YNP #087: Is Your Dog Trying to Dominate You?

Your New Puppy: Dog Training and Dog Behavior Lessons to Help You Turn Your New Puppy into a Well-Behaved Dog

Debbie Cilento: Dog Trainer | Dog Behavior Consultant | Owner of Playtime Paws | Belly Rub Specialist

Kids & Family, How To, Pets & Animals, Education

4.8 • 917 Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2023

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Is your dog trying to dominate you? The short answer is no, they are not.

And though that might not come as a surprise to you, what isn’t always clear is why it’s not true.

Especially because this theory that dogs want to dominate us or some dogs are more “dominate” than others still comes up a lot in dog training.

That’s why I want to talk about where this dominance and alpha theory came from, how it’s been debunked, and why it still persists even though we now know better.

I believe this information is important because helps us better understand our dog and how they see the world so we can better communicate with them and teach them how we want them to behave in our human world.

As always, the resources I talk about in this episode are listed all below.

In this episode I talk about:

Where the dominance and alpha theory came from.
How we now know that there’s no such thing as an “alpha” dog in a natural wolf pack.
Why dominance and alpha theory is still (incorrectly) used.
What is actually happening when we think we see a “dominate” or “submissive” dog.
Why I think it’s so important to understand the difference.

Press play and enjoy!

Other resources mentioned and related to this episode:

International Wolf Center: An article by the organization that conducted the ordinal study on why they no longer use the term “alpha”.

Dave Mech (pronounced “meesh”): An article and video by the scientist that wrote the book that made the “alpha” theory popular on why it’s no longer accurate.

YNP #038: The One Thing You Need to Know About Dog Behavior.

YNP #040: How to be Your Dog’s Pack Leader

Playtime Paws Academy: A membership for dog and humans no matter where you are in your training journey.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to your new puppies podcast. Starting you and your dog off on the right paw. Here's your
0:16.8	host Debbie Salento. Hello and welcome to episode 87 of your new puppies podcast. I'm Debbie and today I'm going to answer
0:36.0	the question is your dog trying to dominate you? The short answer is no they are not but that can be a little confusing because the
0:45.7	idea that your dog's trying to dominate you is very ingrained into like the dog
0:50.0	training world so originally this idea that your dog is trying to dominate you
0:56.0	comes from the idea that in the wild there's in a wolf pack there's an alpha dog and they fight for that position the dogs
1:05.3	naturally want to be there so they try to dominate the other dogs and they win
1:10.5	that position through physical feeds through being confident etc.
1:16.8	Now this idea that there's an alpha dog has been debunked.
1:21.2	It is not true. So what I'm going to go into today is where this theory
1:25.7	original came from, how it was debunked, and why I believe it still persists despite all of that.
1:35.0	So I am going to reference a bunch of sources,
1:37.2	and as always I'll put all the links in the show notes.
1:41.0	It's a bunch of websites to different resources, different societies.
1:45.8	You'll, I'll talk about exactly what they are as we go through. So this whole
1:50.4	Alpha Dog theory was a study that was done back in the 60s by the International Wolf Center.
1:59.1	Now that same organization, which is Wolf.org.
2:04.0	Again, that's one of the resources I'll link to.
2:07.0	They don't even use the word alpha anymore because it's very misleading.
2:12.0	Now, this study back in the 60s... anymore because it's very misleading.
2:12.7	Now this study back in the 60s we have since learned that it was flawed.
2:17.5	It was done on captive wolves which act very differently than wolves in the wild.
	...

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