My Puppy, My Self

Of Mice and Mutts III: The Negative Effects of Positive Reinforcement

Lee Charles Kelley — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:55:39 +0000

In the first article in this series, Why Behavioral Science Is Losing the Training Wars, I described two examples of learning in dogs that can't be explained through either the pack leader model of training or learning theory, and suggested that the reason the positive training movement hasn't dominated the current training landscape is that behavioral science isn't as scientific as positive (or +R) trainers claim. In the second, Is Behavioral Science Failing Our Dogs, I described how my two examples can only be explained completely and satisfactorily through a simple energy theory which operates primarily on the principle that all behaviors, instinctive or learned, are designed to reduce a dog's internal tension or stress: stimulus (energy-in)>increased tension>behavior (energy-out)>release. It's pure energy.

This may seem strange at first, but after all, the universe started out as energy. It then differentiated into subatomic particles, then into atoms of hydrogen, then helium, and up the periodic table. At a certain point some atoms were joined, energetically, into various kinds of molecules. At a point beyond that some of these molecules developed into living organisms, which then evolved and developed into the rich complexity of nature we see all around us (and inside of us) today. From the Big Bang to the dog run, energy continues to manifest itself in everything your dog does, from the way the neurons fire inside his brain to the way his tail wags when you come home from work.

In presenting his energy theory, former police dog trainer and natural philosopher Kevin Behan, writes: "The irreducible essence of anything is always a function of energy. I'm proposing that the nature of dogs is also a function of an energetic makeup rather than a [mental or] psychological one." (Read more here.)

My good friend Alexandra Semyonova -- a highly-respected and well-known dog trainer in the Netherlands, who uses only positive reinforcement techniques -- wrote to me not long ago, saying, "Your energy theory¹ is not as far-fetched as people may think. It's just that you have to think interdisciplinarily to get it. You could say that an energy exchange with the environment doesn't only take place through food. As two dogs look at each other [or play together], the electrical patterns in their brains change. This can trigger changes in physical structure. And because those brains are a sort of solidified past, those dogs will be responsive to [the] kind of energy related to that past, and not to some other kind of energy that wasn't present or important at the time²."

To me, that's brilliant. And it's exactly how operant conditioning works (when it does work). The reinforcement for "good" behaviors isn't the result of an external object, event, or marker; it's due to the way a dog's emotional energy flows and finds a satisfying release. The more satisfying the release, the more deeply the behavior it's coupled with is learned³.

Mind you, when I talk about energy I'm not being vague and new-agey. I'm talking about nervous or emotional energy. Nervous energy is essentially electric: the movement of electrons through one neuron into the next. It's choppy; it has an unpleasant stop/start feel. Plus it's hard to control; it operates on its own, almost forcing an animal to obey its (the energy's) own needs. True, nervous energy is necessary for an animal's survival, but it has nothing to do with animal happiness. That's a problem, because both dominance training and operant conditioning rely primarily on survival feelings to get their effects: with a dominance-trained dog it's the need to avoid danger (i.e., a correction), with a positively-reinforced dog it's the need for food (remember, behavioral science got its start with Pavlov's dogs salivating at the sound of a bell, and continued with Skinner's rats pressing levers to obtain food pellets).

Emotional energy, though, is magnetic, flowing, and can be very pleasant. Yes, a dog may occasionally feel stressed if he has more emotional energy than his system can carry, especially if he has no way to resolve or release it. But at least he has more control over what he can do with it. And as long as he has that feeling, he's not distressed or thrown completely off-balance by the weight of excess emotion.

So it seems to me that despite Skinner's brilliance, instinctive biological needs actually interfere with an animal's capacity to learn, while positive emotions are the bedrock of learning. Behavior modification via survival needs is also almost wholly dependent on repetition and artificial reinforcement, not to mention the process of occasionally withholding rewards through a variable reinforcement ratio, which can be very stressful for a dog. Karen Pryor, one of the key figures of the positive training movement, writes in a 2006 article: "Reinforcement may go from predictable to a little unpredictable back to predictable, as you climb, step by step, toward your ultimate goal. Sometimes a novice animal may find this [variability] very disconcerting. If two or three expected reinforcers fail to materialize, the animal may simply give up and quit on you. You can see this clearly on the video of my fish learning to swim through a hoop. When three tries ‘didn't work' the fish not only quit trying, he had an emotional collapse, lying on the bottom of the tank in visible distress⁴."

Not only is this kind of training not positive, it actually proves that all behavior is learned, not through reinforcers, but through the reduction of internal tension or stress. The more stressed a dog is -- as with a variable ratio of reinforcement -- the deeper a behavior is learned when that stress is resolved. But learning through flow is anything but stressful. It also doesn't require reinforcements because it's an immensely pleasurable experience on its own. Plus it takes place instantly and automatically.

So no matter how well-conditioned our dogs become, no matter how much a part of their brain "salivates" at the sound of a clicker⁵, or works to gain a reward, on a certain level dogs are not very happy when they're subjected to learning through operant conditioning.

Not happy? Are you serious?

Deadly serious. I mean, think about it. Somewhere in the back of every dog trainer's mind is that image of Pavlov's dogs, salivating at the sound of a bell ringing. That's the apex of conditioning. Yet no one seems to consider how unhappy those dogs must have been. And let's not even get into the stress Skinner's lab rats and pigeons were feeling. So, yes, on a certain level, positive reinforcement is actually an unpleasant experience.

I know that may sound crazy, but the current trend in child-rearing and education tells us that positive reinforcement is undermining learning and happiness in our kids. In her Psychology Today blog, Creating in Flow, social psychologist Susan K. Perry quotes Teresa Amabile of Harvard. "If rewards become prominent in children's minds, they may overwhelm the intrinsic joy of doing something interesting and personally challenging." Kids who are given rewards for reading, for example, tend to choose shorter books in order to get more rewards, while children who are motivated by a love of learning will read anything that catches their fancy, just for the pure joy of it.

Every positive trainer reading this will assert that they see that kind of joy in their dog's eyes when their clients' dogs are learning through +R. I can only say that they must be seeing things differently than I do⁵. I would also argue that whatever happiness dogs do experience in a clicker class or by working for variable-ratio food rewards, it isn't because of the technique, it's probably because -- just like young children -- dogs are so hungry for learning and are designed to latch onto anything that gives them something to do with their energy -- especially in a social context -- that they're supplying their own emotional flow in order to help them move past the unpleasant aspects of conditioning techniques.

There's no doubt that there has to be a payoff for learning. That's the one simple truth of Skinner's theory. But if the payoff doesn't reduce internal tension, or spark feelings of pure joy, it will automatically create unhappiness and resistance in dogs just as it creates uncertainty and resentment in children.

The positive training movement defined itself from the outset as being a kinder and more scientific alternative to dominance training. And that's true. But dogs aren't lab rats. And there's a "new kid" in town, a method that's even kinder and may be more scientific.

If you've read my first article you'd know that my primary reason for discussing the holes I see in behavioral science is that dogs are trying to tell us something about the nature of consciousness. Lab rats and helper monkeys don't have the emotional capacity dogs do, so using survival feelings to condition them works fine most of the time. But dogs are different. Only canines, homo sapiens (and some cetaceans) have the ability to override instinct in favor of emotion. That's an amazing thing. And it's part of what makes dogs the current "it" species for cognitive scientists⁷.

We all love our dogs and we all want what's best for them. So I would challenge anyone reading this: if you believe operant conditioning is scientific, then be scientific and test Kevin Behan's energy theory for yourself. Next time I'll give you one simple exercise that will not only enable you to do that, it might just improve the lives of every dog you know.

LCK

Footnotes:

1) It's not my energy theory, though for some reason Semyonova likes to think it is. As this article states, it was developed by Kevin Behan. Oddly enough though, Semyonova and I are the first two people to describe canine social structure as part of a self-emergent system, long before we had a meeting of the minds online. Semyonova did it 2002 in her longitudinal study found at www.nonlineardogs.com, while I did it as a bit of passing dialogue in my first novel, A Nose for Murder, also published in 2002. Meanwhile, Kevin Behan described pack social structure -- particularly while hunting -- as a bottom-up, self-emergent system in his 1992 book, Natural Dog Training, even though he hadn't heard of emergence theory at the time: "Since each individual has different sensitivity to prey making, we observe the emergence of order -- the creation of a group and a pack -- out of what was chaos."

2) It's a physiological fact that certain sensory details associated with past emotional experiences can not only bring memories flooding back, they can often make you feel as if you're actually re-living that past event. One of the strongest of these mnemonic triggers comes through the sense of smell. For example, when your present-day nostrils inhale the same perfume worn by that wonderful girl you were in love with back in college, your olfactory nerves and the part of your hippocampus holding memories of her vibrate at the same frequency once again.

From Discover Magazine: "Quantum physics may explain the mysterious biological process of smell ... says biophysicist Luca Turin, who first published his controversial hypothesis in 1996 while teaching at University College London. Then, as now, the prevailing notion was that the sensation of different smells is triggered when molecules called odorants fit into receptors in our nostrils like three-dimensional puzzle pieces snapping into place. The glitch here, for Turin, was that molecules with similar shapes do not necessarily smell anything like one another. Pinanethiol [C10H18S] has a strong grapefruit odor, for instance, while its near-twin pinanol [C10H18O] smells of pine needles. Smell must be triggered, [Turin] concluded, by some criteria other than an odorant's shape alone.

"What is really happening, Turin posited, is that the approximately 350 types of human smell receptors perform an act of quantum tunneling when a new odorant enters the nostril and reaches the olfactory nerve. After the odorant attaches to one of the nerve's receptors, electrons from that receptor tunnel through the odorant, jiggling it back and forth. In this view, the odorant's unique pattern of vibration is what makes a rose smell rosy and a wet dog smell wet-doggy. It is the frequency of vibration, not the shape, that determines the scent of a molecule."

So Alexandra Semyonova's statement -- "dogs will be responsive to [the] kind of energy related to that past, and not to some other kind of energy that wasn't present or important at the time" -- is right on target.

3) While it's true that learning still takes place in relation to a dog's history (as behavioral scientists tell us), the key element isn't a conscious mental process such as thinking of past experiences and figuring out how to apply them to the present moment, or of learning through consequences or trial-and-error (which would all require that the dog be able to engage in mental time travel and/or propositional thinking). It's simply about the dog vibrating at the same frequency in the here-and-now moment as he did in the past: in other words, learning is a funciton of energy, not a mental thought process.

4) Pryor goes on to say, "Casinos, believe me, use the power of the variable ratio schedule to develop behaviors, such as playing slot machines, that are very resistant to extinction, despite highly variable and unpredictable reinforcement."

