Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

Animals can think, but the author cannot

Can animals think? Do they posses consciousness? Do they possess their own will? Are they capable of intention? Is the brain the source of its intelligence? Those of us who have owned dogs know that they answer to all of these questions are a resounding YES! An opinion backed up by research in several disciplines. Kevin Behan ignores all those facts and tells us that NO, they are incapable of all of that.


For the past few decades there has been ever increasing amounts of evidence to say that "YES. They can think." This idea is not new and has been proposed throughout history by various theologians and philosophers like David Hume and ........

What is new - relatively speaking - is the overwhelming evidence that has come from decades of research into animal cognition.

The author ignores all the scientific evidence and, instead, claims that dogs not think. So how does he explain their behavior? With a poorly defined concepts like 'attraction' Behan tries to define his idea, but what we get is some weird mish-mash of terms that end up being self referencing or blatantly illogical. He also conjures up some fabrications in order to prop up his clay-footed monster. He is not one to let facts get in the way of a pet hypothesis.

This books suffers from many problems. The author's mangled English makes this an unusually difficult read. Even though he has made some improvements when compared to the horribly written 'Natural Dog Training', the main problem - the content - remains. The proposal made by the author, the invented claims regarding dogs and the explanations he conjures are straight out of 'Bizzaro world.' In short all the available evidence contradicts every major claim made by Behan.

Animals In Translation and The Emotional Lives of Animals are far better books .. and to top it off they are based on reality.

4 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

Will change how you see your dog.....

I found this book to be incredibly enlightening and thought provoking. Behan's language can at times be a bit challenging, but as a result, it forces the reader to redefine how they interpret their dog's behavior and the language they use to describe it. It's not necessarily an "easy" read, but thoughts and literature that challenge current paradigms rarely are.

This is not a training book, so one should be aware of that before making the decision to buy it. However, even though it is not a training book per se, your view of dogs will be shifted, and it will lead you to a way of looking at your dog that will allow your training regimen to have much more impact. Build your relationship with your dog based on the fundamental thesis of this book, which is that dogs are emotional beings and as such these emotions drive their fundamental behavior, and you will develop the kind of relationship and trust that you've always wanted.

In the end, I can't recommend this book enough.

1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Interesting but difficult

Some patience is required to get through the memoir content. It seems long given how brief the actual training anecdotes are. The main message is that we repeat family of origin trauma responses (or other learned patterns) not only with others but with dogs. Dogs accept these behaviors from us differently than humans do so we can heal ourselves and our dogs using nonjudgmental observation. Sensible but difficult to implement. I hope it catches on.

New Age Sophistry

Dismissing Behan's strange views is easy. All we have to do is ask ourselves, "how can he know what he claims to know?" In just about every case the answer is that he can't. There are people who see messages in random numbers and conclude it has a higher significance. This is called apophenia - perceiving connections in unrelated phenomenon with a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness. He does try to justify his beliefs, yet as we would expect from someone seeing things the explanations are not convincing and are often self contradictory. For example, he writes that a dog sits because it is the "equal and opposite" of a standing human. But he also writes that a dog is sits for a sitting child; for the same reason. So shouldn't the dog stand in this case? Behan doesn't address it because that kind of thinking is beyond what you will find in this book. And this doesn't even address the fact that standing and sitting are not "opposites", they are simply different positions. in fact we could make a stronger case for the standing/laying combination. Like many who have read Behan's books, I found the claim that dogs don't and can't think to be the most disturbing. When decades of evidence from cognitive science indicate dogs and other animals think, it takes a 'special' author to ignore the evidence and state otherwise. In fact, science has time and time again, eroded the myth of human uniqueness. But this claim allows Behan to set up the human in special place, outside of biological constraints - into the world of energy and telepathy. Instead, Behan condemns a dog to mindless automatons, playthings whose only existence is based around its human god. A slave to the human's shifting emotions - a mirror to the human. This idea may appeal to some people but I hope most dog owners have enough sense than to believe this self aggrandizing new age nonsense.

A Revolutionary Book about Dogs

I don't typically write reviews, but I just had to address to nonsense posted below. First of all, don't claim that an author is making anything up without SERIOUSLY being able to back up the claim. This entire book is about the author's journey to his theory, and how and why he's questioned the mainstream idea of dogs. So not only do you get an explanation of the idea he's proposing, but you get an actual sense of how he got there. So are you seriously saying that he's lying about being a dog trainer, or lying about his decades in the field and what he's seen? Come on now. And calling it an 'unusually difficult read'? Did we read the same book? I didn't want to put the book down! Although yes, Behan does make the claim that dogs don't think, but at NO point does he suggest that the animals are unintelligent. In fact, his hypothesis credits dogs in a way that NO other author or training model ever has! Those of us who own dogs, know that there's a deep connection between us, - something beyond thought, - and this book really delves into that topic. Further, it explains all those crazy, interesting dogs do that no one else has an answer for. It's an absolute must-read.

0 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

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