Does unwanted behavior = bad behavior??

Here are some more thoughts from Mark Rashid's book, "Whole Heart, Whole Horse."

"A lot of folks look at unwanted behavior what a horse offers on the first day as bad behavior. But if we understand that horses can't separate the way they feel from the way they act, then we can start to see that unwanted behavior isn't bad behavior at all. More times than not, it's just the horse expressing the way he feels at that particular moment in time. He's just giving us information, that's all. How we perceive that information dictates how we respond to it. Most of the time we perceive the behavior as being bad, so respond to it badly. If we see it as the horse just trying to tell us something, then it's just a matter of distinguishing the importance of what he's saying. It is a matter of importance. The one thing that the horse wanted to do was the single most important thing in his life at that given time. Not being able to do it and, in fact, not having ever been able to do it, can cause the house so much stress that he can't function."

I think that what I need to do, maybe all of us at some point in time, need to sit back and just realize that there is something causing this particular behavior that our dogs are offering. That they aren't trying to be bad.

Another quote:
"I have been witness to an interesting phenomenon over the years when it comes to how a lot of folks perceive different kinds of horse behavior. In short, people seem to lump most behavior into three categories: good behavior (the kind of behavior we), bad behavior (the kind we don't like), and worrisome behavior (the kind that causes us to worry but we don't do anything about).
Now the interesting thing is while some folks, perhaps unconsciously, compartmentalize these behaviors as separate things and thus respond to them differently, to me they are actually all one thing. Put simply, all these behaviors are nothing more or less than information the horse is offering. A horse that offers us "good" behavior is simply telling us he's okay with what's going on at that particular moment in his life. A horse that's offering up "bad" behavior is telling us there's a problem, sometimes a major one that needs to be addressed. A horse that is offering up "worrisome" behavior is telling us he doesn't understand something and is struggling with it.
We humans have a tendency to take advantage of good behavior; in other words, we don't give the good things horses do much thought because it's what we expect. Conversely, we have a tendency to look at "bad" behavior in a relatively adversarial way, primarily because "bad" behavior scares us, we we often deal with it in a defensive manner and without really giving much thought to the cause. When it comes to "worrisome" behavior, we have a tendency to completely over-think it, which often causes us to become ineffective in dealing with it in the first place."

An interesting concept, to not label things that animals do as a behavior, but as a response to something.

Quote:
"If this is the case, then any behavior a horse offers, good, bad or indifferent, falls under one category: the horse supplying information about how he feels. So if we can replace the word "behavior" with the word "information," then we're talking about the horse offering good information, bad information, or indifferent information."

I strive to take what the dogs are doing and why they are doing it as information and not so much a good or bad behavior. It is difficult at times as it is so easy to fall back into thinking that that this is a behavior. I will continue to strive to think of things as information that my dog is giving me.