So are we training dogs or creating gambling addicts?

5) Clicker training was invented by Keller Breland -- a student and later a colleague of B.F. Skinner -- as a way of marking behaviors while working with hunting dogs at a distance. Breland later taught Karen Pryor how to use clicks and whistles to train dolphins. Here's how Pryor describes the process:

"The trainer clicks at the moment the behavior occurs: the horse raises its hoof, the trainer clicks simultaneously. The dog sits, the trainer clicks. Clicking is like taking a picture of the behavior the trainer wishes to reinforce. After ‘taking the picture,' the trainer gives the animal something it likes, usually a small piece of food. Very soon (sometimes within two or three clicks), an animal will associate the sound of the click with something it likes: the reward. Since it wishes to repeat that pleasurable experience, it will repeat the action it was doing when it heard the click."

So again we're using Pavlov's dogs as a template.

6) Another figurehead of the positive training movement, Jean Donaldson, clicker trained her dog to hump her leg on cue. (I know!) In my experience dogs only exhibit that behavior when they're in a state of frustration, not joy. Yet Donaldson insists that her dog "seems to have fun" doing it. Plus it makes her (Donaldson) laugh. (For the full article, click here.)

Finally (on this point), the fact that +R trainers see joy in the dogs they train doesn't mean much; after all, I'm sure Cesar Millan -- the nemesis of the positive training movement -- sees joy in the eyes of the dogs he works with too.

7) Virginia Morrell writes in Science Magazine: "Dogs are fast becoming the it animal for evolutionary cognition research. Our canine pals, researchers say, are excellent subjects for studying the building blocks underlying mental abilities, particularly those involving social cognition. Their special relationship with humans is also seen as worthy of study in its own right; some researchers see Canis familiaris as a case of convergent evolution with humans because we share some similar behavioral traits. ... Some researchers even think that dogs may teach us more about the evolution ... of our social mind than can our closest kin, the chimpanzee, because Fido is so adept at reading and responding to human communication cues."

Of Mice and Mutts: Is Behavioral Science Failing Our Dogs?

Lee Charles Kelley — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:05:27 +0000

There's a growing trend in this country of moving away from using behavioral science methods in education and child-rearing, and trying a more loving and playful approach.

Popular author and lecturer Alfie Kohn sums up the operant conditioning approach as, "Do this and you'll get that." In a September, 2009 New York Times article, Kohn cites a 2004 study done by two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, joined by American Edward Deci, which showed that although adult children of parents who used behavioral contingencies in raising them were "somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted ... compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a ‘strong internal pressure' than to ‘a real sense of choice.' Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived and they often felt guilty or ashamed."

Kohn's answer is pretty simple: we should love our children unconditionally.

Evolutionary psychiatrist and professor of veterinary medicine Jaak Panksepp has written a number or papers and done studies showing how play is more important than structured learning. This idea was echoed recently in a piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in which Paul Tough highlighted a stark contrast in two ways of teaching pre-kindergarten kids impulse control. Tough discusses a six-week-long experiment that Angela Lee Duckworth and some of her colleagues at U. Penn conducted with 40 fifth-grade students. '"We did everything right." Duckworth said. She and her colleagues led the kids through self-control exercises, helped them reorganize their lockers, gave them rewards for completing their homework. And at the end of the experiment, the students dutifully reported that they now had more self-control than when they started the program. But in fact, they did not.'

"We got zero effect on everything," Duckworth said.

Tough then described how imaginative play can induce impulse control in young children naturally and automatically. "In one experiment, 4-year-old children were first asked to stand still for as long as they could. They typically did not make it past a minute. But when the kids played a make-believe game in which they were guards at a factory, they were able to stand at attention for more than four minutes."

If these two studies are representative of anything (and they may not be), pure play, with no strings attached, is 4 times more powerful than operant conditioning, at least when it comes to teaching impulse control.

Now, I'm no expert in childhood development. I don't even pretend to know everything there is to know about dogs or dog training. What I do know is that dogs are like very young kids in at least two very important ways: they're unencumbered by layers upon layers of thought, and if two or more of them get together, they'll invent some sort of game to pass the time. I also know it's a good idea to question the conventional wisdom about canine behavior, take a hard look at all the myths and folklore from as many angles as possible, and try to come up with explanations that are simpler and more parsimonious.

In her terrific book, Inside of a Dog, Alexandra Horowitz says that in order to truly understand dogs, we need to put "our umwelt caps on," meaning we should try to see things from the dog's unique perspective. That's what I try do here, and it's what I encourage my clients and readers to do. I've often said that instead of anthropomorphizing dogs, we need to dogthropomorphize ourselves.

In my most recent article I gave two examples of learning that can't be explained fully through either of the two opposing theories¹ on dog training, dominance or learning theory: a) by playing a game where you roll over on your back and act "submissive" toward dogs they become more obedient², and b) how I taught my own dog Freddie not to scavenge by praising him while he was in the act of doing it³.

In both examples I'm doing things backwards to the way these theories describe how and why dogs learn to obey. And the reason neither theory can explain why my "backwards methods" work is that both theories are thought-centric and, therefore, not quite dogthropomorphic enough.

For instance, one of the prime directives in dominance is that you should never let your dog "think" he's alpha. Even the propositions that dogs somehow know who's alpha and who's not, or that they form dominance hierarchies based on rank and status, require abstract, conceptual, and symbolic thinking. On the other side of the debate, one of the things you hear a lot from positive trainers is that their methods "make a dog think." If dogs can think, what are they thinking? No one seems to be able to answer that question. (And if you ask me, even the simple idea that dogs learn by cause-and-effect is flawed⁴.)

Meanwhile, when you boil down my examples to their barest essentials, they have nothing to do with a mental thought process going on inside the dog's head. Each simply changes the energetic dynamic taking place between me and the dog. That's why they work.

For example, if a dog's obedience is in any way related to his social instincts, then by rolling over my back I increased each dog's social attraction (which could be rightly called a property of energy), and reduced his social resistance (the opposite energetic polarity). That in turn reduced whatever resistance the dogs might have had to obeying my commands.

In the second case, when my dog was going after sidewalk snacks it wasn't because he was hungry, at least not in the physical sense; no well-fed dog would scavenge for that reason⁵. He did it because of an internal feeling of pressure, coming from millions of years of evolution, pushing him to try to connect to something in the environment through his prey drive⁶. (This is the same primordial pressure that motivates dogs to herd our sheep, guard our cattle, fetch our slippers, and sit, and stay, and come when called.) Then, when I praised him while he was scavenging, that need was satisfied by connecting to me emotionally. And since that feeling was, thankfully (and a bit serendipitously), stronger than the feeling he got from scavenging, he gave up the behavior.

Former police dog trainer and natural philosopher Kevin Behan writes, "There are only two ways to interpret the behavior of things ... either we interpret complex behavior in terms of energy or in terms of thoughts." (Behan has actually created a fully-realized energy theory of canine behavior that informs my personal training techniques and philosophy.)
Immanuel Kant said something similar, that the human mind is endowed with the ability to reason, which contains within it categories of judgment, cause and effect, time and space and so on. As a result humans automatically project "reasons" onto things in the natural world, including animate and inanimate objects. (New research shows that there's actually a neurological basis for this tendency, as reported here by Marc Bekoff⁷).

We're all susceptible to anthropomorphizing dogs. We all do it. However, if we put on our umwelt caps and begin to look at canine behavior as part of a simple energy exchange between the dog and his environment -- with stimuli as energy-in and behavior as energy-out -- then both of my backwards examples make perfect sense. In fact, I think all canine behavior, learned or instinctive, can be described as a flow of energy, directed towards the dog's immediate, in-the-moment goal of reducing his feelings of internal tension or emotional pressure. And this model not only works on its own, it also encompasses both dominance training and operant conditioning, explaining why they work when they do and why they don't when they don't.

We might say, for instance, that dogs and wolves are naturally drawn toward those beings, canine or human, who have more emotional gravitas than they do themselves. This would explain why wolf packs seem to have pack leaders (when they really don't⁸), and why pack leader training techniques are sometimes effective. We could also say that dogs gravitate toward the kinds of behaviors that create pleasurable changes in their internal energy states and veer away from those that don't. This would explain why positive reinforcement works better than punishment.

On the other hand, by expecting dogs to learn through the thought-centric polarities of dominance and submission, trainers using the pack leader model may be unwittingly blocking a dog's natural flow of emotion, which can either backfire (that energy has to flow somewhere), or impose a strict requirement that the owner or trainer has to constantly remind the dog who's alpha in order to keep that dog's energy under control.

As for positive trainers, by not factoring in how a dog's psyche is weighted, energetically-speaking, more toward chasing squirrels or golf carts, for example, than to sitting for a cookie, they run the risk that sooner or later the dog won't respond to commands or cookies because those things have a low energy payoff, and the bigger energy payoff the dog sees in squirrels means that sooner or later, those squirrels had better run.

But by training a dog through playful exercises like hide-and-seek, keep away, chase me, and tug⁹, we're giving our pups a big enough payoff to make squirrels and golf carts and even other dogs start to pale in comparison.

Remember, that's how Freddie was taught not to scavenge. Once he experienced the person praising him (me) as the optimal release point for his internal emotional pressure -- a release that was more pleasurable (at least for him, in that context) than eating sidewalk snacks -- he no longer needed to find satisfaction from those external variables because he had a constant source of satisfaction (me again) right there at his side.

Following this model, you become the reinforcer for good behavior because you're the primary release point for your dog's energy. You also become his "pack leader" because you exert more "gravitational pull" on him than anything else in his environment. And it's not because you're the one controlling the goodies, it's because you are the goodies. And whether you're a follower of Cesar Millan or Jean Donaldson, that's a good thing.

However, if you think the idea of a dog's internal emotional energy needing a release is just a bunch of new-age hooey, watch dogs play. Take a step back. Don't look at their behavior; try to see the shifts in their energy. You'll see that when dogs are enjoying themselves the most, it's because they're taking turns being the release point for each other's energy. It's only when the flow of energy gets blocked in some way that tension results.

Remember, dogs love us unconditionally. They also pay close attention to the shifts in our energy. So let's do the same for them.

LCK
www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
"Changing the World, One Dog at a Time"
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Footnotes:

1) In reality, these are not opposing but dual theories, in that they're isomorphic in certain key ways. First, while dominance is weighted more toward positive punishment, and operant conditioning toward positive reinforcement, they're both using learning theory whether they're aware of it or not. Secondly, both systems are based on fear. Granted, +R trainers aren't aware of how much fear is incorporated into their training systems, but it's there. It's a fear that if you don't control a dog's behavior, chaos will ensue. Ian Dunbar, one of the key figures in the positive training movement has written a guide to puppy training that seems designed more to scare people out of even thinking about getting a puppy than teaching them how to train one.

