COMMUNICATIONS K9
Communication does not start with the mouth but in the heart. Millions of people in our social community today are shutting down because of internal stress caused from the pain they endure through incorrect communication with the world around them. As a scientist, a psychologist, and California State Superior Court Animal Behaviorist, we have dealt with the gamma of mental and emotional problems in our society for over 30 years. There are many aspects of the communication process our clients have suffered with, that we enhance and resolve through the K9s we train for them. The most important part of the training process we have created is developing a way to use our K9s to create, stimulate, and improve better inter-social communication abilities and skills for our clients.
Learning to communicate is a multi-dimensional process that starts as the brain stops, focuses, and receives communication from an external source. The ability and motivation of the brain to receive information from the body's senses, and respond in a positive way, without shutting down or becoming overloaded is extremely important. How the brain receives and processes this information from the senses is a critical determining factor in a person's ability to respond and communicate in return. What and how the body feels, as dictated by the brain, concerning this communication will to a great extent become a fundamental part of the communication process. Therefore, learning to speak and express communication is the end of a long mental process, and is determined by that process altogether.
We teach our K9s to receive and communicate dynamically, using their own intelligent abilities, using a variety of different levels and dimensions of communication. The dogs become "brainwave and body functioning sensitive", and can receive, understand, and respond on an enhanced level of intelligence. As a result, our K9s have greatly stimulated numerous clients to either become verbal or resolve their communication problems and enhance their desire and ability to express themselves on a higher level than they experienced before their relationship with our K9.
True communication is a dynamic process between a minimum of two people. When one of those people has a communication problem where given certain external stimulus their brain automatically shuts down or has shut down the communication process, and only allows so much external input to affect them, the obvious concern is how to get them to turn that process back on. There are several levels and dimensions for communication. Our goal at USK9 is to use our K9s to motivate our clients to start and continue to expand their desire and ability to control use all their skills.
The communication process that other dog trainers use and teach to their dogs is called "operate conditioning". What this means is that the dog is taught to receive a command word, and respond with an action. Most dog trainers brag about the number of commands their dogs will perform. These commands are taught to the dog like tricks, the same way you teach a Parrot to repeat a spoken word. All the dog is doing is mimicking what you have shown them, or repeating an action you have taught them. While these trainers sell or place their dogs as Assistance K9s, they are not, and actually act more like therapy dogs than K9s.
We actually stimulate the Perkinje cells in the brain's Cerebellum in our K9s to "turn on", stop, listen, receive, and communicate, using a dynamic intelligent thought processes. Our K9s perform on a much higher level of intelligence, using their brains to understand and respond to the actual intentions, desires, and needs of the handler, instead of single word "commands". There is no comparison. Our K9s are focused and "tuned in" to the thoughts, feelings, mental and physical processes of their handlers and respond dynamically and intelligently. Isn't that exactly what we are trying to achieve with those individuals fighting a communication disorder? If a K9 has been taught to allow us to stimulate, open their Perkinje brain cells, and turn on the communication process in their brain, why couldn't they help us to the same thing with their human companion? They do. We have had DOGWISH K9 recipients who were non-verbal when they received their K9s, and are now not only speaking but communicating and using dynamic higher functioning skills. Our K9s were able to stimulate and motivate them to do what other sources couldn't.
Social Interaction
Going further, by learning to feel confident and empowered through their relationship with their K9 companion, numerous affected K9 recipients have changed complete behavior patterns and processes, come out of their rooms, allowed themselves to interact with the family and friends, become much more social, and have allowed themselves to face the stresses in their lives in many ways they before would have completely either avoided, or refused to confront. While this sounds fantastic, and it is, here's our explanation.
TRAIN THE BRAIN
We have for some thirty years now, through the process we use to train, (which is totally unique in the field of dog training), created a phenomenon that has boosted the performance in our dogs and given us an ability to produce a quality of behavior and performance in our dogs that is dynamic. It isn't that our personal abilities to train are of a higher quality than other trainers, it is our background and education, the understanding we have developed of the brain, its' parts and processes, and how they relate with body functions, and the strategy and processes that we use to teach dogs, that makes all the difference. The knowledge and understanding of each dogs' mentality, and how to motivate them to use their intelligence dynamically, have given us a heightened ability to produce K9s that can out perform any other dog in their related field.
