There has been a great deal of controversy of late about the concept of dominance in dog training. As a brief history, the old methods of dog training employed coercion, as in forcing the dog to perform the action required by physically pushing him around. Sometimes this involved negative conditioning, using physical punishments to correct unwanted behavior. The use of check chains or choke chains was pretty prevalent. Nobody thought about motivation, giving the animal a good reason to do what you want, rather than training through fear. As long as the dog learned to "do it", who cared about the psychology or the relationship between owner and dog?
In the bad old days, we communicated with dogs in the same way as English people try to converse with "foreigners" by shouting at them. The theory being that everyone intrinsically understands English as long as you push it home hard enough.
So there was a huge step forward towards the end of the 20th century when dog behaviorism was studied and it was realised that dogs, being descended from wild wolves, behaved in the same way as wolves and understood us if we behaved more like wolves too. So far so good.
It was observed that a couple of wolves, male and female, are the Alphas in the pack. They breed all the puppies in the pack and the rest of the wolves are subservient to them and do their bidding. It's like a benign dictatorship. From this it was extrapolated that some dogs are just natural Alphas and want to rule the home and dictate terms to the owner.
The worst side of this theory is that if a dog exhibits resistance to doing what the owner wants when he is trying to train the dog (translation of resistance: confusion) then he is a dominant dog. He will try to rule the roost, sometimes by violent means, unless the owner disabuses him of this notion and shows him who is really the boss.
The problem with this is that there have been cases where a dog who really needed to be given clearer guidance and training in what was required of him ended up being put to sleep and condemned as a "dominant" animal. This is the dominance theory taken to an extreme in dog training.
In more recent years, further studies have been performed, some of which contradict the theory that the wolf pack is the model for the domesticated dog. They assert that wild dog packs are much more relevant, and they behave rather differently to wolves. Operant conditioning has come into fashion which is all about positive reinforcement, and it has been realised that very few dogs actually want to be the top dog in the pack. They want to be shown firm guidance and are quite happy for you to be the leader of the pack and set the parameters. So it's no longer all about dominance and submission, and hopefully this means less dogs will be written off as unworthy of pet life.
In the bad old days, we communicated with dogs in the same way as English people try to converse with "foreigners" by shouting at them. The theory being that everyone intrinsically understands English as long as you push it home hard enough.
So there was a huge step forward towards the end of the 20th century when dog behaviorism was studied and it was realised that dogs, being descended from wild wolves, behaved in the same way as wolves and understood us if we behaved more like wolves too. So far so good.
It was observed that a couple of wolves, male and female, are the Alphas in the pack. They breed all the puppies in the pack and the rest of the wolves are subservient to them and do their bidding. It's like a benign dictatorship. From this it was extrapolated that some dogs are just natural Alphas and want to rule the home and dictate terms to the owner.
The worst side of this theory is that if a dog exhibits resistance to doing what the owner wants when he is trying to train the dog (translation of resistance: confusion) then he is a dominant dog. He will try to rule the roost, sometimes by violent means, unless the owner disabuses him of this notion and shows him who is really the boss.
The problem with this is that there have been cases where a dog who really needed to be given clearer guidance and training in what was required of him ended up being put to sleep and condemned as a "dominant" animal. This is the dominance theory taken to an extreme in dog training.
In more recent years, further studies have been performed, some of which contradict the theory that the wolf pack is the model for the domesticated dog. They assert that wild dog packs are much more relevant, and they behave rather differently to wolves. Operant conditioning has come into fashion which is all about positive reinforcement, and it has been realised that very few dogs actually want to be the top dog in the pack. They want to be shown firm guidance and are quite happy for you to be the leader of the pack and set the parameters. So it's no longer all about dominance and submission, and hopefully this means less dogs will be written off as unworthy of pet life.
