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

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 its owner based on 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 was originally trained under the dominance theory by his father, John Behan, one of ...