Meet Your Dog Quotes

“Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said that “love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
― Kim Brophey, Meet Your Dog: The Game-Changing Guide to Understanding Your Dog's Behavior

“Your own deep quest for meaning in life (and that arguably simpler search that your dog is on) is just classical conditioning at work for the benefit of survival. Baggage, it turns out, has an evolutionary purpose: to keep us all safe, sound, well-fed, and productive in the world. It’s not nearly as personal as we make it out to be. Just the recognition of this universal process can save any relationship a great deal of unnecessary misunderstanding.”
― Kim Brophey, Meet Your Dog: The Game-Changing Guide to Understanding Your Dog's Behavior

“History is the best yardstick for judging the ability to modify behavior. It tells us just how long we may expect the learning curve to be. The longer a behavior has been effective for an individual, the more resistant she will be to changing this pattern in the future. This is why nobody—human or dog—escapes a therapist’s office without digging into family history; how far back a habit goes really makes a difference in potential outcomes.”
― Kim Brophey, Meet Your Dog: The Game-Changing Guide to Understanding Your Dog's Behavior

“You already love your dog (or will soon if you are thinking about taking him home). Now I would like you to meet your dog. As best you can. Halfway. Equipped with the kind of sensible expectations and appropriate measures that may make life easier for both of you.”
― Kim Brophey, Meet Your Dog: The Game-Changing Guide to Understanding Your Dog's Behavior

“The entire point of ritualized communication, signalling, and threatening behavior in nature is to avoid actual conflicts and altercations. To assume that warnings are just an indication of intent to harm is backward.”
― Kim Brophey, Meet Your Dog: The Game-Changing Guide to Understanding Your Dog's Behavior

“The imbalance between genetics and a modern environment creates friction and ripple effects for behavioral health.”
― Kim Brophey, Meet Your Dog: The Game-Changing Guide to Understanding Your Dog's Behavior

“The treat you gave your dog this morning for doing his little dance in the kitchen had good associations for him as he gobbled it up. That same treat caused him to run away from you when you offered it later to try to lure him into the bathtub. He's no fool. He can see the towel and shampoo bottle in your other hand and he knows what that means. Suddenly that chicken jerky you are holding reeks of a mean trick. The circumstances around a stimulus changed, so the meaning of that stimulus in the moment changed for him as well.”
― Kim Brophey, Meet Your Dog: The Game-Changing Guide to Understanding Your Dog's Behavior

“This critical period gives us the largest window you will ever have in your dog's life to use learning to compete with the less flexible influences of genetics and the unpredictable and
complex nature of the environment, An ounce of prevention, as they say, is worth a pound of cure.”
― Kim Brophey, Meet Your Dog: The Game-Changing Guide to Understanding Your Dog's Behavior

“You can deliberately work with him, teaching him (learning) to handle potentially challenging circumstances at this opportune time in his life and development (self). The goal is to get one up on Mother Nature, not wait for instincts to kick in.”
― Kim Brophey, Meet Your Dog: The Game-Changing Guide to Understanding Your Dog's Behavior

“You triple his exercise; and he’s no longer pacing and whining when you watch TV for more than an hour.”
― Kim Brophey, Meet Your Dog: The Game-Changing Guide to Understanding Your Dog's Behavior

“18. Elaine T. Ostrander, “Genetics and the Shape of Dogs: Studying the new sequence of the canine genome shows how tiny genetic changes can create enormous variation within a single species,” American Scientist (Sept.–Oct. 2007). 19.”
― Kim Brophey, Meet Your Dog: The Game-Changing Guide to Understanding Your Dog's Behavior