De-Bunking the Alpha Dog Theory Why every mention of “alpha dogs” or “dominant” dogs is dangerous to all dogs The alpha myth is everywhere. Google “alpha dog” on the Internet and you get more than 85 million hits. Really. While not all the sites are about dominating your dog, there are literally millions of resources out there – websites, books, blogs, television shows, veterinarians, trainers and behavior professionals – instructing you to use force and intimidation to overpower your dog into submission. They say that you, the human, must be the alpha. They’re all wrong. Every single one of them. Is this powerful dog dominant? Acting like an “alpha dog”? No; he’s simply untrained. Pulling hard has enabled him to reach what he wanted to reach in the past, so he’s trying it again. The erroneous approach to canine social behavior known as dominance theory (two million-plus Google hits) is based on a study of captive zoo wolves conducted in the 1930s and 1940s by Swiss animal behaviorist Rudolph Schenkel, in which the scientist concluded that wolves in a pack fight to gain dominance, and the winner is the alpha wolf. READ MORE whole-dog-journal/issues/14_12/features/Alpha-Dogs_20416-1.html Debunking the Dominance Myth 4pawsu/DebunkingDomMyth.pdf The Myth of the Alpha Dog huffingtonpost/dr-karen-becker/alpha-dog_b_4226258.html
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 00:01:36 +0000
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