Blog — dogs

  Balance and Proprioception are Deeply Intertwined Proprioception (your body's sense of position) provides the raw data (where you are) that your balance system uses (with input from eyes and inner ears) to make constant, tiny adjustments via your muscles to keep you steady and upright, preventing falls and allowing coordinated movement, with balance training effectively enhancing this internal GPS system. Essentially, better balance means better proprioception because the challenges of balancing force your proprioceptors to work harder and smarter, improving nerve signals and muscle response. Proprioception (body position in space) and interoception (internal body states like hunger, fatigue) are...

  I really wish I had some fancy training techniques for you. I wish I could impress you with some sharp obedience and lots of down-stays around chickens (impulse control). I wish making your dog "wait" for his dinner and then telling him "okay" was the quick and easy fix to all your training problems. But let's look on the bright side... What we do have is the built-in technology of the nervous system to detect threat and safety. What we have is the fascia, the living matrix of the body. We have neuroception, co-regulation, and somatic resonance. We have your...

Sentinel Trauma is a one-time learning event which can leave a permanent imprint on the autonomic nervous system.    According to Dr. Stephen Porges, Sentinel Trauma is a single overwhelming event which the body-brain registers as life-threatening. This could be an accident, an assault, or a medical crisis. It is an "one-trial imprint" which results is the sudden re-calibration of autonomic state and neuroception. Sentinel Trauma is distinct from chronic stress and complex trauma. It is also separate from fear conditioning, which requires repetition. Sentinel Trauma, like Conditioned Taste Aversion, is a one-trial learning event which is highly resistant to...

  When I was first learning about dogs from my mentor, he taught me that a dog's temperament is based on their "prey threshold" i.e. what types of prey they are genetically programmed to hunt. So bird dogs have a certain temperament because they are tuned to birds (soft mouth). And you can imagine a bulldog, grabbing and holding onto the bull (hard mouth) and what kind of temperament and drive is required of that particular dog. And so on and so forth, in this way we account for all the different types of hunting dogs and their different types...

  The only way to truly re-wire your dog's brain involves activating old memories and then re-configuring them. This means that if you shelter your dog in a bubble of "safety" and always DISTRACT them from triggers, you may be successful at keeping them under threshold... but the underlying emotions and reactivity programs in your dogs brain are not changing.   Of course, it does help to initially interrupt the rehearsal of reactive and aggressive behaviors. But eventually, you must TRIGGER the dog and then re-pattern their behavior with careful titration and training. When old memories are activated, you have...