David Ryan
It is a curious aspect of the scientific process that understanding remains fluid and information is only accepted until it is supplanted by more rigorous, more thoroughly researched, better founded, knowledge. Often the perceived wisdom of the day is no more than a working hypothesis, albeit based on the best interpretation of the information to hand.
Throughout the history of scientific endeavour theories are supplanted by other theories as they are subjected to the scrutiny of peer review. Acting on the most up to date interpretations of companion animal behaviour is extremely important to APBC members because as leaders in the field we bear the responsibility for translating best academic theory into best practice.
One of the most significant changes in attitude in relation to the understanding of canine behaviour is the move away from what has become known as the ‘dominance theory’ of the domestic dog and the punitive training methods that go with it.
In highlighting the move in theory, I make no criticism of the original proponents or followers of it, I was one myself and we were following the best available information at the time, but many leading animal behaviourists are concerned that the dominance model of pet dog behaviour continues to survive, despite the accumulating evidence that it is at best unhelpful and at worst highly detrimental.
The Book of Matthew 13.57 quotes Jesus as saying, ‘A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house’ meaning that it is very often the strictest adherents of a particular mode who fail to see its drawbacks. Perhaps they are too close to it, are too used to living by it, or have vested interests in continuing to advocate it. Perhaps there is an element of cognitive dissonance in abandoning theories upon which you have staked your professional reputation. However, once you understand that theories aren’t forever, critically examining them and changing your mind completely or reinterpreting the facts on which the original theories were based becomes not only inevitable, but actually necessary for advancement. John Maynard Keynes, when challenged on a change of stance, famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ (Malabre, 1995). Everyone should reserve the right to change their mind as they become aware of new facts.
It is an exciting time to be involved with the understanding of domestic dog behaviour, as the late 20th and early 21st century has seen a marked acceleration in the study and application of training and behaviour modification techniques but this means that there is an onus on practitioners to keep up with their professional development or risk being left behind. We should not rely on the remarkable adaptability of the domestic dog to cope with all manner of environments to allow us to continue with a suspect formulaic approach because it works with some dogs; we have a responsibility to develop methods that will work not just for all dogs, but for all people who own, live with and train them too.
In ethology, ‘dominance’ is correctly used to describe unequal relationships between individuals where one is able to secure access to resources such as mating opportunities, food or territory. In a competitive interaction between two individuals one will eventually defer, conferring dominance on the other. Repeated encounters that follow the same pattern establish the terms of the relationship, and very often deferential, appeasing or threat-reducing behaviours develop in order to avoid potentially costly conflict. Having established their relationship it is maintained by the submissive individual continuing to defer. Failure to defer as expected sparks conflict and the dominance relationship breaks down into a competitive one.
Dominance is useful in this context because it allows us to predict the behaviour within the relationship with reasonable accuracy. What is important to emphasise is that dominance is not a quality of an individual, but an emergent product of a relationship. Individuals cannot be dominant unless it is conferred upon them by others.
So, if this concept of dominance within a relationship is useful, why can’t it be applied to relationships between dogs and owners? The answer is that it can, so long as it is applied in the ethological sense as a product of a relationship, not the quality of the dog.
The problem arises when dogs are judged to be dominant when the meaning is that they are trying to secure dominance over their owner, as though dominance itself was the goal. The inference being that either your dog has to be dominated, or it will dominate you; that dogs are programmed to fight to be ‘top dog’ or ‘pack leader’ and you must subjugate them through pinning them to the floor, holding their jaws closed or displacing them from favoured sleeping places and making them watch you eat before they do.
The popularity of the idea amongst dog trainers and owners alike revolves around its simplicity. Dogs are genetically identical to wolves; wolves pack and fight for dominance within that pack; therefore dogs will fight for dominance within their human pack. It’s neat and it’s catchy, it just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It supplanted the previous theory because there wasn’t one beyond, ‘Me human, you dog; me say, you do.’ I liked it at the time I was training police dogs because it gave me a reference point beyond the push-pull-and-shout methods. What I didn’t like was that it often didn’t work. It originated from pulling together a number of sources of information.
• Emerging DNA studies showed that the ancestor of the domestic dog was the wolf – and they still are the same species.
• Studies of dogs showed that their communication by body posture and expression was very similar, if not identical, to that of wolves.
• Observations of captive wolves suggested a pack hierarchy in which the ‘Alpha’ male and female dominated the others.
• This hierarchy was maintained through constant conflict, often bloody, between members of the pack as they fought for resources.
Adding all that together gave us, ‘Dogs behave like wolves and will fight for dominance’. It seemed sensible, but was in fact a huge leap of faith based on misplaced understanding.
Dogs are indeed the same species as wolves, but same species doesn’t mean same behaviour. The (now extinct) aurochs was the ancestor and same species as domestic cattle, but you’d have been seriously ill-advised to try to milk one. Domestication changes not only the appearance, but also the behaviour of animals, as they adapt to fit into a different environmental niche. Nobody doubts the change in appearance from undomesticated wolf to domesticated dog, but recent studies have highlighted that the changes in behaviour are equally apparent once they are examined.
