I often hear people referring to groups of dogs as being in their pack. I often hear people stating that they need to show their dog that they are top dog, or the boss. People may think that their dog recognises one family member rather than another as being in charge. Or that the dog is trying to dominate one of their children as they see themselves as being of a higher rank.
Where has this come from and what is the actual science behind this? Is this the case or have we all go the wrong end of the stick?
I think it is important to recognise that dogs learn by association and consequence. So, it is much more likely that dogs perceive us as individuals that respond to certain behaviours in different ways and this can drive the behaviour.
At extremes our behavioural responses to their behaviour could be either punishing for the dog or reinforcing. If the consequence is found to be reinforcing the dog will repeat the behaviour, if punishing then the chances are that the dog wont.
But it depends.
It depends on the function of the behaviour and what the dog was trying to change about his or her environment. It has to be understood in context and from the dog’s perception of the world at that point in time. Not only this but certain behaviours may be internally rewarding and so not necessarily entirely dependent on something external being given to the animal as a reward or acting as a reinforcer.
It is important that we view the dog as an individual, with a whole range of variables surrounding his or her existence, without making assumptions relating to breed or the various labels, we humans rely on to bring order to our world. Behaviour can be affected by genetics but perhaps more importantly by learning history and environment.
So, from our human point of view, we might think that saying no to the dog should be punishing and stop the behaviour happening again. The dog knows that he shouldn’t have done that. The dog looks guilty. But does he?
Often the word no actually means very little to the dog and the behaviour happens again.
The tone and the sound of us saying no, can be punishing, it can be scary for the dog, and we can see this in the body language of the dog in the photo.
This boxer is displaying the whites of his eyes and flat ears. This is potentially a confused and uncertain dog. Not necessarily a guilty dog that knows he has done wrong.
At the end of the day, “no” is a noise. It holds very little meaning in terms of giving the dog constructive advice. As far as the dog is concerned their behaviour was perfectly acceptable in terms of what they were trying to achieve. That roast chicken was just waiting for them it would be rude not to. Was the dog behaving very badly, or was the dog responding naturally to the environment.
For the dog it’s the consequence, what happens after the behaviour, and the function of their actions, the why they did the behaviour, what the behaviour achieved for them, that means something to them.
In some cases the No might be the attention the dog was looking for.
Also, we know that practice makes permanent. At the point we say “no”, the dog has already performed the behaviour we don’t want…… again.
It is much better to find something else for the dog to do instead. Pre-empting behaviours is so much more beneficial than being reactive to them. What can our pooch do instead to achieve the same results but in a way that we find more acceptable and that is healthier for them? Or we can use management. Prevention is better than cure. Chicken on the work surface. Dog behind a barrier in another room.
Make a good list of all the things that your dog is doing that you would rather they didn’t and make a list of what they could do instead.
A few years ago, I was lucky enough to meet BF Skinners daughter at Chirag Patel’s Woof! Conference. I asked her a question on behaviour… what an amazing opportunity… I asked her about my son…………. He was much younger at the time and had an annoying habit of continually nagging me for sweets, over and over again. I asked her what I should do and she said…. Go home and hand him some sweets, before he has to ask you.
Errrrrr really!!! But then I realised why! What genius.
By giving him sweets before he asked, I would be making the behaviour of him nagging me incessantly, unnecessary, so less practiced, until eventually extinct. I could then gradually slow down the rate of me having to offer sweets and gradually decrease the number of sweets, perhaps swap the sweets for something healthier and then…. Stop altogether.. .
But I have digressed massively, let’s start by looking at what a pack animal actually is.
It is my standpoint that for training purposes, a dog is not a pack animal and the term pack has been incorrectly interpreted and used by many trainers setting a trend for techniques that are not based on true science and very often linked to justifying punishment as a technique, pushing fear and giving us the impression that we must be top dog and dominate our animals before they get the upper hand particularly over our smaller or younger children. If this really was the case, we would have stopped inviting them to share our lives a long time ago surely. Or they would be making all our decisions for us by now.
So what exactly is a pack?
Well, a pack is a social group of 5 – 10 conspecific canines. Examples include African wild dogs which live and hunt in packs. The males assist in raising the young and remain with their pack all their lives.
The females, leave their birth pack at two years of age to join a pack with no females and become the only breeding female in that pack. These dogs are not territorial, and hunt large game cooperatively. They share in the care of the sick and wounded and the young members of the pack.
Gray wolves also live together in packs which consist of the adult parents and their young up to an age of 2 or 3 years. The adult parents are usually unrelated and other unrelated wolves may sometimes join the pack. (L. David Mech August 2013).
The pack of the Black-backed Jackal consists of both parents who care for the young, and their current offspring. They may join with other packs or families to create a larger pack to hunt large game.
It’s worth noting that not all canids form packs for example, Red foxes do not form packs.
The basis of the pack is a family group of canines working together to ensure the wellbeing and survival of the family unit and the species.
So how did the term pack become so intertwined with how we train our domestic dogs?
The original pack theory applied to training the domesticated dog, was based on studies of wolves that were captive in the 1940s and popularised by the monks of New Skete (Skeet) in the 1970s.
