Misconceptions of the Mythical Alpha Dog
People are fond of extrapolating popular, but misunderstood and bowdlerized accounts of wolf-behavior to dog-human interactions and training methods. The assumption is that the dog is out to dominate us and as a result, far too much training advice is unfeeling and adversarial with a sickening reliance on physical domination. So many pop-psychology training books have been written as if people are wolves, rather than humans with supposedly superior brainpower. If only the fall-out from this absurd view were not so unpleasant, the whole premise would be utterly laughable. People seem to be hung up on the questions, “But WHY did he do it?” “Why does he act that way? Why don’t we simply teach dogs how we would like them to act. If we find a dog’s behavior to be inappropriate or unacceptable, we must take a little responsibility here because we are the dog’s teacher and so, why don’t we just change the dog’s behavior to our liking.
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