Your Dog Is Your Mirror

For years dog training has been caught in a tug-of-war between two vocal and often inflexible systems: the alpha-dominance model and the positive-reinforcement approach. In Your Dog Is Your Mirror, dog trainer Kevin Behan proposes a new model for understanding canine behavior: a dog's behavior and emotion, indeed its very cognition, are driven by our emotion. Dogs don't respond to their owners based on what their owners think, say, or do; they respond to what their owners feel. 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 even been imagined — by heart — and that this approach to dog cognition can help resolve many of dogs' most problematic behaviors. Your Dog Is Your Mirror opens the door to a whole new world of communication and understanding between species, and perhaps a whole new understanding of ourselves.