Dogs evolved around 15 to 20,000 years ago and, although the DNA and archaeological evidence is not yet totally clear, it appears that there may have been several domestication events in different locations, some of which subsequently petered out. Their evolution appears to have been supported by access to human waste dumps, a new environmental niche that is a by-product of human settlement in villages and towns. Humans wouldn’t have discouraged them as the proto-dogs would have been a source of nourishment when times were hard. Wolves that were able to remain at the dump longer were able to feed and therefore benefit more, setting up a selection pressure for reduced flight distance. Reduced flight distance, as shown in experiments on silver foxes originally by Dmitri Belyaev and more recently by Lyudmila Trut (1999), brings with it all the attributes of the domestic dog, from coat variation, curly tail, dropped ear carriage, a tendency to bark, smaller brains, shorter faces and biannual seasons through to increased levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which modulates anxiety and impulsiveness. In short, the domestic dog is a neotonic version of the wolf-type ancestor, a specialised variant that retains juvenile characteristics into adulthood, that evolved into a newly formed environmental niche to scavenge the domestic waste of human settlements.
These adaptations removed the need to operate as a true wolf pack and consequently there is little collaboration in hunting or in care of offspring, but much more cooperation with strangers, dog or human. Although, given relevant circumstances, dogs may congregate in groups around resources, they do not form packs in the cohesive family way that wolves still do.
The unit of a wolf pack is the family. The ‘Alpha’ male and female are the breeding pair, or ‘mum and dad’, whilst the rest of the pack usually comprises of their offspring in varying stages of growing up. They act in concert together, cooperatively hunting with each other, or staying behind to look after pups. Proceeds of the hunt are brought back for the baby-sitters and pups, carried in the stomach and regurgitated.
The unit of the domestic dog is one dog: one individual that looks after itself. There is little cooperation in hunting for food, as food is doled out by humans, either dumped as waste or spooned out of a can. There is no universal communal care for the pups, either through baby sitting or from regurgitation by other family members. Very occasionally a male feral dog will pair with a bitch in season and regurgitate for her pups, but the pair-bonds rarely last (Pal, 2011). Indeed, it is an exceptional pup that knows its father, domestic bitches being promiscuous enough to mate with many dogs and males being sexually active throughout the year (as opposed to wolves whose testes and sexual appetite shrink out of season). The genetic benefit has swung from heavy investment by the male wolf in pups he can be fairly sure carry his genes, to little or no investment from the male dog that relies on the weight of numbers of his promiscuous lifestyle to perpetuate his line.
Studies of domestic dogs living as pets show little evidence of linear hierarchies, but rather a more complex interaction between individuals, where each will secure resources depending upon their own preferences. Studies of free-living feral dogs show that where they do form groups they adopt the “family” model of group living where younger dogs defer to older ones (Bonanni and Cafazzo, 2014). Captive wolves were often brought from different families and corralled in an enclosure where they could not avoid each other. Resources were dictated by their human keepers and stress levels were consequently extremely high; inevitably competition and conflict were rife. L. David Mech’s 2008 article Whatever Happened to the Term Alpha Wolf? illustrates that a more rigorous examination of wild living wolves revealed that their social behaviour was built around cohesion and co-operation, not conflict. The model of the wolf’s supposed fight for dominance and alpha status was replaced with one where parents and older siblings guide and lead younger offspring in order to enhance overall genetic fitness.
Recognising that the flawed dominance model arose to fulfil a need – the need to explain why our dogs sometimes come into conflict with us – we cannot supplant it unless we have another workable theory. Fortunately we have.
The domestic dog evolved from wolf behaviour into low level scavenging around human settlements. Whether this was self domestication as a by-product of being in the right place at the right time, artificial selection by humans as a food source or, most likely, a combination of the two, might be an interesting speculation, but still results in the same behaviour. Domestic dogs have plasticity of phenotype (physical appearance) and also of behaviour, a tendency to friendliness towards, or at least tolerance of, strangers, either canine or human, and low levels of hunting behaviour, because these would be selected against in a human environment (the humans would not tolerate them). The basic domestic dog is a relatively innocuous hanger-on for scraps who owns nothing worth defending. We don’t own this type of dog, however, we own pedigree breeds, or at least in the western world we own dogs that are identifiable as being either a breed or a mix of breeds.
A breed is a type of dog that is identifiable as the offspring of two parents who were also the same breed, and breeds happen for a purpose. The behavioural plasticity of the original dogs meant that it was relatively easy in husbandry terms to introduce breed tendencies and we now have dogs for all sorts of purposes: sight hounds, scenting dogs, shepherd dogs, guard dogs, earth dogs and lap dogs. Each of these dogs has needs that are based on the function for which they were originally shaped and it is very often their desire to perform that function that brings them into conflict with us. Place a breed designed to be active in a modern family that thinks two twenty-minute walks a day is good exercise, or place a breed designed to sit on the lap in a family that goes out to work for ten hours each day and something has to give. What we are witnessing in ‘dominant’ dogs is natural behaviour, sometimes competitive in nature, that has been modified through learning. The result is the dog trying to secure something they know is going to have a positive emotional benefit – either to obtain a reward or to avoid something unpleasant. How we deal with those emotions determines our relationship with our dogs.
