You look down at your adorable, incorrigible, perfectly irreplaceable friend Bob who has somehow trained you to feed him better than you do yourself and to allow a dog in your bed after you swore you would never share it with a furry pet again. You kiss his fuzzy chicken breath dog face as he curls up next to your pillow. You love the little stinker more than anything. He is your dog. He is Bob.

You experience him so intimately, so remarkably, every day. In many ways you may feel closer to him than to many people in your life. And yet, a large part of Bob’s internal world is still impossible for you to understand completely. You can make some educated guesses about Bob’s inner life based on what you can see of his outer life. You know how old he is by the plaque on his teeth. You can assume his male hormones have decreased because he is missing his family jewels. You can determine he doesn’t hear very well because when you broke a glass bowl six feet from where he was sleeping, his ears didn’t even twitch. These are the kinds of facts you are given about a dog when you adopt him, and the kind of descriptions we use to make assumptions about how our dog is feeling and what he might be thinking.

What you experience with your dog—whether he is snapping at you when you roll over on him in the middle of the night, or he’s urinating on the rug just minutes after you took him outside—can sometimes be explained by a unique factor of his internal self. His rear leg is painful and he snapped at you because it hurt when you bumped it. He peed on the floor because he has a urinary tract infection.

Self Tips to Remember

When considering the possibility that the self is behind the wheel of your dog’s behavior, think about the big six. Examine the following: Age (development and condition related to age), Sex (M/F and Fixed/Intact), Health (disease, infection, virus, parasite), Nutrition (quality, quantity, and tolerance/allergy), Disability (deafness, blindness, amputation, etc.), and Individual (the wild-card factor).

Age

FEAR PERIODS. There are two primary developmental fear periods in puppies that can make your canine kid act like he’s suddenly seeing ghosts, now afraid of things in his environment that rolled off him days before. While they vary a bit from individual to individual, the first fear period is generally from eight to eleven weeks of age, and the second from six to fourteen months. These phases can seem to be minimal and last just a few short days, or they can feel like they drag on for months. Try to be confidently assuring yet sensitive to not push your puppy into overwhelming or stressful experiences during this time.