Is it dominance, or....?

Is your dog just socially incompetent?

Putting the big question to rest – is dominance real?

Historically, compulsion trainers like the Monks of New Skete, Konrad Most, etc, would justify their harsh methodology on their understanding of dog social behaviour. On hierarchy and dominance.

To them, using corrections was natural. It was what dogs did, and it was therefore the most natural and effective training method – even if it was hard to watch sometimes. To some, the more the correction mimicked what dogs did to each other, the more effective they were.

This was why some recommended that owners flip and pin their dogs down (the famous ‘alpha roll’), or that warnings be growled in a low and menacing voice.

However, throughout the twentieth century, though hierarchical methods were all the rage, actual methods and techniques for asserting dominance varied widely. Some took a very proactive – yet hands-off – approach involving the control of resources and an emphasis on long-downs. Others were very reactive, like the Monks of New Skete, who routinely jumped to harsh, confrontational techniques mostly when the dog displayed behaviour they interpreted as rank-seeking.

As techniques varied, so too did each trainer’s interpretation of behaviour. I cannot understate this: EVERY behaviour that a dog has ever displayed was, at one point, labelled as ‘dominant’. If they had separation anxiety, they were trying to control their owners. If they snatched or stole food, they were trying to control resources. If they walked ahead of the owner, they were trying to lead the pack. If they growled during play, didn’t let go of toys, wanted to snuggle on the couch or solicit attention: dominance, dominance, dominance.

It would be funny if this reasoning didn’t lead to such suffering.

As the twentieth century drew to an end, so too did training methods soften. This was, in large part, due to little known trainers like the Pearsalls, who pioneered puppy training classes for AKC dog clubs. However, though the compulsion was not as extreme, it was still compulsion. Only when the ‘positive’ spin on training took hold – thanks to Dunbar, Pryor and Donaldson – did compulsion start featuring less and less in everyday dog training.

Yet still, there was a split in the positive camp that can be reduced to one single difference of opinion: the relevance of hierarchy.

Trainers like Ian Dunbar refuted its relevance. But not its existence. Other positive trainers, however, would espouse the wonders of rewards-based methods with one exception: handler-directed aggression. Then, no matter how wonderfully positive they were, they would recommend very confrontational battles to try to subvert any future attempts at domination. Dogs were pinned down and growled at, sometimes even yelled at. They were hit, choked, chased and intimidated.

And it was this foundation from which balanced training was born. The idea that compulsion was sometimes necessary – often for the more ‘dominant’ dogs and breeds – though rewards were still a major feature in training. And here is where the question, is dominance real? comes from.

Those balanced trainers created a strawman out of thin air. They claimed that popular positive trainers (the antiquated term for today’s ‘force free’ camp) believed that dominance didn’t exist.

“Ha!” They cried. “Straight from the horse’s mouth, do you see! This silly scientist claims that dominance has been debunked! What madness!” They wrote blog posts and strung together videos of dogs fighting for breeding rights as evidence that dominance does, in fact, exist. And thus, compulsion is a necessary part of dog training. Mostly to solve rank aggression or – again – any of the long list of random behaviours that trainers believed was caused by the dog’s desire to dominate their family or other dogs.

This is an annoyingly persistent argument that is still common today in all factions and varieties.

We have positive trainers looking at those that use compulsion and saying, “Why do you do this when you know dominance theory isn’t true?”

Those trainers using compulsion shake their head in confusion. “I use compulsion, yes. But I don’t do so because of ideas relating to dominance.”

Then you have really old school trainers – nearly always men – that get on social media with a pack of rottweilers or some other ‘manly’ breed and say, “Come on positive trainers, prove to me that you can handle such dogs without being pack leader! Show me that dominance doesn’t exist as you say!”

It’s all just very frustrating to those who know the history. In order to have any degree of a productive discussion, you first need to wade through a pit of misunderstanding and nonsense.

How can dominance be both real AND irrelevant?