Like all animals, dog behaviour is often related to their inherent boldness or shyness. In shy individuals behaviour that does not meet owners’ expectations is likely to be tinged with fear and in bold individuals the behaviour is likely to be joyously unrestrained. Most dogs’ behaviour will be a complex mixture of these two extremes. That complexity is increased because our pets no longer continue to live in their original state as peripheral scavengers but have been refined through selective breeding for specific purposes. By enhancing traits present in the original stock, humans have created dogs whose emotional balance depends on being able to fulfil their desire to exhibit these inherited predispositions, at least to some degree. Although the working traits of these types are reduced during ‘pet-ication’ – the breeding of more amenable individuals that are more suited to life as a pet (witness the current ‘pet-ication’ of the Border Collie from a working animal) – the breeding stock continues to throw up specimens in which the original working temperament is strongly represented. This may be a predisposition to chase moving objects, to nip heels, to use aggression to solve conflict, to hold something in the mouth, or any other breed predisposition. The need to perform these behaviours, and their dissatisfaction when they are unable to do so, can steer pet dogs into conflict with their owners.
Family life can also be remarkably inconsistent for a pet, and dogs may focus their efforts on resources that are extremely important to them, but not necessarily to the owner. Lack of consistency proves to the dog that they are capable of deciding the outcome of many, albeit small, interactions. Add in the effects of either a bold or shy character, and other inherited predispositions that need to be satisfied, and you have a dog that can be extremely resistant to their owner’s efforts to control their behaviour.
If the perceived solution is to out-dominate the dog and bend them to your will and involves things like rolling them over and holding them down, shaking them by the scruff and competing with them for access to resources, both dog-welfare and the dog-owner relationship are compromised. In dogs where lack of compliance is motivated by frustration at being unable to fulfil inherited needs, where the motivation is fear, such as when the dog has developed a fear of being left by the owner or fear of the owner themselves because of the mistaken application of inappropriate techniques, applying misguided ideas of dominance will increase that frustration and fear, and with it the probable use of aggression. Less confrontationally, standing in the dog’s bed to show them who is in charge similarly fails to address the underlying emotional issues.
So what can we do with these dogs that have been labelled ‘dominant’? We can regard them as part of the family. Dogs have evolved to live with us, and our basic unit is the family, but as is the case with all family members they need to know what their role is – their position within that family group. All members of our families need to know what the rules and parameters of accepted behaviour are. As parents or guardians it is our responsibility to guide them through that, whilst taking their needs into account. It is no different for dogs – firstly recognise the needs of your own pet and, having taken them into account, work within them to balance their emotions.
The way to do that has already been admirably explained in other sections of this book, so it is unnecessary for me to repeat the benefits of positive reinforcement here, although I would like to highlight my concerns about being labelled a ‘positive trainer’. The term is sometimes pointed at me as an accusation of weak, fluffy liberalness by some and sometimes used by others to demonstrate their caring attitude but both these perceptions display a lack of understanding of learning theory. Life is full of little rewards and little punishments; they happen to us all the time and our dogs are no different. It is possible to reward every action but it is also possible not to reward it. Not supplying an expected reward can be so punishing that it can lead to frustration, anger and aggression. It needs to be used carefully.
Every time we prevent our dog doing something that it wanted to do we inflict a little punishment. Standing still to teach ‘no pulling on the lead’ is a punishment. Painting taste deterrent on the furniture legs so they taste bad is a punishment. Saying ‘No’ when my toast drops on the floor to stop her eating it is a punishment. Sending him out of the room for jumping at visitors is a punishment.
Punishment is not only acceptable in training dogs, it is inevitable but not all types of punishment are equal and each person has to make their own judgment on what they are prepared to inflict. We should, however, draw the line at punishments that might cause the breakdown of a relationship or have welfare concerns for the dog because a relationship based on fear and competition is at odds with the companion dog ethos and the efficiency of our partnership with working dogs and those used for competition.
What we need is a relationship based on mutual rules. No one gets everything they want as and when they want it. No one gets their way every time. Teaching a dog that they can earn rewards, be they treats, the chance for a game or our affection, for doing the things we want, has the consequence that when they do things we don’t want or don’t respond as requested these opportunities are withheld because rewards and punishments go together. Rules are necessary, consistency is vital, steadfastness can be appropriate but brutality is not.
Taking on the role of parent or guardian for our dogs means that we can care for them and help them understand how to fit into our families. Living with our pets is not just about training them to sit when told, although that might be important too, it is about consistently guiding their behaviour through the use of many little interactions throughout each day. Being your dog’s guardian stops the uninhibited ones getting into trouble, helps reduce stress in the anxious ones and caters for all wonderful temperament types in between. Guiding rather than domineering fosters a mutual respect as you both become aware of each other’s needs and work together to fulfil them.