Why Go Hard?

I brought my puppy home in the usual way - filled with grandiose plans for our future! I grew up with a fairly old school view of how to handle dogs. Dog is wolf, wolf is pack animal, pack is hierarchy = put dog on bottom of family pack hierarchy. Simple, right?

Weeeeell, if you think about it some things start to look a bit weak though. Especially about the clear hierarchical structure of a natural wolf pack, and how that translates to walking first, eating first, and so on. Wolves aren't stupid, and the whole point of living in a pack structure is to benefit from each other. So, is it somehow the case that there are some kinds of super wolves out there, that are the best at everything and are born leaders? Or is it the case that even if the alpha is a worse tracker than the omega (or beta, or gamma, or...), the alpha must walk first - or lose status and risk a coup? It seems to me, that the reasonable thing to do is let the one who's best at tracking walk in front. But if he's also small and can't bring down anything bigger than a rabbit, you might want to switch who's walking first once you catch up to the buffalo he so masterfully tracked. Perhaps they should have a quick fight about it though, just to make sure everyone knows who's leading the pack...

Woohoo, I'm first!

Alright, so it's not quite that simple, and perhaps not quite that stupid. But serious arguments have been made that the early research done on society and behavior in wolf packs, the observations which formed the base of old school thinking and which can be said to have penetrated our culture completely by now (go read a book about werewolves and the handsome alpha males who lead them!), was badly flawed. The studied wolves were in captivity, not in their natural habitat, and it follows that any displayed behavior may not have been natural in turn. Later studies of wild wolves in their natural habitat have shown different results.

Not to mention, dogs aren't wolves. They're. Not. Wolves. Do you actually believe that if you take in a wolf cub and raise it like a puppy, it will behave like a dog? It won't. Because dogs and wolves are not the same.

So why do people buy into it? I did, and I'm not sure I've completely abandoned every aspect of it yet. I think the main reason to believe in and use old school dominance ideas is the immediate result. You correct a dog displaying a bad behavior, and odds are he'll stop it right away. That's great!

Head in the sand is for dummies!

So why not use it and stick to it? Because you think of it as telling your dog "stop doing that", when what you're telling him is "if you do x something bad happens". You can't really be sure exactly what x is going to be for him. That's why trainers using correction emphasize timing so much - if your timing is off you're creating a bad association to the wrong thing, sometimes with very bad results.

Another reason, which Monster has shown me so very clearly, is that exposing your dog to discomfort makes him more used to discomfort. Next time you need to correct your dog you may find it requires a much stronger correction than before. Now, some trainers recommend you to go all out from the start. If you want to correct your dog, do it guns blazing - that way he won't gradually get used to it. But he will. You won't necessarily see it until he's reached the threshold, but once you're there what are you going to do? Many grit their teeth and allow themselves to make the correction even stronger (because it used to work, dammit!), pushing the next threshold crossing into the future. Dogs don't live that long, right?

Another risk you're taking is that corrections are likely to make your dog uncertain and passive. These can be seen as great things for the human (when the effects are moderate)! It means the dog is much less likely to make mischief, he'll stick to you and when not given a command he'll tend to go lie down. Makes life simple. But he's sticking to you because he has no confidence, and he's staying put because he's worried if he tries something he hasn't been told to, things will go badly for him... Nice for a comfy human, hell for an active dog.

*And as I'm writing this my Monster chose to help me illustrate this point with an example. He went and made a phone call, just for fun. This isn't a trick anyone's taught him, he came up with it himself. He'll walk over to the phone, push the handset off its cradle, and mash the buttons a few times with his paw. Then he'll listen, hoping someone picks up. He started doing it when he was young, and while I don't think it's a very good idea (he might scare or irritate the people he's calling, for example) I've never corrected him for it. I've moved the phone to make it harder for him to reach it, and I've made sure to be observant and stop him if he starts doing it anyway, but I've never told him off. When I moved into the more correction heavy methods of dealing with him, though, this behavior stopped completely. I had formed no negative association to the phone for him, but the general use of corrections made him passive and unwilling to volunteer behavior and experiment with his surroundings. Today was the first time he returned to it again, after I stopped the corrections a couple of months ago. It's very encouraging to see that he's bouncing back.

Sure, having your dog use the phone is impractical to say the least, but aren't you also a bit amazed at his ingenuity? Would you really like to miss out on your dog doing something equally amazing, just so you can cling to using corrections?

Correcting your dog for bad behavior also means he just won't like and trust you as much. I'm not saying your dog doesn't love you, I'm sure he does (sleep with one eye open). I'm just saying you're not just the greatest thing since cat leashes (seriously, you might want to lock your bedroom door), you're also a source of discomfort. No matter how "right" you do the correcting (it's not a punishment, its a consequence; your timing is impeccable; you never threaten, you just correct; you never lose your temper, etc), your dog is not an idiot - he knows you're the one causing the discomfort. He may not hate you for it (quick, look behind you!), but the whole point of correcting bad behavior is to create an association between the behavior and the discomfort. That association, although weaker, will form to the person doing the correcting as well. But I'm sure your dog's brain works differently. (run away!)

For me, however, the strongest argument against using corrections is the thought behind it. You want the dog to form a negative association, "doing that is unpleasant". But it's not likely his thoughts are going to be that clear, and some (or even all) of that association will form to the trigger to his behavior! Meaning, if you correct your dog for barking at strangers, he may stop doing it. But he'll like strangers a lot less, and once something pushes him over into behaving badly at strangers again (bad day, got yelled at for pushing a vase over, feeling a bit sick, unusually suspicious looking stranger, anything really) he may not just bark any more. After all, strangers make bad things happen to him...

In our case, I corrected Monster for his behavior towards dogs. I had a good trainer demonstrate the when and the how (I'd used mild corrections before that, like telling him off and grabbing him by his neck, but he had never so much as blinked at those), and it worked! I timed the correction perfectly, I made it unpleasant enough that he immediately responded to it, and our walks became blissfully peaceful... For a while. Soon I noticed Monster starting to get tense when another dog approached. Every sighting of dogs made him react earlier and stronger, until he snapped and started his earlier aggressive behavior again. Only much, much worse. Going outside became impossible, we had to go for walks in the middle of the night, or drive off to the remotest areas I could find. Getting Monster into the car meant first going out to scout the area so no dog would turn up while I was loading him.

Monster had stopped showing agggression towards other dogs when I corrected him. But the reason for his behavior, the thought in his head going something like "Other dogs are a threat, keep at distance!" was not only still there, it was reinforced! Clearly dogs were bad, bad things kept happening when they were around. So the pressure to act on his feelings built, and eventually he snapped.

Do you want your dog to hate and/or fear the triggers to his bad behavior?

Dogs are individuals, they respond differently to things, and they also show their responses differently. For lots of people the dominate and correct will work - or seem to be working depending on your viewpoint - perhaps for the dog's entire life. That doesn't mean it's right, it just means your brain likes patterns and causality, and humans form associations as well as dogs.

Why are you being so mean?

I'm not saying it doesn't work, I'm saying it doesn't work the way most people think it does.