Here's a key passage: "From the first day you get your puppy, the clock is ticking ...there is so much to teach and nearly everything needs to be taught right away." The book is also peppered with small sub-sections labeled for their levels of "importance" or "urgency." And out of 11 chapter titles, there are 7 with the word "deadline" somewhere in the heading!

So in my view, on a certain level both dominance trainers and +R trainers operate on an irrational fear that nature is random and chaotic, and that dogs are inherently bad.

2) http://leecharleskelleysblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/proper-way-to-d...

3) http://leecharleskelleysblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/using-praise-as...

4) Dogs don't learn through cause and effect; they learn through the ebb and flow of their own internal energy. I say this because while cause and effect are things that happen to the dog, if they don't actually play any part in how he experiences what's happening to him, they can't rightly be said to play any real part in learning. People say that dogs live totally in the moment, and if that's true (which I think it is) then dogs wouldn't be able to perceive one thing happening before or after another, let alone in consequence of another. In a dog's mind events wouldn't happen sequentially; they'd all happen in the now moment, so any sequential connection we'd see, when looking at behavior from the outside-in, couldn't reverberate or be able to attain any purchase within the dog's own consciousness.

On the other hand, if the principles of cause and effect can be explained as part of an energetic dynamic -- where the dog is only required to experience pleasant or unpleasant shifts in the flow of his own emotional states and adjust his behavior accordingly -- then I think we'll be much closer to understanding how dogs really learn, in the moment.

5) Scavenging is a normal behavior in young puppies, not in adult dogs.

6) Despite the fact that dogs may have become dogs by scavenging at human encampments, they still have hunting instincts. Ray Coppinger, who first popularized the scavenging theory of domestication, has often talked about how there are some predatory behaviors that can't be trained into a dog, and can't be trained out of them.

7) Beckoff writes, Recent research by Andrea Heberlein and Ralph Adolphs shows that a part of the brain called the amygdala is used when we impart intention and emotions to inanimate objects or events...Their research suggests that the "human capacity for anthropomorphizing draws on some of the same neural systems as do basic emotional responses." My reading of this research and my own experience with a wide variety of animals is that "We feel, therefore we anthropomorphize." And we're programmed to see humanlike mentality in events where it cannot possibly be involved."

8) https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/my-puppy-my-self/200905/pack...

9) In each of these games the owner or trainer acts like prey, and allows, or rather, encourages the dog to chase and bite him or her (through a toy) in play. +R trainers will tell you that they also use play as part of their training system, and they do. But there's a substantial difference, and it goes back to the problem with how operant conditioning is used to teach impulse control in children: "Do this and you'll get that." In other words it isn't play itself that +R trainers use, it's "access to play." The trainer controls access to toys, etc., until the dog "behaves himself." But since play inherently teaches dogs how to "behave themselves," the +R view has it backwards. (I'm simplifying the +R view, but the underlying principle still holds.)

Dogs are like an extension of our unconscious selves. Sometimes we treat them the way we feel we should've been treated when we were small, helpless children. Sometimes we treat them the way our parents treated us and probably shouldn't have. It's hard for us not to do that, and the great thing about dogs is that they want so badly just to be in harmony with us that they'll pretty much go along with all our crap until it becomes too much and they have to say, "Arf! Treat me like a dog, not an unruly child! Play with me! Let me kill something!"

Anyway, that's how I see it.

Of Mice and Mutts: Why Behavioral Science Is Losing the Training Wars

Lee Charles Kelley — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:49:10 +0000

You may not be aware of it, but there's a quiet war raging right now in the dog-training world. It's a conflict between positive reinforcement (+R) trainers and behaviorists like Ian Dunbar and Nicholas Dodman who base their methods on the principles of learning theory. They've pitted themselves against traditional or dominance trainers like Cesar Millan and the Monks of New Skete, who follow the alpha theory.

Learning theory: whenever a behavior is followed by a positive consequence (i.e., a reward), it will tend to become learned. Negative consequences (or punishment), will tend to extinguish unwanted behaviors. These principles are said to be true of all learning in all animals, from rats to monkeys to humans. It's clinical, it's clean, it's almost mathematical, and a great deal of modern cognitive science is based on its principles.

The alpha theory: dogs have an instinct to obey anyone they view as their "pack leader." When a dog disobeys or refuses to learn, he's acting dominant. When he does obey, he's submissive. This theory is based on how members of a wolf pack supposedly follow the alpha wolf, and only applies to domesticated dogs; you can't train lab rats and helper monkeys (let alone wild wolves) via dominance.

In terms of results, each side is equally successful, yet one treats dogs like lab rats while the other sees them as wolves. Neither seems to treat dogs as, well ... dogs.

The war actually started in the 1930s, pitting American psychologist B. F. Skinner against Nazi ethologist Konrad Lorenz¹. It heated up again in 1993 when Ian Dunbar founded the Association for Pet Dog Trainers (APDT) to try to steer dog training away from the practices of traditionalists like the Monks of New Skete who at the time asked, "How hard should you hit your dog? If she doesn't yelp in pain, you haven't hit her hard enough." Dunbar and the APDT thought this wasn't the proper way to treat your best friend, and wanted to change the way trainers treated the animals in their care. (I'm on Dunbar's side here, at least in this one regard.)

The APDT quickly grew to become the world's largest organization dedicated to the training of pet dogs. Since its inception there has been a worldwide explosion of puppy classes run by reward-based trainers. By the beginning of the 21st Century it seemed as if Dunbar's utopian ideal for the humane training of all dogs was about to be realized.

But in 2004 the National Geographic Channel premiered their reality show, The Dog Whisperer, starring, as his critics liked to characterize him, "an ex-dog groomer," named Cesar Millan. Nicholas Dodman, of Tufts University, sent a letter of protest to NGC, stating that he and his colleagues believed Millan had "set dog training back by 20 years." The American Humane Society urged National Geographic to take Millan off the air, expressing dismay at the "numerous inhumane training techniques" he uses, including hanging dogs from a choke chain until they lose consciousness. In an article in Esquire, "The Dog Whisperer Should Just Shut Up," Patricia McConnell, a zoologist from the University of Wisconsin, joined in. "Behavioral problems are the result of miscommunication," McConnell said. "Either dogs don't know what their owners want or humans inadvertently teach them to do the wrong things. Most behavioral problems can be solved using the science of how animals learn."

You might be thinking, "So what? Who cares about this petty professional jealousy and squabbling? It's pretty meaningless in the overall scheme of things, isn't it?"

Perhaps. But science writer Virginia Morell wrote in a recent article in Science Magazine, "Dogs are fast becoming the ‘it' animal for evolutionary cognition research. Our canine pals, researchers say, are excellent subjects for studying the building blocks underlying mental abilities, particularly those involving social cognition."

So this conflict in the dog training world might be able to reveal something important about the true nature of dogs in particular, and animal consciousness in general. After all, how can two diametrically-opposed scientific theories be equally successful? Oddly enough, while both theories get results a fairly large percentage of the time, dogs can also be trained without using any aspect of either theory. For instance, you can sometimes increase a dog's obedience tenfold by acting submissive!² It's also possible to completely extinguish some behaviors in dogs simply by rewarding the dog every time he does the very thing you don't want him to!³ You can't train rats and monkeys in such backwards fashion, but for some reason it works with dogs.

We now know (though Cesar Millan doesn't seem to) that in wild wolf packs there is no pack leader⁴, and that dominant and submissive behaviors are so rare as to be virtually nonexistent. Also, none of the behaviors Millan uses to convince dogs he's their pack leader actually exist in nature. In other words, there is no scientific foundation for his form of training. But if Dunbar and Dodman truly have science on their side, as they believe, then why haven't they dominated the training landscape? (Ironically, Dodman himself has written a carefully detailed account of how ineffective operant conditioning is at solving behavioral problems in dogs, although that was clearly not his intention.)⁵

Dogs are able to detect diseases like cancer and diabetes, they can predict epileptic seizures, they can find escaped convicts, missing children, they can even find their way home after their owners have moved to a new city or new county miles away. It shouldn't be surprising then that they can detect the holes, flaws, and cracks in our theories about them and their behaviors, fetch those flaws for us, and drop them at our feet. And what they're showing us, in these silly training wars of ours, the thing they've detected that our cleverest scientists have overlooked, is that there's a (perhaps) tiny piece of the smooth-running operant conditioning machinery that's simply, well ... inoperative.

True, the alpha theory has very little basis in science. But it's starting to look like learning theory isn't as scientific as we've all been led to believe it is either. Yet it's so deeply embedded into our scientific studies and academic institutions that it's nearly impossible for us to view it as incomplete and inaccurate, let alone divest ourselves of its hold over our ability to see how learning really does take place. But dogs are innocents. They're like the child in the Hans Christian Anderson fable. And they're telling us that on a certain level operant conditioning, seemingly arrayed in the purple robes of science, isn't wearing any clothes.

That's why behavioral science is losing the training wars.

LCK
www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
"Changing the World, One Dog at a Time"
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Next time I'll explain how behavioral science is not only failing our dogs but our kids as well, and why the two are connected. I'll also offer a simple theory to explain why dominance training works with some dogs, why operant conditioning is ineffective at solving behavioral problems, and why dogs can be taught without punishment or rewards.

Footnotes:

1) Lorenz was eager to join the Nazi party. And his job under Hitler reportedly involved determining which offspring of mixed Polish and German heritage had enough Aryan blood to remain in the gene pool and which didn't and had to sterilized or exterminated.

2) Years ago I did an experiment to test the alpha theory. I put myself in what's presumed to be a submissive position (rolling over on my back) to a number of dogs (one at a time, in various settings and situations) as part of a game, and found that all the dogs were more obedient after I'd "acted submissive" than they had been before. (To learn more, read my personal blog article, "The Proper Way to Do an Alpha Roll.")

3) I also did an experiment where I verbally praised my dog every time he decided to scavenge something from the streets of New York, chicken bones, pizza crusts, you name it. Within three days he stopped all scavenging, and never showed any interest in it again. In other words, I successfully extinguished a behavior simply by rewarding the dog every time he exhibited it. From the perspective of learning theory, his scavenging was always followed by a positive consequence, and yet instead of reinforcing that behavior, it somehow eliminated it. (Read my personal blog article, "Praise to Correct.")

4) http://www.leecharleskelley.com/thetop10myths/mythofthepackleader.html

5) The Dog Who Loved too Much

Why Do Dogs Like to "Kiss" Us?

