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

by Kevin Behan

Overview

In Your Dog Is Your Mirror, dog trainer Kevin Behan proposes a radical new model for understanding canine behavior: a dog’s behavior and emotion, indeed its very cognition, are driven by our emotion. The dog doesn’t respond to what the owner thinks, says, or does; it responds to what the owner feels. And in this way, dogs can actually put people back in touch with their own emotions. Behan demonstrates that dogs and humans are connected more profoundly than has ever been imagined — by heart — and that this approach to dog cognition can help us understand many of dogs’ most inscrutable behaviors. This groundbreaking, provocative book opens the door to a whole new understanding between species, and perhaps a whole new understanding of ourselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608680887
Publisher:	New World Library
Publication date:	03/06/2012
Pages:	344
Sales rank:	48,853
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

The author of Natural Dog Training, Kevin Behan is a veteran dog trainer and one of the nation’s foremost experts on dog rehabilitation.

Table of Contents

Preface: It's Not about the Dog xi

Introduction xxv

Part I Our Special Relationship with Dogs

1 They Know Us by Heart 3

2 A Dog's Greatest Gift 11

3 What the Woof Do We Know? 17

Part II My Life with Dogs

4 State of the Art 30

5 The Problem with Biology 61

6 The Immediate-Moment Theory 73

7 One Day 83

8 The Miracle After Birth 101

Part III How Dogs Work

9 Nature Is a Mirror 113

10 Unresolved Emotion: The Heart of the Matter 131

11 Where the Past Gets Buried 153

12 The Truth about Pavlov 171

13 What Is Heart? 181

14 What Is a Dog? 189

Part IV The Dog in Your Life

15 Dogs Are Never Wrong 211

16 Group-Speak: What Dogs Are Really Saying 227

17 We Will Be Tested 237

18 The Cost of Domestication 247

19 The Late, Great Doberman Pinscher 261

20 Decoding Your Dog 273

21 The Dogs in My Life 295

Acknowledgments 303

Bibliography and Recommended Reading 305

About the Author 309

Editorial Reviews

Beautifully written and deeply engrossing, Your Dog Is Your Mirror is destined to change the way we think about dogs.”
— Lee Charles Kelley, dog trainer and bestselling mystery novelist

“Your Dog Is Your Mirror is a very thought-provoking book that will force you to reconsider who we are and who dogs are and why we are so attracted to one another. Kevin Behan calls upon his extensive experience with our best friends and makes the important point that in the emotional interactions between dogs and humans, it’s not the human reading the human in the animal but the animal reading the animal in the human. Whether you agree with Kevin’s provocative theories or not, the age-old adage that no one knows you like your dog clearly rings true. I learned a lot from this wide-ranging and unique book.”
— Marc Bekoff, University of Colorado, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals and The Animal Manifesto

“There are scores of books on how to change the outward behavior of a dog. But Kevin Behan challenges us to look deeper, to examine the dog’s behavior as an emotional reflection of its owner, revealing our own unresolved issues. Your Dog Is Your Mirror is beautifully written, with entertaining and insightful examples from throughout Kevin Behan’s remarkable career. This book will forever change your relationship with your dog, and you will never look at your dog in the same way again. It is a must-read for every committed dog owner.”
— Kyra Sundance, internationally bestselling author of 101 Dog Tricks and 101 Ways to Do More with Your Dog!

From the Publisher

Scientific evidence on the extent of dogs' emotions has been slow in coming, but the concept has recently become more widely accepted and studied (see, e.g., Stanley Coren's The Modern Dog). Here, veteran dog trainer Behan takes a quantum leap, theorizing that dogs are driven by nothing but emotions, which manifest as energy; he argues that training a dog involves knowing how to change energy states. Behan expands on the method he explains in Natural Dog Training, which emphasizes the roles of prey and predator and their complementarity, completely opposing both Cesar Millan's pack theory (Cesar's Way) and Karen Pryor's positive-reinforcement approach (Don't Shoot the Dog!). VERDICT Part biography and part New Age philosophy based solely on Behan's observations, this is a difficult read, replete with abstract concepts such as "group consciousness," "heart energy," and "emotional counterbalance." Patrons seeking a training manual would be better served by Pat Miller's Play with Your Dog. Those wanting a novel interpretation of dog behavior and the human-canine bond will find Behan's work thought-provoking.—Florence Scarinci, Nassau Community Coll. Lib., Garden City, NY

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