Dog Dominance: When Will We Get Over It?

Dog behaviorists and advocates have been trying to send a message for a few decades. Simple and straightforward as it is, the message nonetheless hasn’t quite been received, thanks to decades of entrenched misconceptions and one or two celebrity trainers sending an entirely different message.

But here’s what behaviorists and dog advocates want you to know:

Your dog is not vying for dominance. He is not plotting world domination. And your training efforts do not need to “put him in his place” or “show him you’re the Alpha” in your relationship.

It’s a perennial topic of coverage here at Spot, and for good reason. Misconceptions about dominance are so common and deeply held that they stubbornly refuse to yield to the insights of modern behavioral science. So we’ll keep talking and hope the world will listen. It’s long past time that we adopt a view of dominance that’s more humane, accurate, and behaviorally sound.

Make no mistake: this myth is harmful. It might even be harming your own dog, not to mention your opportunity to form a trusting, companionable bond with him.

We wrote a two-part feature in 2012, highlighting this misunderstanding of “dominance” or the so-called alpha dog concept. Part one talked with local behaviorists and trainers about their work to teach clients more humane ways of interacting with their dogs. These experts noted that they sometimes do this even while clients are using old-school dominance-focused language. These ideas are so ingrained that many behaviorists have stopped trying to counter them and instead just get to work on teaching the practical skills people need to interact with their dogs.

Part two introduced you to the weary scientist who first published the book that put much of this flawed theory out into the world. Since that book was published in the 1970s, much has changed in behavioral science, but the general public’s understanding has failed to keep pace.

Well into retirement, he’s still trying to squash this flawed idea that can’t seem to die. As Dr. L. David Mech points out, our current, pervasive, and highly flawed view of the “alpha” dog sprang from a tragically flawed and inhumane study of wolves. The decades-old experiment placed unrelated wild wolves into a captive environment to study how they behaved. The wolves fought, and researchers reported the behavior as if it represented normal wolf behavior. Better science has since proved that the wolves fought from the unnatural stress of their captive situation, and that in the wild they avoid fighting whenever possible.

Dr. Mech says the term “alpha” that still floats around — especially in popular culture — is not a useful term. In a wild wolf family, the most senior wolves are the ones who mate to produce offspring, which maintains their privileged place in the pack because a significant number of their pack members are their children and grandchildren. So the “dominant” wolf is more accurately called the “mating” wolf or even the “mother and father” wolf, Mech says.

Lovers, Not Fighters

Dr. Clive Wynne, who runs a well-known canine cognition laboratory, is among the field of scientists and advocates calling on humans to adopt a kinder, more collaborative relationship with dogs.

Spot interviewed him on the release of his new book, aptly titled Dog is Love. In the pages of his book — which manages to balance scientific reporting with heartwarming insight into everyday human-dog interactions — he calls on humans to adopt a more companionable relationship with dogs.

This scientist — like others whose careers are devoted to studying dogs — is convinced that dogs are driven by a unique ability to form close emotional bonds with members of other species, and most especially with humans. This bond, he says, constitutes something scientists rarely dare to mention in scientific literature: love.

In their hesitancy to use the L-word, scientists have created convoluted, multi-syllabic terms like hypersociability. Wynne says these extra syllables tell us nothing that a simple forbidden four-letter word can’t convey. In professional circles, he’s broken the ice by starting to use the word in his work. “I remember the first time I used the word love at a scientific conference in Denver at a behaviorist meeting. A number of people commented after that they could tell I was nervous.” But far from shunning or dismissing him for breaking the L-word taboo, colleagues were pleased. “Actually a number of people congratulated me.”

Wynne, who says he’d like to lead a revolution in the way we relate to dogs, would start first with addressing the isolation so many dogs experience. Either closed in backyards or left in a quiet house all day while humans work, these highly social beings are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness. And his second priority would be to correct the popular misconceptions about dominance.

“There’s a massive, massive misunderstanding of the concept of dominance. They think dominance means imposing your will on others by force. In behavioral biology the term would be much better defined as compassionate leadership.”

Driven by this flawed understanding, too many people relate to their dogs in ways that are foolish at best and abusive at worst. “We have all of these problems in dog training where people are bringing violence into their dog’s life, or even absurd ideas like you should be eating before your dog or going through a door before your dog.”

Humans need not worry about whether they have the upper hand in their relationship with their canine companions. “Dogs clearly are sensitive to social rank and all the evidence suggests that dogs recognize people as being of higher social rank, which makes sense because we control access to food and the outdoors and toilet breaks. But that doesn’t imply anything about violence. It just implies that dogs look to us for leadership.”

Wynne’s voice is but one in a chorus of experts calling us out for our flawed understanding of dogs. In her latest book, author and canine cognition researcher Alexandra Horowitz urges humans to begin to “see dogs anew.”

In our generally happy and companionable relationship with dogs, we cling to a maddening array of contradictions, myths, and outright failures in logic. In our own homes, we often interact with dogs as though they are semi-human family members. Yet our laws grant them scarcely more importance than furniture; dogs are considered property, which humans are free to acquire, keep, sell, or dispose of with very few legal restraints outside of laws that bar extreme or intentional cruelty.

In truth, dogs are neither property nor pseudo-humans. They are animals, with animal desires and instincts and drives, and with a highly social nature that predisposes them to fall head-over-heels in love with their human companions. And these domestic animals — like their wild wolf cousins — want harmony in their family groups. Given a chance, they will establish that harmony through give-and-take social interactions, and not by force or violent domination.

As helpful as behavioral science can be, leading behavioral scientists like Wynne and Horowitz are quick to point out that we could gather all the data we need in our own homes. Dogs are communicating with us, Horowitz points out. It’s our job to learn to listen.

“Does your dog love you?” Horowitz writes. “Watch them, and you tell me.”