Lee Charles Kelley — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:35:45 +0000

They're sublimating their urge to bite.

In the Mike Nichols film, Wolf, Will Randall, a meek, downtrodden book editor (played by Jack Nicholson), is bitten by a wolf one winter night and finds himself becoming more and more in tune with his primal nature. He can smell things like tequila on a co-worker's breath from clear across the building. He can hear people talking from several floors away. He can read and edit whole manuscripts without his reading glasses.

Worried that the changes he's experiencing may have also caused a nocturnal blackout, Randall goes to see Dr. Alezais, an expert in animal lore. Toward the end of the interview the aging Dr. Alezais reveals that he's been told that he's dying. However, he thinks that if Will Randall were to bite him, he might become strong like the wolf and live forever.

"I can't ask you to transform me with your passions," Alezais says.
"I can only ask you to honor me with your bite."

My dog Freddie was punished for biting when he was a puppy. This created some behavioral problems later on (severe panic attacks) that took me a while to unravel. However, once I did, I observed a funny, and very sweet side-effect to the new emotional freedom he felt once his fears were gone. Before that, whenever we came home from our walks, he would wait at the top of the first landing, and as I came up and got close to him, he would lick my nose in a kind of ... what, a "submissive greeting?" Perhaps, though he really wasn't the submissive type.

But oddly enough, once I'd helped him resolve his fears, whenever we came home and I got near the top of the landing, instead of licking me he'd slowly incline his head toward mine and use his front teeth to lightly pinch the tip of my nose. The experience was thrilling; it often gave me goose bumps. He used his teeth so gently and so precisely, it felt to me as if he was re-establishing an emotional connection between us that had previously been lost.

Wolves make a living with their teeth. Predators aren't really designed to be social animals because their urge to bite has to be kept under lock and key around other members of their group, otherwise there'd be bloodshed. And yet wolves are very social; they live together in almost complete harmony and are extremely cooperative when hunting. They even have the ability to share food, eating side-by-side, once their prey has been killed. This is pretty remarkable given the Darwinian view of nature as a cut-throat enterprise, even among members of the same animal group.

To me, all canine behavior is essentially a process of tension and release. When emotional energy builds up in an dog's system, it creates tension which then needs to find a release point through behavior. For wolves the most complete and most satisfying release of tension comes either through biting prey (during the hunt) or copulating (during mating season). In other words nearly everything a wolf does is a sublimation of his urge to bite (his prey drive), or his urge to mate (his sex drive).

One way of sublimating the urge to bite is "submissive" licking, commonly thought to be how a wolf appeases a more "dominant" pack member. But a) dominant and submissive behaviors are so rare in wild wolf packs as to be virtually non-existent, and b) if a wolf's emotional energy is geared to always be expressed primarily through biting, and c) if he also wants to maintain pack harmony at all costs, he may very well lick his pack mate's lips or chin, instead of biting them.

Submission? Probably not.

Sublimation? Probably so.

If much of a wolf's social behavior is based on sublimating the urge to bite, the domestication process for dogs is based almost entirely on doing that. The proto-human, proto-dog dynamic was based on one simple rule: dogs that bite don't live to mate. That was the primary behavioral aspect of the natural selection process. So dogs took what was already a natural aspect of the wolf's pack dynamic, and expanded on it exponentially in their relationships with human beings.

Meanwhile, it's been suggested (I think by Desmond Morris) that when dogs kiss us (which is anthropomorphic, since a kiss involves puckering the lips, and a dog's lips don't pucker), they do so because that's how wolf pups get their parents to regurgitate a meal when they come back to the den.

This doesn't make sense to me. It's like taking a decal from one behavior and sticking it onto another. Dogs are very practical and context-oriented. It would be very unusual for a dog to take a behavior specifically related to her parents, and somehow apply it to human beings. For one thing dogs move through space on the horizontal axis. Humans are vertical. There's no way a dog could mistake a human being for another dog. Also, dogs don't just lick our lips, they lick our noses, our ears, our hands and feet. Plus, the more stressed a dog is, the more he tends to lick. Plus dogs lick us a lot more when they're going through puppyhood than they do when they're adults. Why? Probably because puppies feel a lot more oral tension than adult dogs.

There's one more thing to consider. When we smile it's considered a signal of good will. But to a chimpanzee a smile communicates fear. Similarly, when a puppy sees your big human head coming toward him, a part of him reacts with fear, and that part wants to bite you. But dogs make their living with their hearts, not their teeth. They have strong feelings of love and affection for their owners. Plus, they retain the genetic knack of maintaining group harmony at all costs. So when your dog sees you come leaning in for a kiss, he sublimates his urge to bite, and licks you instead. Then, over time, as he accrues more and more feelings of trust on top of the love he already feels, he finds that licking you actually feels good, not just because it releases his nervous tension, but also because of how it makes you feel. (Our feelings are very important to our dogs; they're like the sails and rudders they use to navigate their way through their relationships with us.)

That's the simple, dog-centric genesis of why dogs lick us: it's a way of sublimating their urge to bite. That's why Freddie licked me when I reached the top of the stairs, back before his fears of being punished for biting went away. It's also why he replaced the less satisfying release he got from licking me, and started giving me those tender little love bites on the tip of my nose. He finally felt free enough to share a tiny bit of his deepest and most primal nature with me.

He honored me with his bite.

LCK
www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
"Changing the World, One Dog at a Time"
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Bared Teeth, Raised Hackles, and the Myth of Aggressive Intent

Lee Charles Kelley — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:08:34 +0000

If you ask me, dogs are the most talked about and yet the least understood of all animals.

From what I've observed, one of the biggest roadblocks to truly understanding a dog's nature -- as neither Machiavellian power-schemer always intent on being alpha, nor emotionless Skinner-box automaton -- is the tendency by many in scientific and academic circles to blithely ignore three simple rules whenever discussing canine behavior:

Ockham's razor¹, Morgan's canon², and the rule against anthropomorphism³. All three rules demand that we always look for the simplest explanation for a phenomenon, as long as it satisfactorily explains all aspects of it.

One glaring example of the way scientists and scholars have contributed to some of the most common misconceptions about dogs, is that in many textbooks on behavior you'll read that a wolf or dog will raise its hackles "to make its body appear larger to other animals." This is also (supposedly) why a cat arches its back, why a bear rises up on its hind legs, etc. The most widely-accepted explanation of these phenomena is that these animals intentionally produce these behaviors to make themselves look bigger to their foes. And it breaks all three of our simple rules.

I don't know much about cats and bears; I'm a dog trainer. But what I do know is that the hackles aren't under a dog's control. They're raised automatically when the dog is fearful but has no way to release the energy generated by his nervous system; in fact this "behavior" may be nothing more than a build-up of static electricity! We can't consciously control our goose pimples, so why suppose a dog can control his hackles? That goes beyond anthropomorphism and gives dogs abilities that not even humans possess.

Secondly, even if a dog could control the muscles that make his hairs stand on end, unless he first knows what he looks like to himself (which would require a sense of self and maybe the ability to recognize his own image in a mirror⁴) how could he try to make himself look "different?"

Thirdly, without the use of language and internal narrative, how could a dog be able to differentiate one category or state of being from another, i.e., smaller from larger? "Before my teacher came to me," Helen Keller wrote in 1908, "I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious time of nothingness. Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another."⁵ (You can't compare things unless you can first put a handle on them.)

Fourthly, without a full-blown theory of mind⁶ -- the ability to attribute mental and emotional states to other beings -- a dog can't possibly know what the other dog would think or feel about seeing him get suddenly bigger, so he could have no "reason" for producing this behavior.

Finally, I've seen a dog's hackles go up when he comes up behind a horse, for example. If the horse has his back to the dog, why would the dog bother to "make himself appear larger" to the horse's rear end? I've also seen dogs whose back hairs stand on end when they see another dog, and yet his hackles sometimes stay up even when he goes around behind the other dog to sniff its butt.

Perhaps mine is only a semantic quarrel. I don't know for certain that those who've written about this phenomenon actually believe it takes place under the dog's conscious control, or that the dog really intends to make himself appear larger to others, etc. But there is implicit within this explanation a host of problems that give us the impression that dogs are thinking all these things through, in some very complex ways, when it's far more likely that this simple "behavior," which is almost purely reflexive, is the result of a surge of nervous energy and the build up of a bio-electric charge.

Does this mean that raised hackles aren't evidence that a dog is feeling aggressive? Not at all. It just means that he's not capable of intentionally raising his hackles or forming the intent to communicate whatever feelings he might have to anyone else, not even to himself.

How about the idea that dogs bare intentionally bare their teeth?

Here we come up again the same sorts of problems. And just like before, they all add up to the necessities of the dog having a sense of self and other, to know what he looks like, an ability to form intent (which dogs don't have), and a fully-developed theory of mind.

Wait, go back. Don't sneak that thing about intent in between parentheses. Who says dogs don't have the ability to form intent?

To me, intent requires conscious thought⁷. Conscious thought requires the use of language in the form of an internal narrative. Plus intent also requires a form of mental time travel, where the dog projects the results of an intended behavior into the future and predicts what the outcome might, hopefully, be. Dogs live in the moment. They don't time travel.

So why does a dog curl his lips back?

Technically speaking, he doesn't. Again, if we look for the simplest explanation, one that also explains all aspects of the phenomenon, we can see that the lip snarl is just another autonomic reflex, not an intentional act; when a dog has a strong urge to bite, with a lot of emotional force behind it, his lips curl back involuntarily to get out of the way of the teeth. It's an important -- yet purely unconscious -- mechanism designed by nature to prevent the dog's lips from being damaged or punctured by his own teeth when he bites something (or someone).

For example, many dogs curl their lips back when you give them a bone or a toy. Who are they communicating their aggressive intent to? The toy? The bone? Yet if the behavior is a simple reflex, designed to get the lips out of the way of the dog's teeth, it makes perfect sense.

My dog Fred once had an encounter with a dog who, according to her owner, hated Dalmatians. The two dogs were walking kind of parallel to one another on wide stretch of sidewalk. Fred skirted ahead of the aggressor, who was barking frantically, but whose lips weren't curled back and hackles weren't up. However, as soon as Fred's back was to this dog, the instant he could no longer see her, her lips did curl back. If she did it to show "aggressive intent," she got things very mixed up.⁸

Finally I knew a pit bull named Augie Doggie who seemed to lack this lip-curling reflex. As a result he kept biting through his own lips whenever he went to chew a toy or a stick. His owner had to be very careful about keeping people from giving Augie Doggie things to chew because Augie Daddy couldn't afford to pay for all the stitches his poor dog had to keep getting in those big fat lips of his.

