-damage-of-the-dog-whisperer-a-scientific-critique Cesar Millan is a particularly nettlesome burr under the saddle of progressive learning/training theorists, who believe that animal behavior is driven by reinforcement. Cesar is challenging this view, in effect saying that there is an […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/books/review/social-by-matthew-d-lieberman.html?ref=books&_r=0 NYT Review of “Social” by Matthew D. Lieberman The premise of this book, while overly weighted to the neurochemical basis of behavior, nevertheless is getting deeper to the core and fits nicely with NDT tenet that there is only one drive, the Drive To Make Contact, and emotional affects evolved to compel organisms to […]

Everything is connected, everything is a repeating module elaborating from simple structures into more and more complex ones. As I develop my body language series, I will illustrate how the social sense of the canine mind is analogous literally, to the quantum mechanics of the sense of smell. This will not prove to be a […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

The idea of choice immediately evokes in our mind the notion of a self-contained intelligence deliberating over options and doing a cost/benefit analysis over some span of time. However, in emotional intelligence, which is a network consciousness, it takes two to make a choice. Every animal wants to feel good, but we are complex emotional […]

Monty Roberts in his book “The Man Who Listens to Horses” in recounting how he developed his “Join Up” method of training, writes of observing what he termed a dominant mare in a herd of wild horses on the high plains, driving a young stallion out of the herd that had been biting and kicking […]

What could be cozier, a dog snuggled deep into the comforter on a raw winter’s night, warming the bed, groaning and sighing with drowsy contentment while the cold winter wind bites and whips against the bedroom window? When my father and I floated the Cains River in New Brunswick, Canada during the last run of […]

A discussion as to whether dogs apprehend reality in terms of a virtual rather than an actual field of energy may not seem particularly relevant to training a dog to stay in the yard and staying off the furniture, but it is. Because dogs are social by nature, they do everything in terms of a […]