You are currently browsing the category archive for the
‘Uncategorized’ category. After reading Barry Eaton’s new Book
“Dominace in Dogs: Fact or Fiction?” we were inspired to update
our essay on the same topic. When the profession of dog training
started taking off in the 1960s, people thought of dogs as
domesticated wolves and believed they had to train them as if
they were wolves being raised by their human “pack.” When L.
David Mech first studied captive wolf packs in the 1970s, he
concluded wolves operate in a hierarchy, generally dominated by
alphas through aggression. From there, many dog trainers
concluded that since dogs are related to wolves and order is
maintained within a pack by dominant or alpha wolves, the same
must be done in the domestic dog’s home with the human taking on
the role of alpha. Further research has since shown us although
dogs are indeed descended from wolves, they are more like
distant cousins who, due to evolution and selective breeding by
man over the course of 14,000 years,