By Gaby Dufresne-Cyr, CBT-FLE
The catchphrase think outside the box means thinking in new ways to release one's creative potential. In the dog training world, thinking outside the box means stopping training with traditional punishment-based methods and letting new positive training ideas develop. Discussions are taking place all over the world about dominance, submission, and the excessive use of punishment in dog training; I urge you to join the discussion.
Traditional punishment based training models stipulate dogs form packs and establish hierarchies based on dominance and submission. At the top of the hierarchy, we find the most dominant subjects followed by their subservient conspecifics. The dominant animal, AKA alpha, controls all the resources. Traditional trainers take this model and apply it to domestic dog training. They claim dogs seek the alpha position within the human family unit, and dogs will do anything to get to the top. In other words, the dog wants to control humans and all available resources. Trainers that believe in dominance also claim dogs must submit to humans, if they do not, dogs must be placed in a submissive position till they surrender (calm down).
If this were true, why do dogs tolerate our presence? Canis Familiaris can exert approximately five hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, so why not just kill us and be done with it? Why display appeasement and avoidance signals towards us? The reason is simple, dogs do not want total domination, if they did, they would avoid humans all together or gang-up and kill us all.
Furthermore, dogs do not live in packs, nor do dominant subjects strive to control other individuals and available resources. Dominance is defined as what an individual wants more than the other at a particular point in time, and the want can change, and usually does, at any moment. Dominance is really about confidence, not aggression. To push the discussion further, those who keep thinking within the box have not yet learned that submission (all three types) is always voluntary. You cannot force an individual, especially from another species, to submit because submission is the act of surrendering yourSelf. No living organism, human or non-human, can make another living organism surrender itSelf.
Dominance and submission are words that describe a group of behaviours. Anger and fear are emotions expressed as aggression and fearfulness. Behaviour is simply an expression of emotion, so dog training is really about changing emotions, not behaviour. My question to the reader is, why does a dog trainer keep thinking in the box? Why not challenge yourself and think outside the box? The dog stopped being a wolf fifteen thousand years ago, so maybe the time has come for us to let go of the romantic idea that dogs are domestic wolves. Maybe the time has come for us to accept that the dog is, in fact, just a dog.