If we take a step back, away from the literature, and just look at these two simple reflexive behaviors, and follow Ockham's razor, Morgan's canon, and the rule against anthropomorphism, and we really think this through, whittling away all the nonsense, we can see that both behaviors are the result of how emotion moves through a dog's system in the form of emotional and electrical energy, and that the internal, unconscious intelligence of the dog's own body is responsible for the behavior; it's not created intentionally from within the dog's mind.

My hope, vain though it may be, is that in the future, all scientists and scholars, when describing canine behavior, will use our 3 simple rules, that textbooks will be re-written (there's a vain hope!) so that the phrases "the dog raises its hackles" will be replaced with "the dog's hackles go up," and "the dog bares its teeth" will be replaced by "the dog's lips curl back." I also think we should systematically replace "intent" with "desire," whenever and wherever we can. Once we remove these hidden signals, subtly encouraging us to anthropomorphize our dogs, we may start to see them more clearly and understand them a lot better.

Dogs are amazing animals. At times they really do seem smart enough for us to ascribe higher levels of thought to the kinds of things their social and emotional intelligence enable them to do. But my feeling is the better we understand them for who they really are, the better off we'll both be, canine and human.

LCK
Changing the World, One Dog at a Time
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Footnotes:

1) Ockham's razor: A scientific principle stated by William of Ockham (1285-1347/49), a scholastic monk, that "Plurality should not be posited without necessity." The principle gives precedence to simplicity; of two competing theories, the simplest explanation of an entity is to be preferred. The principle is also expressed "Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity."

2) Morgan's canon: First stated by Lloyd Morgan in 1894, that animal behavior should never be attributed to a higher mental function if the behavior can be satisfactorily explained in terms of a simpler cognitive process.

3) My take on anthropomorphism: "How Dogs Think: The Debate Between Emotion and Logic"

4) Your aunt's dog may cavort in front of a mirror, but that doesn't mean that she recognizes her form as being exclusively hers. There's a specific way of determining if animals can recognize their own forms, called the mirror test, and so far no dog has ever passed it

5) Keller also once said, "College isn't the place to go for ideas."

6) Theory of Mind

7) Forming an intent to do something is quite different from having a desire to do it. In humans, a desire may lead to conscious intent; the same can't be said for dogs.

8) This is when I first realized that dogs don't "bare their teeth;" that the behavior is an unconscious reflex. The reason the dogs lips curled back is probably becaus while she and Freddie were on equal terms, and his head (with its teeth) was facing her, her urge to bite was held in abeyance. But once Freddie's back was turned, the urge to bite came on in full force, which is what caused her lips to curl back, out of the way of her teeth.

After I'd formed that realization I began to remember the way Fred and other dogs took their toys, as if snarling at the inanimate objects. It was only several years later that I came across a dog -- Augie Doggie -- who seemed to lack this natural reflex.

How Outdoor Play Can Cure Depression in Dogs

Lee Charles Kelley — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:46:43 +0000

Can dogs suffer from depression?

On a certain level, yes. They're not capable of dwelling on negative thoughts the way we are, but they are capable of getting into depressed moods. And it's our job to help get them out.

One of the saddest and most frustrating things I come across in my travels around the streets of New York - where I'm constantly meeting dogs and their owners - is the dog who doesn't play. And the saddest thing of all is often the owner's attitude about it.

"Eh, she's just not that interested."

"Oh, he doesn't really like to play."

They tell me these things matter-of-factly, as if that were the end of it.

When I try to explain that their dog might actually be depressed, they get angry or defensive.

"Oh, she's perfectly happy," they say. "She just doesn't like to play. It's just the way she is."

No, that's not the way your dog is. Lack of interest in play is a serious psychological problem that needs to be addressed not shrugged off or ignored.

The truth is, all dogs - in fact all mammals - are born knowing how to play. And when a dog can't relieve his stress through rough-and-tumble play outdoors, he'll either become aggressive toward other dogs or people, or become withdrawn and depressed. And play can actually cure depression more effectively than drugs like Zoloft!¹

So why do some dogs "forget" how to play?

In almost all cases it's either because their playful urges (which usually involve their oral impulses as well) were punished or repressed during puppyhood, or because they had a negative experience while playing with another dog, and the owner, instead of trusting the social nature of dogs, stepped in, prevented the two dogs from working things out on their own, and substituted physical affection for play.²

Is there a way to undo this kind of emotional damage?

Yes.

First of all, play is infectious. If you take your dog to the dog park or a dog run every day, he may not participate at first, but don't give up. Keep going, and spend at least an hour there each day. I've found that dogs who supposedly don't like to play tend to go through 5 basic stages before finally being reunited with their true, most playful inner selves.

a) they'll hide behind their owner's legs or try to climb into their laps

b) if you don't let your dog hide, she'll eventually come out in the open

c) then she'll start to investigate the space, sniff the perimeter, etc.

d) this will lead to tentatively sniffing the other doggies

e) this leads to play initiation behaviors (which may include humping)

Allow your dog to go through these 5 stages and her urge to play will probably be rekindled.

What about playing with you? Studies show that dogs who get a chance to engage in biting games with their owners, especially tug-of-war, are more obedient than they were before a play session. This kind of play has a triple benefit; it cures the doggie blues, makes a dog more obedient, plus it makes him able to focus more on his owner in the face of distractions, like squirrels, skateboarders, etc.

One problem dogs have, though, in terms of playing with their owners, is that humans don't follow the same rulebook as dogs. Plus we're vertical and dogs are horizontal. So some dog owners will need to work harder to overcome their dog's internal resistance.

One way to do this is to get down on your dog's level, either on the floor, or out on the back lawn, and imitate the way other dogs initiate play. Do a play bow (or two or three), growl playfully at your doggie, use your "paws" to bat playfully at his head and shoulders. Roll over on your back and let him jump on top of you.

At some point the dog will want to nip you in play, which he may have learned is a "no-no." If so, he may look away, or wander off. This means you have to make yourself even more non-threatening. Sometimes I'll spend a few days or even a few weeks just lying on my back and letting the dog eat treats off my chest or torso before trying to get him to play.

If your dog doesn't lose focus on you or wander off when his urge to bite is activated by your antics, he may actually want to bite you in play. That's good! That's a positive step. But it also means you'll need to have a tug toy or a tennis ball handy for him to sink his teeth into.

Another cool trick is to tease your dog with a toy or treat, and run away, encouraging him to chase you. In a dog's predatory database, the chase always leads to the bite. And when a dog is in a pro-social mood, biting equals play. So again, have a tug toy handy so that your dog's teeth can find a satisfying outlet.

Sometimes a dog won't chase me even if I've got a treat. So I start by using treats as if they were tiny tennis balls. I toss them for the dog to chase. Remember, for a dog chasing always leads to an urge to bite, especially in play. So using treats in lieu of toys can sometimes reawaken those natural predatory/playful feelings. But with some dogs it can take several weeks before you'll see results.

Sometimes your dog will have her own interest in playing but in a way that's somewhat out of the ordinary. As long it's not harmful, this can be a great inroad to teaching her how to play with you, and to curing all kinds of behavioral problems. I learned this from a shy Jack Russell terrier named Gina, who loved playing what I eventually came to call "The Spoon Game."³ All dogs have their own idiosyncrantic spoon games. Find what your dog's is, and use it to teach her to play.

Keep your sessions short. Always quit before your dog gets tired or bored. And if you're not 100% sure about your dog's temperament, be very careful. You may be asking your dog to bite off a bit more than his temperament or personality is able to chew yet (so to speak).

What if your dog doesn't respond to you rolling around the back yard with him, or if he just sits there while you run away, waving your arms and jumping around like an idiot? What if nothing works? Do you have to just accept that your dog won't play?

No. Probably the most important technique ever invented, at least in terms of rekindling a dog's desire to play, is "The Pushing Exercise," developed by Kevin Behan, a former K-9 trainer.

Here are some links describing how to do the exercise, and why it works.

Why Pushing Feels Good, and How It Cures Behavioral Problems

How to Do the Pushing Exercise

How the Pushing Exercise Was Created

Essentially it amounts to hand feeding your dog all her meals outdoors, holding the food in one hand and putting the other hand against her chest. The harder she pushes as she eats, the more confident, uninhibited, and playful she'll become. If you're really interested in trying this with your dog, click on the links, read the articles carefully, print out the description of the exercise, keep it handy, and refer to it often as you try this remarkable technique. Your dogs will thank you for it!

LCK
www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
“Changing the World, One Dog at a Time”
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Footnotes:

1) Stephen Ilardi, PhD, wrote in a recent article here, "Even moderate physical activity - brisk walking three times a week - has been shown in two landmark studies to fight depression as effectively as Zoloft. Simply put: exercise changes the brain. It enhances the function of dopamine-based circuits that mediate our experience of pleasure, along with our ability to initiate activity. Likewise, physical exercise stimulates the brain's synthesis of BDNF, a growth hormone that guides the repair of damaged neurons and triggers the sprouting of new neuronal connections." [However, rough-and-tumble play, done outdoors, increases these brain growth factors even more! --LCK]

2) This doesn't mean that we should stand by and let our dogs injure each other, but we have to resist being "helicopter" owners, always hovering over our dogs, not just protecting them from getting hurt but also preventing them from having fun and learning how to be strong and social.

3) A Description of "The Spoon Game" (excerpted from my novel, A Nose for Murder)

Tina was a shy, frightened Jack Russell terrier (an oxymoron, I know) who had been originally trained by an expert trainer with a college degree in animal behavior. After three sessions, though, Tina had become a mess. Not only would she not obey any of her basic commands, there were actually two commands-down and stay-that caused her to involuntarily evacuate her bowels and run under the bed every time she heard them.

One of the first things I asked Tina's owner was if there was anything the dog really liked to do-something that charged her up, got her riled and feeling spunky.

He said there was. For some reason, if you dropped a spoon on the kitchen floor, Tina became a different dog-confident and aggressive (like a real Jack Russell). The sound of the spoon being dropped on the tile caused her to run into the kitchen, grab the spoon in her mouth, and shake her head around as if trying to break its neck. Then she'd take it into the living room, bury it under a sofa cushion, and bark at it until you dug it out and threw it for her to chase. Then she'd go after it, grab it again and "break its neck" again, then bring it back to you.

Her owner said he didn't like playing this game because Gina didn't know when to quit. But I knew, or felt, it was the secret to undoing the terrible harm done to her by her original trainer.

I started out by lying on my back and letting Tina jump on top of me. This was done to build her confidence. Once we'd done that for about five or ten minutes I started retraining the down command which frightened her so terribly.

