Nonviolent Social Processing 

WITH DR. LAURA DONALDSON

CEUs: PPAB 1, CCPDT 1, KPA 1, PMCT 1, & IAABC 1

A Webinar Sponsoring The Pet Training Science Alliance 

Just rejecting violence in dog training is not enough! We also need to articulate what an ethic of nonviolence would mean for daily life with our dogs, our clients’ dogs & everything we do as canine professionals & companions. Violence is not just deliberate physical harm—it also involves a failure to accept the whole subject with their own story, ideas, images, needs, wishes, capacities, pace (Kurtz, 2007, 2015). We know that dogs and humans have remarkably close social and emotional brains so the imperative to accept the whole subject definitely includes dogs.

At the center of the nonviolent ethic I am articulating is what I call NONVIOLENT SOCIAL PROCESSING: this foregrounds a dog’s processing of information from the environment in a mode that makes sense to them and with enough time to just “be” with this information rather than feel relentless pressure to “do” something about it.

A nonviolent approach also validates a subject’s attempts to manage painful experiences by assuming they are doing the best they can to navigate their world given the levels of stress they are experiencing. Rather than viewing these attempts as “naughty,” “bad” or even “vicious” behavior, a nonviolent framework regards them as creative, if often outdated and sometimes inappropriate, adaptations to life events (Ogden, 2021). I call them “ADAPTIVE SURVIVAL STRATEGIES.”

There is so much more to say about living out an ethic of nonviolence with our dogs and I am dedicated to articulating it as fully and completely as possible.

Learning Objectives

1. How to incorporate an ethic of nonviolence into everything we do with dogs
2. Understand how information processing is at the center of how our dogs navigate their environments
3. Practical, safe and NONVIOLENT strategies for helping worried and traumatized dogs process information from the environment

About Your Presenters

Dr. Laura Donaldson, PhD, is a Professor Emeritus from Cornell University located Ithaca, New York, United States. She is an award-winning writer on dog behavior who has worked as a canine behavior specialist for 20+ years. Laura is a Certified Dog Behavior Consultant (CDBC), a Karen Pryor Certified Training Partner (KPA CTP) and a Certified Control Unleashed Instructor (CCUI). She is also a Certified Trauma Professional and created the very popular program, Slow Thinking is Lifesaving for Dogs® for traumatized as well as aggressive dogs. She has presented at many conferences and given a number of online talks, podcast interviews and webinars, including Trauma and Aggression in Dogs and courses such as Somatic Self-Resilience for Dogs. Laura currently lives in upstate New York (Fingerlakes region, northeastern United States).

Preseners Business 

Facebook