Appropriate Dog Behavior

Animals, like us, are beings of energy. There is kinetic energy. This is energy in motion. I am not referring to that, but rather the energy that is the basis of everything — the stuff that we’re all made of.

You’ve probably heard that what you feel travels down the leash to the dog. More importantly, as dogs they convert whatever energy we are experiencing through our thoughts and actions into an “appropriate” dog thought and action. In other words, they respond in the “dog equivalent” to our human emotion, thought, and posturing.

It is through awareness and observation that we can make subtle shifts in what we are feeling and in how we are using our bodies. This transfers to a different and what we humans would call a more desirable reaction from our dog. Let’s just say, we are more likely to get the response we want and have a much more attentive and content dog.

Dogs are never intentionally responding inappropriately nor are they ever bad in the way that we may interpret the word. They are just acting in a way that is natural for them at that particular moment in time. We spend a lot of wasted energy trying to get the dog to understand human thought rather than it being the other way around.

I’m not saying that we should just accept whatever the behavior is. It is difficult not to transfer our emotional expression to our dog. We assume that they are thinking as we are. By humanizing our dogs, we miss the opportunity to see what’s really going on.

Chances are, your dog is responding appropriately given their history, genetics, training (or lack of), and maybe most importantly, their instincts.

As a side note, I think it’s fair to say that we humans tend to forget that we also live a lot of our life based on instinct – human instinct. We should remember to understand and work with our dogs based on their instincts and not ours.

For a related article on humanizing your dog, check out: http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/articles/humandog.htm