Feel the World the Way Your Dog Does (And Be Happier For It)

Our dogs respond to their feelings long before they have a chance to “think” about what’s happening. This is why all the work you may have done getting your dog to sit or stay can just fly out the window when your dog is confronted with a particularly stressful or stimulating situation. They do what feels right in the moment, and what feels right usually has more to do with catching prey as a way to release their energy or tension than it does with listening to what you have to say about the situation (see my earlier blogs for more about the prey/predator dynamic at work in a dog’s awareness).

So how do we use this awareness in our canine interactions?

Our intention is to insert ourselves into the feeling/response cycle so that what ultimately feels right to our dogs is “interacting with us,” whether the environment is as calm as a lazy summer afternoon in the park, or as chaotic as a walk downtown during lunch hour.

Here are a few things we humans need to know about how our dogs feel the world:

Our dogs are like a big receiver, picking up the “vibes” of the world. Their senses are bombarded with stimulation. In fact, both you and your dog have emotional experiences of the world that are, at their core, chemical reactions that occur long before the mind works its diagnostic magic. Humans have emotional experiences, then we label them as happy, sad, angry, frightened, and so on as we see fit, after the fact. Our dogs just have the experiences without labeling them. By emotional energy, I mean this core, pre-labeled emotional experience. At the most basic level, this is simply an exchange of energy: the world gives, and we receive.

Those vibes either flow right through our dogs (that is, they perceive something and just let it go), or they are stored within our dogs as stress. If you’re walking your dog in the park, and suddenly a squirrel darts across the path right in front of you, putting out little squirrel vibes, this registers in your dog as a feeling. Your dog starts to get all stirred up inside, and pulls on the leash to get at the squirrel. You have a good hold on the leash, though, so the most your dog can do is pull, pull, pull, until the squirrel is out of sight. Maybe you keep on walking, dragging your dog along until they forget about the squirrel. All that emotional energy stirred up by the squirrel is unresolved at this point, and will be stored up within your dog as stress, held in reserve for another opportunity to be released. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this stored tension. It takes a lot of effort to hunt for prey, so this stress is a storehouse of emotional energy for those moments. This is nature’s way of charging the dog’s battery: if a dog is going into the wild to go moose hunting, they’re going to need a lot of emotional reserve to handle the intense energy of that situation. However, practically speaking, we want to minimize the stress that our domesticated dogs are carrying around, and to give them ample opportunity to release whatever stress they do have in appropriate ways instead of possibly destructive or dangerous ways.

Another day, another walk, another squirrel. This time you have a tennis ball in your hand, and your dog is really into the ball. When you notice your dog perk up, and begin to get vibes from the squirrel, you get your dog’s attention with the ball. Once the squirrel is safely up a tree, you throw the ball in the opposite direction, and your dog tears off after it in a game of fetch. You play fetch for a minute or two, then grab the lead and keep walking. In this situation the emotional energy stirred up by the squirrel has been resolved through the game of fetch, and there is no residual stress. As you repeat this exercise, your dog learns that the squirrel vibes will be satisfied by playing fetch with you. Ultimately, when your dog sees a squirrel and feels the initial feeling associated with that, looking to you to resolve that feeling becomes automatic.

In the first walk, the unresolved energy stored within your dog as stress is potential energy waiting to be released. In the second walk, that energy is satisfied through a quick game of fetch, with you as the vehicle for removing the stress from the situation, making you the most attractive, most important object in your dog’s universe.

I’ll be adding more on the subject of how your dog feels the world in a future article, but in the meantime, see if you can connect with the feeling of letting the vibes in your environment flow through you, without storing them as unresolved stress. (And set a good example for your dog!)
 

Neil Sattin is the author of www.naturaldogblog.com a website devoted transforming your relationship with your dog (and yourself) with a centered, nonviolent, and radically different way of training.  He released "Natural Dog Training: The Fundamentals", an instructional 2-DVD set that teaches his methods.  Neil lives with his wife, two children, three cats, and, of course, his dog Nola outside of Portland, Maine.