Here's how it worked:

I went to the kitchen and dropped a spoon on the floor. Gina raced into the room, lunged at the spoon and grabbed it. True to form, she then shook her head around, "killing" it, and finally ran into the living room and buried it under a sofa cushion.

I took it out, teased her with it, then suddenly made a downward swoop with my hand, placing it in a position that if Tina wanted to grab hold of it she could, but only by lying down first. She instantly went down and grabbed the spoon. As she did I said, "Down!" in a happy voice.

Her ears went back, her tail went down, and she dashed to the bedroom and hid.

I waited about twenty seconds, then went to the kitchen and dropped the spoon on the floor again.

She zoomed out of the bedroom, grabbed the spoon, and we repeated the game.

We kept doing this until she stopped running away and would actually lie down, somewhat nervously, when I gave her the command to do so. I always rewarded her by giving her the spoon to grab hold of with her teeth.

Then I changed the rules a little: when she obeyed the command I would throw the spoon for her to chase instead of just giving it to her. With this added variation it took almost no time at all to rid her of her fear of the word "down." In fact, she was not only not afraid of it anymore, she actually loved hearing it. Why? Because it no longer meant she would be forced to lie down or punished mercilessly if she didn't; it meant she got to chase the spoon and "kill" it if she did.

Yay, Gina! Kill that spoon!

The Canine Mind Doth Make Fools of Us All

Lee Charles Kelley — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:18:59 +0000

In an earlier post -- "From Pavlov to Pauli..." -- I wrote that, scientifically speaking, all canine behavior can and should be explained from an emotional/energetic point of view rather than a mental framework. I even kind of bragged, perhaps foolishly, that I could do just that.

In my most recent article -- "Smart Pooches or Dumb Science?" -- I critiqued a recent spate of online articles and TV news blurbs in which psychologist Stanley Coren quite wrongly states that dogs are better at math than 2-year-olds. Here's CNN's version of one "study" supposedly proving that dogs can count and perhaps even do arithmetic: "Counting ability is tested in drills such as one in which treats are dropped, one at a time, behind a screen. When the researcher either sneaks away one of the treats or stealthily adds an extra before raising the screen, the dog will wait longer -- appearing to puzzle over the bad math -- before eating the treats."

In rebuttal I gave some of the scientific evidence for the idea that all animals, not just dogs, have an innate number sense, which enables them to know when the general amount of salient things in their environment has changed: robins and their eggs, for example, or dogs and their treats or toys. (This "number sense "can also be found in 4-and-a-half-month-old babies, by the way.)

However, I think the concept of animals or even babies having a "number sense" is inaccurate because understanding numbers -- 1, 2, 3, 10, 3/5ths, pi -- is language dependent. Without the use of words, animals and babies can't put names to abstract numeric concepts, or even to concrete objects like eggs or toys. It seems to me that the thing they're actually aware of is the changes that take place in their environment: the absence or presence of things that were or weren't there before. And I think they calibrate these changes viscerally, via the changes in own their internal energy states.

Since in my "Pavlov to Pauli" article I proposed the idea that I could explain any and all behavioral phenomenon in dogs from just such an energetic standpoint, I'll attempt to do so here.

Imagine you're at a party. Your mind is full of thoughts: "God, those cheese thingies were good, I wonder if they have any more," or, "Hey, Shelia looks good in that," or, "I hope the kids aren't terrorizing the babysitter," and possibly, "Uh-oh, there's that awful bore, what's-his-name? I hope he doesn't try to harangue me again with his theories about how dogs have better math skills than toddlers."

These are all thoughts. But beneath these thoughts your body is busy accommodating its inner "radar" to the underlying press of stimuli around you: the buzz of conversation, the brief bursts of laughter, the tempo and level of the music, the clinking of ice in glasses, and the almost constant sense of kinetic energy, people shifting between groups of 2 or 3, etc. You're not thinking much if anything about all this, but your body's internal radar is. It's constantly calibrating and recalibrating itself to accommodate these fluctuations in energy. (Since a stimulus is, by definition, anything that increases the energy in an organism, that's exactly what your body is responding to: fluctuations in energy.)

At some point you ask the hostess if you can use her bathroom. She nods, points the way, you go down the hall, make a left, go inside the bathroom, start the water running in the sink, etc. And, while you're thus engaged, a large chunk of people decide to go to another venue: perhaps they go out back to see the pool, perhaps they all have theater tickets. It doesn't matter. Approximately half the people, let's say, are suddenly gone, disappeared.

When you come out of the bathroom you go into a mild state of shock. Your first thought is, "Wow, where did everybody go?" though you don't really care where they went, you just want to know how they all disappeared so quickly. And the reason you're shocked is that your unconscious mind has to re-calibrate itself viscerally to this sudden change in the environment, this huge shift in energy. (This is not a mental process, by the way; the mind rarely concerns itself with fluctuations in energy, but the body is always doing so.)

Okay, now back to dogs.

Remember, the researchers showed the dogs in their study a certain number of treats then dropped the treats behind a screen, added or subtracted some, then revealed the new "amount" to the dogs.

Coren interprets all this as follows: "Now we're giving [the dog] the wrong equation which is 1+1 = 1, or 1+1 = 3. Sure enough, studies show the dogs get it. The dog acts surprised and stares at it for a longer period of time, just like a human kid would."

The dogs "get it?" Right. Except that from the dog's point of view this is more like three-card monte or a magic trick done by an annoying relative -- pulling a quarter from a kid's ear or doing the "where'd my thumb go?" trick -- than actual arithmetic.

Now put yourself in the dog's shoes. You're in place where there's food and people, sort of like a party. Humans are showing you some treats, so you pay attention. Those treats are magnetic to you. They're buzzing with all kinds of potential energy. As far as your body is concerned, they're the most salient feature of your environment. Then these humans do a magic trick where one of the treats is suddenly no longer there or another one is suddenly, inexplicably present. And like the partygoer coming out of the bathroom, you go into a mild state of shock: you have a look of "surprise" on your "face." But it's not because you've done any mental arithmetic. It's because your body's awareness of its surroundings is forced to make a sudden adjustment. In short, you've been fooled.

Stanley Coren has had a long and distinguished academic career. His research on sensory perception is top notch. His paper "Sensation and Perception" is required reading on the subject at university levels. He's a bestselling author, and has also written some very interesting articles on dogs here. So I have to wonder why he sometimes seems totally incapable of using any kind of real critical judgment when it comes to the subject of canine cognition. He can't really believe this stuff, can he? If he does, I guess it's true that when it comes to dogs, even the smartest people can be very easily fooled. I think that says less about Coren, though, than it does about what truly amazing animals dogs are.

They can fool even the best of us without even trying.

LCK
www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
"Changing the World, One Dog at a Time"
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How Dogs Think: Smart Pooches or Dumb Science?

Lee Charles Kelley — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:09:56 +0000

I'm sad to have to report that AOL, MSNBC, and CNN have all proclaimed in their headlines this weekend: "Dogs Smarter than Toddlers, New Study Shows" (AOL), and "Your family dog may be smarter than your toddler!" (CNN). I'm sad because it's been my experience, as a dog trainer, that the more that "science" tries to prove how "smart" dogs are, the more dogs suffer as a consequence. (See my article here, "How Dogs Think: The Debate Between Emotion and Logic.")

Here's the opening line from AOL: "The canine IQ test results are in: Even the average dog has the mental abilities of a 2-year-old child."

Really? That's interesting. According to what scale? Stanford-Binet? Or Bichon-Frise?

"The finding," AOL goes on to say, "is based on a language development test, revealing average dogs can learn 165 words (similar to a 2-year-old child), including signals and gestures, and dogs in the top 20 percent in intelligence can learn 250 words."

Oh, I see.

First of all, that's not only not true, it's not even news. That information (or disinformation) can be found in Stanley Coren's first book on dogs published 15 years ago. Coren (both in that book and in the recent online articles) somehow equates a dog's ability to respond, behaviorally, to cues of any kind -- including words, hand gestures, whistles, even just picking up its leash -- with the ability to both understand the meanings of words and to actually use them in speech. And many two-year olds are not only able to speak, they're also capable of using words in new and unexpected ways. Plus, on a basic level they inherently understand that words are symbols; they represent things. I love dogs, but they don't have anything close to this kind of linguistic aptitude. So comparing simple behavioral responses to verbal or visual cues with actual linguistic ability is not just like comparing apples and oranges, it's like comparing apples and a recipe for apple pie, or what might be more appropriate, comparing apples and "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

The recent online articles go on to claim that dogs can also count, add and subtract, and can do simple math much better than a toddler.

Again, really?

From CNN: "Counting ability is tested in drills such as one in which treats are dropped, one at a time, behind a screen. When the researcher either sneaks away one of the treats or stealthily adds an extra before raising the screen, the dog will wait longer -- appearing to puzzle over the bad math -- before eating the treats."

"Now we're giving him the wrong equation," Coren says of the final part of the study. "The dog acts surprised and stares at it for a longer period of time, just like a human kid would."

The implication here is that the reason the dogs are staring is because they've added up the number of treats in their heads before the screen was removed and have now discovered that some are either missing or that new ones have magically appeared.

But which is more likely, that dogs are able to feel an emotional attraction to certain things in their environment -- toys, treats, other dogs -- and can therefore "sense" when something's missing (or has been added)? Or that they engage in some form of mental arithmetic and count out, by number, how many things were there initially and either do addition or subtraction to "figure" it all out?

Here's an idea: what if the study had been done with objects that didn't interest the dogs? Toddlers can be taught to count on their fingers and toes, or to count the number of cats in a drawing, or to count spoons or matchsticks or cracks in the sidewalk or other items that wouldn't interest a dog in the slightest. Plus, how do the researchers know the dogs were really surprised when the screen was removed and weren't just feeling uncertain as to what the researchers wanted them to do next? To me this "study" seems to be a perfect example of confirmation bias, and as I wrote in a recent article here, "Dogs are confirmation bias with a tail." They'll do pretty much whatever you want them to, especially if there's nothing else very interesting (to them) going on at the time.

What Coren (and the "reporters" at AOL, MSNBC, and CNN) have failed to mention is that all animals, including rats and even some insects, have a basic "number sense." It's innate, it's hard-wired, it doesn't require arithmetic. Never mind toddlers; even 5-month old babies have this ability. So no, dogs aren't better at math than toddlers. Far from it.

In Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being, George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, and Rafael E. Núñez, a psychologist, argue that even the most abstract mathematical constructs arise from how the brain and physical body interact together with the world. They write, "Animals have numerical abilities -- not just primates but raccoons, rats, and even parrots and pigeons. They can subitize [instantly and fairly accurately perceive the numbers of things in a very small collection, as a robin might do with her eggs or a dog with his toys], estimate numbers, and count [just] as four-and-a-half-month-old babies can." (p. 21)

However, Coren insists, "These studies suggest dogs have a basic understanding of arithmetic, and they can count to four or five."