To start, we must fully understand where ‘dominance-theory’ or ‘alpha-theory’ came from. I’m sure you’ve probably heard of David Mech and his predecessor, Rudolph Schenkel. In case you haven’t, both were wolf researchers. Schenkel worked with captive wolves and was responsible for the creation of ‘alpha-theory’ which is the idea that wolf pack structure involves a strict linear hierarchy that is created and maintained through a great deal of vicious fighting. David Mech, like many wolf researchers, perpetuated this idea until he worked directly with wild wolf populations. It was there that he discovered Schenkel’s alpha theory to be totally inaccurate. Specifically, he saw that wild wolf packs were family units and that the ‘alpha pair’ were the parents to the rest of the pack. True aggression and fighting were rare amongst a family unit, and when it did occur it was highly ritualised to avoid injury. He believed that Schenkel’s research was flawed because the wolves in his study were unrelated and kept in very small, unnatural conditions.

Mech then went on to recant his earlier findings and has worked diligently over the course of nearly 30 years to set the record straight. It was nevertheless slow progress, and popular culture hasn’t really caught on.

I can’t say that dog trainers ever really cared too much about wolf social behaviour until these studies started coming out. In fact, for a long time, dogs and wolves were thought to be completely unrelated. It’s worth noting that the idea of a hierarchy between a man and his dog – and between dogs - was always there. Schenkel didn’t invent anything, his research just made justifying harsh, confrontational methods much easier in a slowly softening society.

Looking back even into the nineteenth century, you’ll find plenty of reference to the superiority of man over all beasts. For those that subscribed to the church’s view of the world, God created dogs for man to use and thus there was an automatic hierarchy there. Even those embracing Darwinism saw a hierarchy amongst animals with humans at the top as the most evolved. The term ‘master’ was regularly used in place of today’s ‘owner’ or, more progressively, ‘guardian’.

Early explorers (particularly those that visited the arctic regions) observed social hierarchies amongst domesticated and feral dogs in a very unofficial, subjective manner. So, these hierarchies were not even solely man -> dog, but also dog –> dog.

As the training industry grew (particularly after the second world war), trainers began asking questions. They asked it of each other, even pet dog owners started getting curious about why their dog behaved the way that they did. In a time where research into dog behaviour wasn’t a thing*, all they had was, 1) a new understanding that dogs and wolves are related, and 2) a growing body of research into wolf behaviour. So, of course, where did they look for the answers to their questions?

Many famous trainers, like the Monks of New Skete, didn’t just look at wolf social behaviour as a loose framework to base their relationship. They thought that wolf behaviour and dog behaviour were identical.

Not only did ‘dominance’ and a desire for rank and status make sense as a way to account for any manner of behaviour, it also fit into the simple hammer-and-nail approach to training that was common in those days.

“Ah, the dog tried to bite me, I will correct it even harder.”

“The dog is pulling because he is trying to show you who is boss, punish it some more.”

“The dog is guarding his bone because he doesn’t see you as his alpha, you must assert your leadership through –” you guessed it “correcting him.”

The alpha theory fit very nicely into the existing, extremely uncomplicated, training systems of the day. An age where when all you had was a hammer, everything must be a nail.

But the entire thing was flawed for two reasons:

1.      Wolves don’t form the social relations that Schenkel thought, there are no ‘alpha’ wolves. And,

2.      Dogs and wolves, though related, have two completely different social structures that are largely incomparable.

So, if the dominance theory has been debunked, but dominance has not, why isn’t it relevant in modern training systems? I mean, clearly it worked. That’s why some of these training systems persist even today. It’s why the Dog Whisperer was such a big deal and had such a following. Make it make sense!

It comes down to semantics…

But those semantics are actually really important.

Firstly, dominance (and inversely, submission) are outcomes. They are not motivators. When two dogs meet and compete for a resource, and one inevitably comes out on top, that dog is dominant, but was dominance the dog’s goal? Or was the dog’s goal to attain or retain the resource?

Let’s look at a similar example. If you walk up to your dog while he has a bone, he growls at you and you leave him alone, he IS dominant. By all definitions, the outcome for the interaction was an obvious hierarchy. If we looked at this through the lens of Konrad Most or Cesar Milan or the Monks, the treatment for such transgressions are swift, severe and… also likely to cause more problems. Why? Because the dog’s motivation was not some arbitrary rank, but to keep his bone safe from being stolen. Again, the OUTCOME was dominance, but the MOTIVATION was to keep the resource safe.

Looking at that same example from the lens of someone that has a good understanding of learning theory, we can make some pretty obvious assumptions:

1.      The dog’s behaviour is a manifestation of his emotional state, and that emotional state is likely negative. He is worried that you are a threat. The emotion of worry motivates him to warn you away.

