VINEGAR The idea behind dominance training is that dogs will show submission to anyone they perceive as a pack leader, an instinct they’ve supposedly inherited from wolves. But according to David Mech—the world’s leading expert on wolves—there are no pack leaders in wild packs. And dominant and submissive behaviors are extremely rare.*
The old, outdated studies that gave us the myth of the pack leader were done on captive wolves taken from various packs who didn’t know one another and weren’t able to hunt together. So their aggressive behaviors didn’t reflect a wolf’s true instincts for social harmony and group cooperation while hunting.
But even if dogs had pack leaders there’s no way they could confuse a human being for another dog. Dogs move through space on a horizontal axis; their eyes face each other directly. We’re vertical, and our eyes are far above theirs. The spatial relationship is closer to that of an elk staring down a wolf, menacing him with his antlers. So if anything, dogs would see dominance trainers as potentially lethal prey animals, but definitely not as pack leaders.
There may be some merit to using dominance techniques in certain rare situations, but they don’t work for the reasons their proponents think they do.
*(Mech, L. David, Canadian Journal of Zoology 1999, 2002.)
HONEY
In recent years there’s been an explosion of trainers who base their
methods on the work of B.F. Skinner, who locked rats and pigeons inside
boxes in a research lab, and waited to see if they’d learn to press or
peck a lever in order to obtain a food reward. These behaviors were
then tied to a visual cue like a flashing light, which is said to be
similar to giving your dog a verbal cue during obedience training. Skinner called this operant conditioning and claimed it was the basis for all learning in all animals.
But things tend to work differently in real life than they do in a lab. For instance, Keller Breland—who worked with Skinner and later invented clicker training—once
taught a group of animals who were kept in a barn to
push a button in order to obtain their daily meals. The
animals learned this behavior very quickly, but after a few days something odd happened: they began
producing their own food-related behaviors instead: The chickens
preferred pecking the floor to pecking the button, the raccoons chose
to simply “wash their hands,” and the study on pigs had to be stopped
or they would’ve kept rooting in the dirt and starved to death!
Breland wrote: “There are definite weaknesses in the philosophy underlying these techniques.”*
So while conditioning does work, there are also times when an animal’s natural way of doing things will simply take over.
*(Keller and Marian Breland, American Psychologist, 1961.)
NATURE’S WAY The
latest breakthrough in dog training is the natural method, which states
that a dog’s hunting instinct—or prey drive—is the real key to
obedience. It’s what makes dogs and wolves social and willing to cooperate. And while some owners may think their dogs don’t have a prey
drive, it’s always there in one form or another.
Why is the prey drive so important? Because it's nature’s mechanism for releasing tension. Wolves hunt large, dangerous prey like moose and elk, animals that could easily kill or maim an individual member of the pack. So a wolf’s desire to hunt (his prey drive) is offset by his desire to stay alive (his survival instinct). Tension builds between these opposing forces like water pressure building up behind a beaver dam. Finally it reaches a point where the wolf has to release that tension in some way, so he finally leaves the safety of his den and, with his pack mates, he faces the danger of the hunt.
When energy builds it has to flow somewhere. And if you think about it, everything in nature has to act in accordance with the laws of energy. When tectonic plates, for example, are under too much pressure, there’s an earthquake. When a lark is filled with sexual energy, he sings his mating call. When bio-electrical energy builds inside a cell, it divides in two. All things in nature exhibit tension and release. And it’s also the key to dog training.
Of course dogs have the capacity to learn complex new behaviors. But the principle still applies. When a dog is energized he’ll jump up on you when you come home, or bring you a toy when he wants to play, or bark if he hears strange noises, etc. But on the most basic level all canine behavior is still about one thing—releasing energy.
ENERGY This idea of seeing behavior as energy is at once so unusual and yet so right that it’s bound to revolutionize not only the dog training community but our entire understanding of animal psychology.
Why would captive wolves exhibit behaviors that don’t exist in nature? Because they weren’t able to release aggression naturally by hunting. Why would pigs go hungry when dinner was waiting at the push of a button? Because when pigs need to eat, their instincts tell them to release tension by rooting, not by pushing buttons. Even the lever that Skinner’s rats pressed did more than release a food pellet, it also released some of their internal tension and stress.
It works like this: a stimulus is anything that increases the energy in a dog’s system. He experiences this as a physical sensation of tension or pressure. If he has no outlet for that feeling, the unresolved energy is stored as stress. If a dog’s response reduces his tension or stress, he feels better and that behavior becomes learned. So training isn’t about external punishments or rewards, per se. The real reinforcement is the pleasurable changes that take place in the dog’s internal energy state.
This explains why Natural Dog Training always works where other methods fail—it’s specifically designed to utilize a dog’s energy during the training process. And when you play our innovative training games with your dog, a truly extraordinary thing happens: he automatically starts to behave properly! That’s because play reduces stress, making it nature’s true mechanism for learning and for solving behavioral problems. In fact, many scientists are now calling it a force of nature.*
We just call it Natural Dog Training.
*(Jaak Panksepp, Oxford University Press, 2002.)
