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| So, Who's Most Dominant Here...? |
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Myth #2 - The Myth of Dominance and Submission
You
hear a lot of talk among dog owners, dog trainers, and even the man on
the street, about dominance in dogs. What is it, exactly? Is it an
instinctive behavioral tendency, an inherited genetic trait, part of a
natural power struggle to become top dog?
We all have our own
ideas as to what it means, and we all “know it when we see it,” but
what are its scientific origins? How does it manifest in behavioral
terms? Does it have a sound evolutionary purpose? Or is dominance based
on a simple misunderstanding of a dog’s true emotional nature?
(To continue reading, please scroll down...)
One
clue is that in multiple dog households you often hear owners say that
one dog is “dominant” over food, while another may be “alpha” over the
couch, and a third may be “the pack leader” when it comes to who’s
first through the door or who gets to play with which toys. But if
dominance were a real genetic behavioral tendency, geared toward ruling
the roost, why would it be so specific to food bowls and not to the
best sleeping spots and going through doorways and controlling how
others play as well? Why wouldn’t one dog in a multiple dog pack be
dominant about everything? Isn’t that his or her role as the pack
leader?
As part of a new trend away from this idea, many experts
in animal behavior are now beginning to replace the old terms of
dominant and submissive behaviors with the more accurate threatening
and non-threatening postures. In other words, where before we’d see a
dog acting dominant over food but not over the couch or during play, we
now know that he might simply exhibit a series of threatening postures
to keep other dogs away from his food bowl in the one case, but not
exhibit such postures in the others. Is this true dominance, or is the
dog simply engaging in resource guarding—keeping the other dogs from
having access to the things that mean the most to him individually? If
it’s resource guarding, then the behavior is probably caused by
anxiety, not by an instinctive need or desire to be alpha.
It might clarify things if we knew how the idea of dominant behavior originated.
A Reflexive Dance
Konrad
Lorenz was the first to describe the basic difference between dominance
and submission in his 1952 book KING SOLOMON’S RING. He stated that
when two dogs or wolves are engaged in a conflict, the defeated animal
supposedly offers his neck to the other because if he does he’ll “never
be seriously bitten. The other growls and grumbles, snaps with his
teeth in the empty air and even carries out, without delivering so much
as a bite, the movement of shaking something to death. However, this
strange inhibition from biting persists only as long as the defeated
dog or wolf maintains his attitude of humility.”
Hasn’t it ever
struck you as strange (a word that even Lorenz uses) that when two
animals are fighting one would offer himself up to the other to be
executed? Why wouldn’t he struggle with all his might to survive? Does
this dog suddenly have some magical awareness of Ghandi’s “peaceful
resistance?” Has he studied Zen? Or is something else going on?
That’s
exactly what biologist Rudolf Schenkel, who disagreed with the alpha
theory from the very outset, said. “It is always the inferior wolf,”
Schenkel wrote in 1967, “who has his jaws near the neck of his
opponent.” Schenkel also points out that it’s the supposedly dominant
wolf or dog who walks away from the fight, making him “more vanquished
than victor.”
Now that makes sense. The submissive wolf actually
has his teeth closer to the throat of his opponent, putting him at a
slight advantage. That’s why the “dominant” wolf doesn’t bite, and
that’s why he walks away without finishing his enemy off. Yes, the
lower wolf is in a weaker position physically, but he’s not rolling
over on his side in submission or to commit suicide; he’s putting
himself in a position that, given the weaker nature of his temperament,
feels most natural to him, yet still enables him to defend himself if
need be.
The behaviors of both parties probably originated
simply for the evolutionary purpose of defusing tension and maintaining
harmony between pack mates. Wolves and dogs are predators. And being a
predator of any kind requires that you have a reservoir of aggressive
energy available to you at all times. But if you’re a group predator,
meaning you’re a social animal too, nature doesn’t want that aggression
being directed at your brothers-in-arms, she wants it directed only at
prey animals and sometimes at other packs who invade your turf. (Which
again, is a form of resource guarding.)
Meanwhile, it’s doubtful
that either one of the wolves in Lorenz’s example would be consciously
aware of his position of advantage or disadvantage, of power or
weakness. Instead, it would be much like the interaction between two
magnets whose poles counter one another’s energy: the superior wolf has
a direct, assertive energy, which when directed at the inferior wolf
causes his indirect energy to spin off in the other direction, both
physically and emotionally. If they were both direct and both
assertive, and came toward each other with ears, tails, and shoulders
held high, bloodshed would very quickly ensue. But nature is wiser than
the individual wolf; she wants the pack to get along, so she created
this reflexive dance.
So here we have, at the very start of this
idea about dominance and submission, what is probably a major
misunderstanding committed by the primary architect of the alpha
theory, a misunderstanding so major, in fact that it turns out that the
“submissive” wolf or dog is in fact controlling the “dominant” one’s
behavior as much if not more than the other way around. Yet despite the
simple, obvious logic of Rudolf Schenkel’s view, Konrad Lorenz’
misinterpretation that the weaker wolf is offering his neck because
he’s showing submission, or “humility” (as Lorenz) calls it, continues
to be handed down to us as “fact” today.
They Aren’t the Same Animal
Part
of the problem with the manner in which the ideas about dominance and
submission emerged may come from the belief that Lorenz and others of
his time had that the social behavior of captive wolves, being held
prisoner in zoos and sanctuaries, would be much the same as it is in
wild wolves, who roamed free in the wilderness. This belief may have
arisen partly out of scientific necessity, because during the 1930s and
40s, when these initial studies were done, wild wolves were almost
totally inaccessible. That’s no longer true.
