I just read a great article about “De-Bunking the ‘Alpha Dog’ Theory” on one of my favorite sites, Whole Dog Journal. The point of the article was to explain how the notion of the “alpha dog” came about from observations of wolves in captivity and then applied syllogistically to dog behavior and, thus, dog training. The author, Pat Miller, sketches the growth of the use of Social Dominance Theory and operant conditioning in training dogs from William Koehler to the Monks of New Skete toCesar Millan. She first points out that trying to emulate dog behavior in the interest of gaining dominance over a dog is wrong-headed, and she caps off her comments with one of my all-time favorite quotations about oversimplifying our notions of dogs and their behavior:
Finally, the very presumption that our dogs would even consider we [sic] humans to be members of their canine pack is simply ludicrous. They know how impossibly inept we are, for the most part, at reading and understanding the subtleties of canine body language. We are equally inept, if not even more so, at trying to mimic those subtleties. Any attempts on our part to somehow insert ourselves into their social structure and communicate meaningfully with them in this manner are simply doomed to failure. It’s about time we gave up trying to be dogs in a dog pack and accepted that we are humans co-existing with another species – and that we’re most successful doing so when we co-exist peacefully.
She then goes on to advocate systems of positive reinforcement and gives some nice examples of her point. All in all, it’s a very thoughtful article, and I highly recommend reading it. I also recommend reading the comments below it. Some of them are affirming, and some are dismissive and even antagonistic. The discussion demonstrates quickly that dog owners are prone to making one or another of errors – either to overestimate their ability to understand and behave as a dog or to overestimate the ability of a dog to behave as a human. Love your pet. Really love your pet. But don’t believe too much of your own ability or the dog’s. It isn’t fair.
