All Dogs Need is a Game of Ping-Pong.
When I was searching for a dog training method to follow, or an individual who’s training method I found most legitimate, it was the way Kevin Behan interacted with dogs that got me sold on Natural Dog Training (NDT). Instead of him training dogs in the typical systematically structured way of either a) when you obey you will be rewarded with food i.e. positive reinforcement, or b) if you don’t obey you will be punished until you obey i.e. dominance, he was training in a different style. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to discredit these other methods, but there certainly was something different about the ebb and flow of Kevin’s style.
In NDT, prey-making is the central theme of the training model. Once everything boils down to the nitty-gritty, dogs are driven by the hunt and the hunt alone. This means that as owners, we want to teach ourselves to appeal to the prey-drive in our dog, and then we can achieve high-caliber collectivized actions with our dog — which is what we want from training.
From my experience, I have come to the realization that to a dog every relationship is that of the predator/prey relationship. This predator/prey relationship is governed by the second law of thermodynamics, which states: heat flows naturally from an object at a higher temperature (higher concentration) to an object at a lower temperature (lower concentration), and heat doesn’t flow in the opposite direction of its own accord. So, in the same way heat flows, energy flows from the predator (higher concentration) to the prey (lower concentration). Another way of saying this would be that the predator Projects emotion while the prey Absorbs emotion.
Dogs that are socially weak get stuck on the Projection phase. The dogs with stronger temperaments show it outright and many times get in fights, these dogs will always be labeled “dominant”. Whereas the dogs with weaker temperaments will internalize it all as stress and try to escape from the pressure.
On the other hand, dogs that are socially stronger are able to project and absorb energy. When watching dogs play in the yard, it has become obvious to me that the true nature of play is when both dogs are switching from prey to predator — over and over again. My mentor describes this as being analogous to a game of ping-pong, where one player hits the ball (projector) and simultaneously the other player has collected himself physically to absorb (prey) the force of that hit, and then they swap roles. The better the players get, and the longer they play their round, the faster they are “swapping polarities” between predator and prey. Dogs are the same way, the better they get at “swapping polarities”, the more social they are.
I see this ability to play ping-pong with your dog as the most important aspect of having a well-trained dog with a strong rapport. It’s all about learning how to tap into your dogs prey drive to get her on the same wavelength as you, and then being able to swap polarities with them.
It’s not about following a pack leader, but rather about following a master who gives the feeling of hunting. That is the true nature of collectivized behavior.