In 1975, Erik Zimen, the chap in the middle, put together wolves from different origins and studied them in captivity. He found that they fought and competed to establish rank and it was these theories that were then applied to our domestic dogs.
Because dogs originated from wolves, why wouldn’t they behave in the same way? Particularly as they live in “captivity” with humans.
This seemed to confirm the theory outlined by David Mech, in his earlier book published in 1960, The Wolf: Ecology and Behaviour of an Endangered Species.
However, what wasn’t taken into account was that the wolves studied weren’t a natural family group but a group from different locations forced to live together in captivity and to compete over resources.
We also know that animals, from the same species such as orcas, dolphins, cows even, but from different locations communicate in different dialects that can make it more difficult or frustrating for them when trying to discuss important matters.
So what happened next….
After further research and study Mech concluded that wolves lived in family groups rather than in packs and that conflicts were rare. In 1999, he published a new book, in which he amended his theories and in 2008, he wrote an article, “Whatever Happened to the Term Alpha Wolf?” based on his studies of wolves living in the wild and revealing that the wolf’s social behaviour is based on co-operation to ensure the success of the family unit.
John Fisher who brought us rank reduction programs, wrote a paper just before he died stating that these programs didn’t work in terms of the dog seeing us as an alpha.
Ray Coppinger compared wolf behaviour to feral dog’s behaviour and saw a difference in social relationships and pack behaviour.
Even the monks of new skete have written a new chapter in their book retracting the use of the alpha roll, which they invented, …… because it’s dangerous. Just take a moment to read the full title of their book and wonder where that ever fitted in in the first place.
The domestic dog is a social creature. Dogs have shared life with us working with us and adapting with us over many thousands of years. Both humans and wolves shared sufficient similarities in social customs to lay the foundations of a lasting relationship perhaps meeting as early as 140,000 years ago.
Dogs are massively keyed into our emotions and are highly visual, picking up on our body language and through their sense of smell, they know when we are stressed, or worried or angry and when we are unwell. We make great use of these skills today.
I often think dogs are a mirror, reflecting back a picture of the environment they live in.
According to the view of John Allman (1999) early man and dog, were preadapted to fit each other’s ecology and family structure enabling the domestication process and giving both species a considerable advantage over other species competing for the same resources.
To initiate the domestication process, humans must have had a way of training these animals using reinforcement for the behaviours they wanted to see repeated and limiting those they wanted to see reduced, through the sharing of food. We were training dogs with food thousands of years ago!
Dog training is thought to be the first art of man.
Over time humans will have selected dogs for friendliness towards humans and paedomorphic dog types may have excelled through evoking altruistic tendencies and empathy in their human captors.
Whilst dogs do perform packing behaviours such as running together, group defence, rallying around the owner, leader follower behaviour, social facilitated eating and other contagious behaviours (Lindsay SR 2001 pp42) …………, as a species they have evolved with us and through selective breeding are now a distant echo of their origins both in behaviour and physical traits.
And I can tell you how and why!
For the last 59 years a team of Russian geneticists have been running one of the most important biology experiments of the 20th, and 21st, centuries. The experiment was the brainchild of this chap in the fury hat, Dmitri Belyaev.
In 1959, he began an experiment to study the process of domestication in real time. He was especially keen on understanding the domestication of wolves to dogs, but rather than use wolves, he used silver foxes as his subjects.
He selectively bred from those foxes that appeared most tame. In less than a decade, some of the domesticated foxes had floppy ears and curly tails. Their stress hormone levels by generation 15 were about half the stress hormone levels of wild foxes.
Over generations, their adrenal gland became smaller and smaller. Serotonin levels also increased, producing “happier” animals, think Fluoxetine and Prozac, and over the course of the experiment, researchers also found the domesticated foxes displayed mottled “mutt-like” fur patterns, and they had more juvenile facial features (shorter, rounder, more dog-like snouts) and body shapes (chunkier limbs).
Domesticated foxes like many domesticated animals, have longer reproductive periods than their wild relatives.
Another change associated with the selection for tameness is that the domesticated foxes, unlike wild foxes, are capable of following human gaze as well as dogs do.
In a recent paper, a “hotspot” for changes associated with domestication, is linked with synaptic plasticity, which itself is associated with memory and learning, and so together these studies are helping us better understand how the process of domestication has led to important changes in cognitive abilities.
If we look at Belyaylev’s breeding of the silver foxes we have evidence that selective breeding produced changes in behaviour traits and physical traits within just eight to ten generations.
In this case, dogs are a long way and many generations, away from their wolf ancestors today.
Dogs live in and have adapted to environments far removed from those of wolves. They live among humans and form part of our families. Unlike wolves they are able bond with other species and habituate quickly to new situations and objects in the environment. They have lost the lupine and carnivorous drive and predatory behaviour exhibited by wild canids. (Lindsay, SR 2001 pp15)
The basis of the pack mentality of dog training is built upon unscientific and unsubstantiated theories and is in my belief, used to validate the use of positive punishment. The claim is that domestic dogs are motivated to increase their status within their human families and that in turn humans have to ensure that they hold their “alpha status” over the dog by showing dominance.
But dogs aren’t wolves and wolves and other “pack” animals aren’t motivated by aggressive displays of dominance, and it can be argued, live in family groups rather than packs.