Two years ago, Doctor David Kelso, the Vice President of the Wyoming Chapter of the American Red Cross brought us an Akita he wanted trained as a Disaster K9, for Search and Rescue and Cadaver work. The dog was a normal Akita with medium to low drive, very sensitive to stress. We started the dog off in obedience and search work, and had to stop, wait, and restart the dog twice during his six month training course. At times we wanted to give up and just let him go home. We felt bad about keeping him in our kennel where he just didn't fit in or belong. However, at the beginning of his fourth month of training, something happened in his brain and Casper began to "own" the training and accelerated his training. When Dave came at the end of the sixth month period Casper was doing it all on a medium intermediate level. Dave took Casper home and after just a couple of days noticed immediate progression. Based on the training we had given him, Casper in his second week home was able to track, search out, and find a man at 3am in the morning, in minus 30 degree weather, eight miles from town, stranded in the mountains in five feet of snow, and saved him before the cold could either kill him, or cause serious body damage. None of the other K9s owned by Search team members, or the State Police could even begin to track him. Casper went straight to him. Nobody could figure out how Casper was able to do this. Casper started finding people on a weekly basis. A month later, Dave was called out to find an "escaped" mental patient in a large hospital. The State Troopers had been trying to find him for over eight hours with no success. Dave went into the hospital, took Casper off leash and let him go. The officers there immediately scolded him, telling him there was no way without scent or other important evidence, that Casper could do the job. It took Casper 10 minutes. He went to the elevator up to the fourth floor and indicated to stop the machine. He went to the right, down the corridor, and into a door on the left, stopping at a closed door. Dave opened the door, and Casper went into the room and sat next to a man, sitting in a chair, who was then identified as the "escaped" mentally ill patient. When asked how the dog could do it, Dave explained that USK9 trains dogs to be brainwave and body functioning sensitive. Casper was attracted to him by his abnormal brainwave activity. Though the officers couldn't believe it, they had to accept Dave's explanation because there was no other explanation available. Since then Casper has found more people than any other Search dog in America in 2006, and has been awarded "Therapy K9 of the Year" by the Delta Society, and "Search and Rescue K9 of the Year" by FEMA and The American Red Cross". Casper is a good example of the results we can produce in our dogs at USK9.
What causes this dynamic reaction in the dogs we train? We have spent years researching in numerous fields of science to find out specifically what it is we are accomplishing in the brains of the dogs we train that is allowing them to perform with such dynamic performance.
Most dogs, though their senses are far greater than those of a human being, exist in a state of consciousness that is controlled largely by their subconscious minds. Their "thought" processes, when triggered, are controlled by disabled brain activity that have been passed down to them, and keeps them from communicating dynamically, as a human does.
Often, since their brain works differently than ours, or because their genetic ancestors did not develop or use parts of their brains as we do, these parts are undeveloped and not prepared to handle the stress that it would take to work correctly, or function at a minimal level. That brain, instead, handles these experiences in a protective manner; with behaviors it creates to defend itself from external pain and abuse. It shuts down, refuses to respond, becomes in operant, and dormant.
We need to understand that at its' best, the brain is only a mechanism that works as it has been programmed and as it is taught to work. Therefore, we have found that the dogs' brain simply repeats the same processes over and over, which dictate and control its' behavior.
However, through our conditioning we have found a process that breaks into the mental programming of the dogs we train and interrupts their brains' thought process. As we continue with our conditioning it allows us to motivate a higher quality of dynamic responsiveness in the brain of the dog, which allows them to:
continue to change the processes their brains use,
raise their ability to respond,
and perform (communicate) with a higher quality of function ability.
If you have further interest, concern, or desire communication with us about our work, please feel free to contact us at (866) 875-9364.
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