YNP #091: Listener Questions
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
4.8 • 917 Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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 91 of your new puppies podcast. I'm Debbie and today I'm going to |
| 0:35.8 | answer some of your questions. So these are questions that I get through email or |
| 0:42.3 | on social media through a comment or direct message and I can't get to all the |
| 0:48.5 | questions that are sent to me in fact I can't get to most of them, but when I see a question being asked more than once, I'll probably make |
| 0:58.6 | a podcast episode about it. But there are some questions that might not warrant an entire podcast episode, but I do see them more than once. |
| 1:07.0 | So that is what I'm going to do today. |
| 1:10.0 | Those are the questions I'm going to answer here. I have five of them, and I'm just going to do some rapid-fire answering. |
| 1:17.4 | Okay? |
| 1:18.4 | So the first question is, |
| 1:21.5 | Hi Debbie, my puppy no longer likes his crate overnight. |
| 1:26.8 | He's nine months old and has hadn't had a problem with this crate |
| 1:31.0 | for months. Now this is great for months. |
| 1:32.7 | Now this is actually very common. |
| 1:35.1 | Nine months doesn't surprise me. |
| 1:36.6 | Five months would not have surprised me either. |
| 1:40.2 | And this is something that sometimes I have people |
| 1:42.4 | wanting to make a session with me, like a virtual session with me to talk about it. |
| 1:47.0 | And usually we're able to solve it just through a quick email instead of doing a whole session because what's |
| 1:54.6 | usually happening especially if the puppy has not had a problem with the husband |
| 1:58.8 | sleeping through the night for months then there was probably one night a little bit ago, maybe a week or so ago, that your puppy |
| 2:08.0 | did whine. And you got up to check on them, of course, because this was not normal. You should. You should go check on them because it's not a normal behavior. It hasn't happened in months. And maybe they were sick. Maybe for some reason that night they had to go out to the bathroom. |
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