First of all, having an innate sense of quantity -- again as a robin would with her eggs or a dog would with his toys -- and having a "basic understanding of arithmetic" are two entirely different things. We're back to comparing apples to ... I don't know, multiplication tables. We could carry Coren's logic even further and ask: when a dog catches a Frisbee in mid-flight has he done some form of differential calculus in his head in order to predict the object's trajectory? Of course not; it's a simple sensori-motor skill. (Maybe not so simple, but the dog's behavior is not based on math or other feats of intellect.)

And while it may be true that dogs can be taught to "count to five," their ability to do this is not in the same ball park as a toddler's: not even close. (Remember, dogs don't have the ability to use language, therefore they have no words for numbers.)

In 1930, mathematician Tobias Dantzig first proposed the idea that animals and humans have a kind of mental accumulator, giving them what he called a "number sense." This is not the ability to count but a natural sense of knowing when something has changed in a small collection of items.

In his book The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, modern French mathematician and cognitive scientist Stanislas Dehaene writes: "Whatever its exact neuronal implementation, if the accumulator model is correct, two conclusions must necessarily follow. First, animals can count, since they are able to increase an internal counter each time an external event occurs. Second, they do not count exactly as we do." (34) (Dehaene may seem to disagree with Dantzig about what "counting" means -- but remember, one was German the other French.)

It's true, though, in a way. I taught my own dog Freddie to "count" to 5 many years ago: I would give him a number between 1 and 5 and then give him a treat if he barked 2, or 3, or whatever number of times I asked him to. But I didn't reward him if he barked out the "wrong" number. And sure enough, after repeating this procedure over and over many times, Fred learned to bark in accordance with the number given. The thing is -- and maybe it's just because I have a different sensibility than Coren and others -- I never got the impression that Freddie understood what he was doing. It was purely a rote behavior; he wanted that treat. That's light years away from "having a basic understanding of arithmetic."

So are these recent articles really a case of smart dogs? Or is it just more dumb science?

I'll let you do the math.

LCK
www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
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From Pavlov to Pauli: What Can Dogs Tell Us About the Nature of Time, Consciousness, and Modern Science?

Lee Charles Kelley — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:00:12 +0000

Dogs live totally in the moment. They don't dwell on the past and they don't worry about the future. This may be one of the most charming and delightful things about them. But while dogs have no sense of linear time, they do have a very exact sense of cyclical time (probably related to circadian rhythms1), and it's pretty amazing.

Pavlov once did an experiment where he sprayed meat powder into the mouths of a dozen or so dogs at noon every day for 2 weeks in a row. Then on the 15th day, he didn't spray the powder yet they all still salivated exactly at noon. How does that happen?

One Friday afternoon, two weeks ago, a dog I know twisted his leg pretty badly and immediately began to walk with a limp. The vet found no permanent damage and said he would be fine in a few days. And he was. But a week later he began limping again, but only on Friday. By Saturday he was back to normal. (This is not uncommon in dogs.)

There was a time when, as soon as Final Jeopardy was over, I'd get up, put on my shoes, wake my Dalmatian Freddie, and take him out for our evening walk. Then after about 9 months, my schedule changed so I stopped waking Freddie at that time. And yet, like clockwork, he woke up on his own at exactly 7:25 each day, and continued doing so for several months until he finally got used to our new schedule.

Dogs have a very strong sense of cyclical time, which makes sense because it would be advantageous for predators to have this ability. However, it's equally clear that dogs don't have a sense of linear time. That seems to be a construct of more developed type of brain. In fact, I think the ability to use reason -- to see cause and effect, to put two-and-two together, etc. -- is dependent on 3 cognitive abilities: 1) the use of language, 2) a sense of oneself as being separate from one's environment, and 3) a clear sense of linear time. When studied in their natural state, dogs show no signs of possessing any of these abilities, so they can't have "reasons" for their behaviors, which means we have to examine their unique form of consciousness (or dognition, if you will) in terms of emotion not reason, and desire not intent.

Even for human beings, time is not an absolute; it's entirely subjective depending on our moods. "Are we there yet?" the kids will ask from the back seat. "Wow, the time just flew by!" we'll say at the end of a wonderful evening. And during moments of extreme trauma, "Everything just seemed to go into slow motion."

Einstein proved that time is not only subjective, it's relative to how fast you're traveling. He also said that the past and the future are illusions. In fact some scientists say that linear time may be nothing more than an artifact of a quantum wave collapse.

Physicist Nick Herbert says, "The present doesn't have any special status in physics. So, the fact that time seems to flow is a kind of illusion that our kind of existence gives rise to. ... If we just took the equations of physics as truth ... the universe would seem to be a kind of eternal, ever-present process."

That sounds exactly how dogs experience life: an ever present process with certain crests and valleys that cycle in a continuous circadian rhythm. If so then linear time would be like a series of particle-like moments, set in chronlogical order, cyclical time would be like a wave, and we're seemingly back in the realm of quantum physics. (New research suggests that quantum physics may explain the mysteries of the sense of smell, the process of photosynthesis, and other biological functions.)

In 1919, in Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist John B. Watson wrote, "The key which will unlock the door of any other scientific structure will unlock the door of psychology." In 1952, quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli2 was more specific: "It would be most satisfactory of all if physis and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality." In fact Pauli spent a great deal of time trying to find the laws that would connect mind (energy) and matter.

One of the most fascinating things about Pauli's life is what's called the "Pauli effect," the supposed tendency for equipment to malfunction whenever he was in the lab. There was even one such mishap in Gottenheim, Germany, where Pauli had worked several years earlier. Pauli was living near Zurich at the time, though, which caused the scientists to joke that the malfunction couldn't have been caused by the Pauli effect. Yet they found out later that Pauli had been passing through Gottenheim on his way to Zurich, and was sitting in a railway car at the train station at the exact moment of the incident!

Despite his affection for and belief in the somewhat unscientific nature of the principle named after him, Pauli was also a perfectionist when it came to hard science. He was especially sensitive to confirmation bias, both in his work and the works of his fellow physicists. He's said to have been so infuriated by one badly-conceived paper that he coined the phrase "Not only is it not right, it's not even wrong."

Psychologist Carl Jung worked with Pauli on several attempts to formulate a workable theory connecting mind and matter. Jung coined the term synchronicity to describe what he called the "acausal connecting principle" that links mind and matter without any reference points in space or time. (There's that old bugaboo, Time, once again.)

In many ways time has always been a mystery. St. Augustine wrote, "What is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it, I know not." Certain drugs like LSD, peyote, etc., drastically change a person's perceptions about the passage of time, indicating that linear time really is a mental construct, not a fixed fact of nature. It has also been documented that some autistic persons have either no sense of linear time or a very different sense of it than the rest of us.

In Beyond the Silence: My Life, the World and Autism, Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay wrote the following bit of poetry...

"Every move that I make shows how trapped I feel
Under the continuous flow of happenings
The effect of a cause becomes the cause of another effect...
But it is a world full of improbabilities
Racing toward uncertainty."

This brings us back to quantum physics, which describes a world full of vibrating probabilities. And it's only when we observe a phenomena that those probabilities "settle down" and become real.

"The door through which this happens," says Nick Herbert, "is measurement. ... but quantum physics doesn't tell us what a measurement is. Some extreme guesses are that consciousness has to be involved -- only when some entity becomes aware, do the vibratory possibilities change into actualities."

A lot has happened since Pavlov's day, and even Pauli's. This is the 21st Century. John Watson's hope that the laws of psychology would one day be revealed through physics and chemistry is becoming a reality. We're getting more and more information all the time now on how neurochemicals like dopamine and oxytocin exert tremendous control over behavior, learning, and even evolution. We have the ability to do fMRIs on human subjects to see what parts of their brains fire up while they're engaged in certain simple cognitive tasks (like time-dependent tasks lighting up certain sections of the parietal lobe3). We can even do tests on patients while their brains are exposed during surgery to find out where the language centers are located in the brain. It seems as if the ideal that Watson was hoping for has finally arrived.

And yet it hasn't. Cognitive scientists are still trying to understand how our species is different from "lower" animals. As Alexandra Semyonova points out in her book, The 100 Silliest Things People Say About Dogs, some scientists say animals don't have emotions, despite the fact that they have pretty much the same wiring for simple emotions that humans do. Meanwhile they insist that animals can't think either. Why? Because they don't have the same kind of wiring we do.

As Semyonova says, you can't have it both ways.

Other scientists insist (rightly) that animals do have emotions, partly because they have the same kind of wiring that we do. But many of these scientists also insist that animals can think, deliberately ignoring the fact that there are certain bits of cognitive architecture the "non-human animal" brain simply does not possess.

Again, you can't have it both ways.

If you ask me, too many dognitive scientists design their studies with heavy confirmation bias in mind. In one such study on "selective imitation in dogs," the owners of the dogs involved were there, giving the animals cues. So were the dogs really exhibiting selective imitation or just being good, obedient little doggies? And the conclusions drawn! -- that dogs will imitate another dog's behavior "if they believe the other dog has a good reason for doing it" -- are begging for Pauli's response. Not only is that not right, it's not even scientific enough to be wrong.

Like quantum physics, synchronicity, and autism, there are many things about time and consciousness that are still a mystery. And yet if we look at what Wolfgang Pauli had to say, the only mystery is why we don't assiduously avoid confirmation bias instead of deliberately steering dogs to act in the way our experiments are designed to prove. And even if some scientists aren't doing this consciously, I know dogs; and if they're in a situation where there's nothing interesting going on and someone with a strong enough desire comes along and wants them to do something, they'll usually try and find a way to do it. Dogs are confirmation bias with a tail4.

So it seems to me that we not only to avoid confirmation bias but to avoid a kind of reverse Pauli effect, where the equipment, or in this case the test subjects, operate in ways that they wouldn't do under normal circumstances. (We could call this the "doggie effect.")

Pauli believed, and rightly so, that consciousness was energy. On the most basic level all behavior is an energy exchange with the environment. So let's see if we can begin to explain canine behavior from a purely energetic standpoint5. What are dogs, after all, when given enough time and room to play, but pure, unadulterated (not mention timeless) energy?

So let's celebrate dogs for the wonderful qualities they actually possess: their true dogginess. They're amazing animals, particularly since they're able to fool so many otherwise talented scientists into thinking some very unscientific things.