Dr. L. David Mech (pronounced Meech)
of the University of Minnesota, who has spent his entire career
studying wild wolves in their natural habitats, writes, “In captive
packs dominance labels were probably appropriate, for most species
thrown together in captivity would usually so arrange themselves. In
nature, however, the wolf pack is not such an assemblage.”
If
Mech is right, then captive wolves and wild wolves aren’t the same
animal, at least not when it comes to their social behaviors. In fact,
in Mech’s observations over the past forty years, there actually is no
pack leader in wild wolf packs, at least not in the traditional sense.
He writes, “The concept of the alpha wolf as a ‘top dog’ ruling a group
of similar-aged compatriots is particularly misleading.” Mech and his
colleagues are also reluctant to use the word alpha because, as they
put it, “It falsely implies a hierarchical system in which a wolf
assumes a place in a linear pecking order.” They reserve the term alpha
for the breeding pair (though Mech says that’s a bit like calling your
dad a “male” father.)
So in wild wolves there’s no hierarchy, no pecking order, and no pack leader.
Hmmm. Is there actually such a thing as dominance?
Yes,
says, Mech, though it only occurs in rare instances, and usually only
take place over how to disburse food to the young. Yet one of the most
striking things about these battles is that it’s usually the
“submissive” (or non-threatening) female who triumphs over the
“dominant” (threatening) male! She actually wins by acting in a manner
that we’ve all been taught is the instinctive way one wolf will submit
to the authority of a dominant pack mate.
How, exactly, does this happen?
The
male has killed a hare and comes trotting back toward the den where,
presumably, he wants to eat his kill in peace and safety. As he
approaches, the female comes toward him. His neck and back go up. He
stands tall and stiff. She approaches, low to the ground. The closer
she comes, the stiffer he stands. The stiffer he gets, the lower she
gets to the ground. Then as she comes right up to him, while he’s
growling and standing firm, she very nearly rolls over on her back in
the way the inferior wolf in Lorenz’s description does. Here, though,
she’s not on her back and not offering her neck. So why is she so low
to the ground?
The next part of the drama explains it:
crouching in front of her mate, so low to the ground as to almost be on
her back, her jaws are actually now in a perfect position to grab the
hare right out of the male’s mouth! Which is exactly what she does!
Then she runs back to her pups, leaving the male standing there,
hare-less and “wondering” what the hell just happened.
So
again, this natural behavior in wild wolves is in direct contradiction
to the idea that dominance is about being in control. It’s not; it’s
simply about resource guarding. (The male wants the hare for himself.)
And just as in the battle Lorenz described, it’s the non-threatening
wolf that actually exerts more control and eventually wins the
confrontation.
Are there other times when dominance displays
erupt between wild wolf pack members? Yes, they happen rarely and
usually occur when the pack is hungry and hasn’t hunted large prey in a
while. This might explain why dominant behaviors are much more common
in captive wolves who never get a chance to hunt large prey together as
a real wolf pack would.
Dominance = Anxiety
Wait, let’s go back. Why would hunting large prey reduce tension?
Simple.
Because hunting large prey uses up a lot of aggressive energy. In wild
wolf packs this goes a long way to reducing their individual levels of
internal tension and stress. But since captive wolves don’t have access
to this natural method of reducing stress, or of offloading their
natural predatory aggression, or of fostering group harmony (you can’t
hunt large prey without working together), captive wolves find
themselves fighting instead over little things; that’s what they do
with their aggressive energy—they scrimmage.
The same process
would be apparent in both village dogs and domesticated dogs. Village
dogs don’t usually hunt together; they mostly scavenge. So they tend to
have the same build up of tension seen in captive wolves, and skirmish
a lot. With pet dogs, who are like both village dogs and captive wolves
in that they don’t routinely hunt as a group, it’s often the most
“dominant” dog in a household who doesn’t know how to play, for
example. And since play is nature’s stand-in for the hunt (it teaches
young predators how to catch prey, and young prey animals how to evade
predators), it’s a great tension reducer, as well as a kind of social
“glue”—it bonds dogs and owner together emotionally. And for dogs, in
fact for all animals, social play is probably the best tension-reducer
there is.
That’s why when a “dominant” dog is taught how to
play hunting games in a harmonic social context, or when his owner or
trainer find another way to reduce his inner anxiety, if only through
increasing his level of daily exercise, you’ll find that all his
supposed instinctual dominant behaviors begin to magically disappear.
So
it turns out that what we’ve all been taught was dominance is really
two things: a build up of internal stress, and a form of resource
guarding, which is an anxiety-based behavior.
Wait, dominance is really nothing more than a form of anxiety?
Yep.
Think about this: the standard pharmacological treatment for “dominance
aggression” in dogs comes in the form of anti-anxietal medication. And
though these drugs don’t cure “dominance aggression,” they are
generally effective at managing it! So yes, “dominance” is a symptom of
anxiety.
Dr. Karen Overall of the University of Pennsylvania
writes, “The ‘alpha’ concept is an outdated one with almost no data to
support it. There are no truly ‘submissive’ or ‘dominant/alpha’ dogs,
and by [using] these labels we blind ourselves to all of the
interesting information that dogs are communicating with [their]
postures.”
So
now we’re back to our new terminology: dominant and submissive
behaviors aren’t what they seem: they’re more rightly called
threatening and non-threatening postures. And they aren’t inherited
traits in dogs and wolves, nor are they part of the pack instinct’s
non-existent hierarchical structure; they’re simply communicative
postures that express a dog’s inner anxiety. So the upshot of all this
is, if you think your dog is dominant you might want to take another
look. He could just be anxious and need a lot more play time…
Which brings us to our next article...
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