2.      If we walk away and leave him to it, we might have settled that emotion – he learns he need not fear your proximity. However, he also learns that growling and aggression works to keep you from his things. Thus, his behaviour is at risk of being reinforced and can get worse.

3.      If we aggress, like Cesar Milan did in the famous video of Holly the lab, we risk confirming the driving force behind the behaviour. We confirm that the dog’s fear is justified, you ARE a threat! Now, one of two things happen from here,

a)      The dog increases his aggression in the moment, or he escalates in later situations where you approach his resource. Again, this is exactly what Holly did. She associated Cesar’s proximity with an increase in concern (specifically his outreached hand which he’d used to hit her previously) and thus increased her aggression.

b)     The dog decides that he is MORE afraid of what you’d do to him, than he is of losing the resource itself. Success! We’ve effectively inhibited his aggression by scaring the shit out of him.

Needless to say, using highly confrontational methods are considered very risky! Even trainers that use compulsion (like I do), would not use aversives in the manner that was common in the 70s and still, apparently, in use by some trainers today.

But this is a riddle, isn’t it? If we can’t walk away without risking reinforcing the behaviour, and we can’t punish the dog without risk of reinforcing the fear, then what can we do?

We identify the motivator. If the dog is worried by your proximity, then we simply need to show them that our presence means nothing but good things occur. “Yes, dog, you have a bone. I see that. Well, look here, I have a handful of roast chicken. Here you go, no trade needed, you keep that bone too. Bye!” After some repetition, the dog is likely to then view your proximity as a profoundly good thing. We have successfully ridded him of fear, and thus the resulting aggression.**

We see the effects of these semantics in all spheres, and it continues to be both highly relevant and highly misunderstood. Stallions that fight aren’t ‘trying to be dominant’, they are trying to keep win or to keep mares to breed with. The goal is NOT dominance, it is the outcome. Dogs that fight over a female in heat are not vying for leadership, but for the right to mate. Leadership, dominance, status, whatever – it does occur, yes. But it is not the reason behind the dog’s behaviour.

So, you see, dominance can be both very real, and very irrelevant.

But, what about…

Most of the time when I work with owners that are complaining about their ‘dominant’ dog’s behaviour, it has nothing to do with the technically correct definition of dominance. There is no resource to be won, there is only aggression.

Dogs that posture and fight with others. Dogs that snap at their owners or rebel when they’re being forced to do something they don’t want to do. Owners of apparently ‘dominant’ breeds like Rottweilers and German Shepherd Dogs claiming that ‘positive training can’t work’. You get the idea. Does ‘rank-aggression’ or ‘dominance-aggression’ exist in this sphere at all?

To say yes, I’d have to concede that dominance itself is a motivation for behaviour irrespective of the presence of resources. This is simply not the case, however I can determine a lot by the description and I’m not such an idiot as to disregard the observations of these owners.

People that describe their dogs as ‘dominant’ are usually just revealing that their dog is a socially incompetent bully. They (the dog) enjoy telling other dogs off, starting fights, annoying them, controlling them. And, yes, certain breeds that are often called ‘dominant’ are much more prone to this than others. But, again, is it dominance, or is it a century of selective breeding to increase aggression all while decreasing sociability? Is it dominance or is it a lack of – or too much – socialization that has resulted in an inability to read and respond to another dog’s cues? Is it ‘dominance’ or a lack of trust between dog and owner? Is it ‘dominance’ or have you failed to lay the correct foundation in training?

This is all to say that the label of ‘dominance’ might mean something in layman’s terms, but it is still pretty useless beyond gaining a baseline understanding of the dog’s behaviour.

And finally; if you use compulsion but you don’t do so because of the need to be a dog’s ‘alpha’, then why do you do it?

The choice to use aversives and compulsion comes down to motivation, ironically. It is the thing that bridges the gap between the dog’s motivation for what you have and their interest in the environment. It used solely to increase a dog’s responsiveness in the face of distractions. It has nothing to do with being a master, or an alpha or leader.

Technically, if you pay the bills and feed the dog, you’re already there.

*While dogs had been studied, right up until very recently their behaviour was not studied for the sake of learning about dogs, but for the sake of better understanding human behaviour.

**This is a pretty big oversimplification of the training process.