LCK
www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
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Footnotes:

1. There was a study done in Japan recently which showed that the human body naturally emits light. These are not infrared emissions detectable with night vision goggles or special cameras. The body emits photons of light with wavelengths within the visible spectrum. And the amount of light emitted varies over time, according to our circadian rhythms.

2. Pauli was a brilliant physicist but also thought of himself as a natural philosopher. In physics he was famous primarily for the exclusion principle (aka, the Pauli Principle), and for his prediction in 1930 of the neutrino, which wasn't proven to exist until 1956.

3. Interestingly, there are certain equations related to quantum physics where space and time reverse themselves. Time becomes space and space becomes time. It's also interesting that in humans the sense of time seems to be processed in the parietal lobe, which is also where a sense of spatial dynamics is processed.

4. In a previous article I noted that dogs have an uncanny ability to "get under our skin" and "hijack" our brains. Cognitive scientist Michael Tomasello has suggested that animals who are "enculturated" with humans show higher levels of cognition than those who aren't, suggesting that the cognitive abilities of domestic dogs may be the result of embodied embedded cognition, a theoretical outgrowth of self-organizing systems.

5. I'm pretty sure I can explain most if not all canine behavior from a purely energetic and/or emotional point of view. I'll even give some examples in a future article.

Why Do Dogs Sniff Each Other?

Lee Charles Kelley — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:36:51 +0000

It's said that dogs sniff each other as a kind of canine equivalent to the human handshake; an otherwise meaningless "greeting ceremony"(1) which reportedly started in medieval times as a way of checking the other guy for weapons. Our canine companions are said to do this for similar reasons; it signifies that both animals are willing to start out on friendly terms.

But is it really just a social gesture? Does it have an adaptive purpose? Will knowing the true reason for this behavior tell us anything useful about the dog's way of seeing the world? And perhaps more importantly, will it tell us anything about ourselves?

We know that at least 33% of a dog's brain is devoted to processing olfactory information whle in humans that figure is closer to about 5%.

Marc Bekoff wrote here recently in "Yellow Snow Can Tells Us About What a Dog's Nose Knows." that "[a dog's nose] can distinguish T-shirts worn by identical twins, follow odor trails, and are 10,000 times more sensitive than humans to certain odors."

"Odors are powerful stimulants," Bekoff continues. "Although my late companion dog, Jethro (aka Hoover), enjoyed visiting his veterinarian, he showed fear if he went into an examination room where the previous canine client was afraid."

Steven R. Lindsay writes, "Olfactory information is highly durable in dogs. They exhibit evidence of recognizing the scent of the mother and the breeder after years of separation, social memories that may persist throughout a dog's life." (Handbook of Applied Dog Behavior and Training: Adaptation and Learning, 2000, p. 228.)

So if a dog's nose can pick up information from yellow snow, from the fear that hangs in the air after another dog leaves an examination room, from scents left behind by the shoes of an escaped prisoner, or from lifting its nostrils to the wind, why would a dog need to stick his nose directly into another dog's snout, genitals, and nether regions to garner social information? Couldn't he do that at a "safer" distance? And if the emotional memories sparked by familiar scents are so durable, why would dogs need to continue sniffing each other every time they meet even after they've already established a social relationship?

Dog trainer and natural philosopher Kevin Behan has a unique way of looking at canine behavior. Most of us tend to view such phenomena from the top down or from the outside in. As a result we overcomplicate things. Behan does just the opposite. He sees things from the inside out, and in so doing he's developed a very simple theory of "behavior as energy," sort of the E = MC2 of animal consciousness if you will, except it would probably be written as C = ME2, where C is consciousness, M is momentum, and E is emotional energy. (I just made that up, of course; I don't think Behan has such an equation, but since we're so used to thinking about animal consciousness in very complicated ways I think my whimsical re-working of the most famous theory in scientific history may help adjust our minds to the simplicity of Behan's philosophy.)

In the "Why Dogs Do What They Do" section of his website, Behan makes a very interesting and apt observation, "When people meet and greet, they shake hands or touch in some way, and they exchange pleasantries. And when dogs meet and greet, they smell each other. However people don't reintroduce themselves periodically throughout their interaction or every time they meet especially if they know each other well, whereas dogs smell each other each and every time they meet, no matter how well they may ‘know' each other."

Like a lot of Kevin's observations this one comes as both a bit of a surprise and a "Huh, I hadn't thought about it but that's true..." realization.

I had three dogs staying with me this weekend. Two of them, Dougie and Muskoka, see each other at least twice a week. They spend a lot of time together, they've known each other for years, they're best buds, they don't need to "shake hands" every time they run into one another. Yet on Saturday, when Dougie's owners dropped him off, the first thing he and Muskoka did, right there on my front stoop, was sniff each other.

Why do dogs need to do this?

Behan says it's a way of grounding themselves. "Anytime there is ... any change, any stimulus or stimulation, and especially when stressed, dogs need to smell something."

That's a simple and yet very intriguing observation. And you can see it for yourself in the way a dog who's momentarily frightened when a book falls to the floor, for example, will first react to the noise and then cautiously, and somewhat mysteriously, go over to sniff the offending object. I've also seen a dog notice that another dog is whimpering in his sleep. And she'll come over, and, while the other dog is still dreaming, very gingerly sniff his snout.

Behan explains, "[Any] change in the dog's sensory perception of a situation generates nervous activity in its brain, and this of course is neuro-chemical electrical energy. My proposal is that this electrochemical energy acts just like electricity in that it wants ‘to run to ground.'"

He also says that too much electricity creates a disconnect between the "big brain" in the head and the "little brain" in the solar plexus, and that inhaling the smell of something is a way of restoring internal balance.(2)

"Smelling is that primal," says Behan. "It allows the dog to connect with its ‘self' and quite literally feel the ground beneath its feet."

It's primal in humans too. What happens when you stop and smell the roses? It makes you feel good; you can feel your chest expand. What happens when a tantalizing smell comes wafting toward you from a pizza joint? You feel it in your gut. What happens when you find the scent of your lover's perfume on a scarf she's left behind? You experience a rush of sexual desire. Whenever we smell something pleasant we're instantly taken "outside of ourselves;" we leave behind all the thoughts that were buzzing around in our brains, and we experience, if just for a fleeting moment, what it's like just to be in a body.

As has been discussed in several previous articles here(3), human beings have an innate tendency to anthropomorphize animals, i.e., "when dogs sniff each other it's the canine equivalent of shaking hands." But I think that in order to truly understand canine behavior we sometimes need to dogthropomorphize ourselves instead.

Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset once pondered the handshake. "Man--let us never forget, was once a wild beast, and, potentially he continues to be one to a greater or lesser degree. Hence the approach of man to man was always a possible tragedy. What today seems to us such a simple and easy thing--one man approaching another--was until recently a dangerous and difficult operation. So it was necessary to invent a technique of approach." (Jose Ortega y Gasset, Man and People, 1963, p. 207)

I had an important meeting the other day, and I was a bit nervous coming into the room. Then, as I shook hands with everyone there, I tried to tune-in to what effects, if any, it had on me. And sure enough, each handshake actually made me feel less nervous and more balanced, as if the soles of my feet were planted more firmly on solid ground. (I'm not sure that happens every time we shake hands, but it was an interesting feeling, and one I had never noticed before.)

Dogs can't "categorize" things. For instance, while we might say that Dougie and Muskoka are "friends," and they're certainly friendly toward one another, they don't put things into conceptual chunks, store them in a mental library, and retrieve them for future reference. In other words, they don't think of themselves as friends, they just feel it. We, on the other hand, can sometimes think too much. That's why it's so pleasant to escape our thoughts when we "stop and smell the roses."

So maybe Kevin Behan's explanation for this behavior is correct. After all, when we shake hands with strangers we can categorize them afterward and put them into our mental library, and so we won't necessarily need to shake their hands again. And yet the first time we do engage in that ancient social ritual, it's entirely possible that on the most basic level we're doing what dogs do when they sniff each other's butts.

We're simply grounding our energy.

LCK
www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
“Changing the World, One Dog at a Time”
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Footnotes:

1) The rationale for "shaking" hands was to see if there was anything up the other guy's sleeve, which reminds me of the famous Marx Brothers scene where the policeman is shaking Harpo's hand and with each shake, enormous amounts of silverware keep dropping out of Harpo's sleeve.

Interestingly, when elephants meet, they often greet each other by touching each other's mouth with the tip of the trunk. Sometimes they'll even grasp their trunks together, almost imitating the ancient Roman hand clasp.

In Hyenas: "Exposure of vulnerable parts to the other partner is also characteristic of hyena greetings. They stand head to tail, lift the hind quarter nearest to the partner, raise their tails, erect their penis (males) or pseudopenis (females), and sniff and lick each other's erect "penis," scent gland, and anus." (Filippo Aureli, Frans B. M. Waal, Natural Conflict Resolution, 2000, p. 94

In Orcas: "The pods will approach each other in line formation and then stop about 20 metres away from each other. After a short time they will swim towards each other and become extremely excited as they engage in physical caresses, swim in tight groups, and often display erections. This activity occurs when the pods first meet each other after the winter absence or before departing. It has also been recently associated with the presence of a sick pod member." Greeting ceremonies in orcas.

In Howler Monkeys: "Greetings are a conflict management mechanism used between males of similar ranks. The fission-fusion social system of this group of howlers allows males with conflicting interests to remain separated, and greetings may reduce tension during fusion events." ("The functions of the Greeting Ceremony among male mantled howlers (Alouatta palliata) on Agaltepec Island, Mexico," Pedro Américo D. Dias *, Ernesto Rodríguez Luna, Domingo Canales Espinosa)

2) Behan's position stems from a very simple proposition (so simple you may find yourself going, "What!?"). He says that the primary, bedrock environmental factor shaping the evolution of life on earth is gravity. This natural force deeply influences not only the evolution of organisms but their behavior as well (non-human and human animals alike are always concerned, albeit unconsciously, with maintaining their physical balance). The second factor is the need to absorb energy from the environment in order to sustain life. Behan calls this "hunger" (though in my view it should also include thirst and the need to breathe). "Animal consciousness," Behan says, "is the confluence of the two most primordial systems by which every animal functions, the primal circuits dedicated to balance and the primal circuits dedicated to hunger." He then goes on to suggest that when dogs greet each other they're essentially motivated by a need to "ingest" the other dog's energy, and that smelling, which is often a precursor to eating, is the safest way to do that. (Personally, I'm still trying to "digest" that idea.)

3) "How Man Creates Dog in His Own Image," Lee Charles Kelley

"Anthropomorphic Double Talk," Marc Bekoff

"Naturalizing Anthropomorphism," Alexandra Horowitz (cited in Bekoff's article, above)

"The Debate Between Emotion and Logic," Lee Charles Kelley