01/03/2026
It is important that we look at the big picture when caring for other species. They are technically held captive and it is our responsibility to understand the biology, natural behaviors, communication styles, and all else that is at play. It is our duty as their guardians to ensure their comfort and well-being.
This is why I speak the way I do and why I continue to teach in a way that often makes people uncomfortable. Not because I enjoy friction, and certainly not because I lack compassion, but because what I witness again and again is not cruelty—it is unpreparedness. And unpreparedness, when paired with power over another species, inevitably becomes harm, even when intentions are good.
A nine-week-old puppy crying through the night is not broken. A mouthy Border Collie puppy is not defiant. A young animal seeking proximity is not manipulating. These are not training problems. They are the natural expressions of biology, development, and an unfinished nervous system still wiring itself in real time. Yet the moment inconvenience enters the human experience—sleep deprivation, disruption of routine, frustration—the question so often shifts from understanding to control. How do I make this stop, rather than what is this animal experiencing, and what capacity does it truly have right now?
That shift is where the fracture begins.
I have come to believe that not everyone is fit for dog ownership, not because they lack love, but because love without understanding is insufficient. Affection does not override neurobiology. Desire does not replace preparedness. Wanting a dog does not automatically confer the ability to become a steward of another nervous system. We have created a culture in which dogs are acquired impulsively, framed as lifestyle additions, while their developmental, genetic, and emotional realities are treated as inconveniences to be managed rather than truths to be honored.
In doing so, we forget what dogs actually are. Canis lupus familiaris is not a modern invention. This species co-evolved with us over roughly thirty-six thousand years, not to be silenced, controlled, or forced into premature independence, but to synchronize with us, to cooperate, and to survive alongside us. Dogs followed us into caves, across frozen land bridges, and into human settlements because proximity meant safety and cooperation meant survival. The bond that formed was never transactional. It was relational.
And relationship carries responsibility.
What frustrates me most is not the questions themselves, but how quickly biology is dismissed when it becomes inconvenient. Distress is reframed as stubbornness. Fear is labeled as bad behavior. Advice is given casually to ignore, isolate, or “let them cry it out,” without any understanding that the nervous system never forgets what it learns during vulnerability. These moments do not build resilience. They build coping strategies rooted in shutdown, hypervigilance, or despair, and later we give those outcomes names like separation anxiety, reactivity, or emotional instability, as if they appeared out of nowhere.
This is precisely why I wrote The Space Between Minds. Not as a training manual, and not as a collection of techniques, but as a bridge between human intention and canine experience. There is an invisible space between what we assume and what dogs actually feel, and that space is where misunderstandings quietly take root. When we fail to understand how dogs process stress, proximity, safety, and separation, we end up punishing biology and calling it training.
Education does not make us softer. It makes us accountable. It forces us to confront the weight of inviting another species into our lives, a species that has paid for our survival with its loyalty, adaptability, and trust for tens of thousands of years. I will always stand for protecting that bond, even when it makes me unpopular, because the dog does not get a voice in these moments. And someone has to speak for the nervous system that cannot yet speak for itself.
Bart De Gols
