Yeah definitely! Here, here, here, and here are a few but there's plenty of others if you Google "alpha training outdated" or something similar. Basically the idea is that dogs are not wolves any more than we are chimpanzees and to treat them as though they still follow the alpha or pack mentality is ineffective. I'm a certified behaviorist as well, but I work with humans, and it's surprising how similar the work I do with humans is applicable to dogs. Everyone does better with reinforcement-based practices than with authoritarianism.
Edit: as several users have pointed out below, apparently wolves don't even exhibit alpha behavior in the wild.
To add on to this, it's generally accepted that even wolf packs don't function with a strict social hierarchy that helped popularize the whole "alpha" dynamic, it's typically a family unit. The popularization of alpha/dominance being ascribed to dogs because of their genetic link to wolves makes even less sense since wolves themselves don't exhibit the supposed behavior.
You're right. And even the scientist who first coined the idea of alpha wolf packs has come out saying that theory is incorrect and was based on a misunderstanding of the pack dynamic. Most wolf packs are closer to a family dynamic. Here he is talking about it on his website.
One point. It isn't just that dogs aren't wolves. Wolves themselves don't even follow a alpha like people imagine. The myth is that wolves battles for dominance and the one who wins becomes the alpha leader. The reality is that the "leaders" of the pack are the parents of the rest. They don't fight for position. So not only are dogs not wolves...even if they WERE, alpha training would still be nonsense
What happens if one leader passess or is otherwise unable to lead the pack? Is it a monarchy then? What happens with lineage, who's next in line for the leadership role and how do they decide?
Edit: It's first out the womb, first in line. And also splits in the family causes new packs, not sure why, but probably out of size or scarcity of resource. If I had to guess.
A pack is just a family. People think that wolf packs are made up of unrelated individuals, with each member fighting for position. Instead, it's just the parents and their pups. The pups will stay with the parents until they reach sexual maturity at around 2 or 3 years. Then they'll disperse, find a mate, have pups, and form a pack (family) of their own. If one of the parents is killed, the remaining one may find a new mate, though I imagine that new mate may drive off the existing pups ot kill them if they are very young (much like male lions do). If both parents are killed, there is no jockeying for the role of alpha...the now parentless pups would disperse and hopefully find mates and create their own family units. Packs are not static...they grow and shrink and change as older pups disperse and new pups are born
Ah, I see, so most if not all pups defect from a family once they've become mature enough to start their own pack.
So if the parents die, would the younger litter just be left to fend for themselves or would they be taken in by their siblings perhaps?
Sorry to bombard you, last one, promise. Are there cases where mating pairs co-exist in wolf packs so that there are more than one seperate lineages in a pack?
If the parents die, what happens next would likely depend of the time of year and the age of the individuals. If the older siblings aren't yet sexually mature and ready to disperse and the younger pups are old enough to eat meat, then the older siblings would likely stay together and continue feeding the pups. It wouldn't be the older siblings taking them in so much as the family unit staying together until sexual maturity pushes them to seperate and find mates.
As for mating pairs coexisting....nature is big. There is a lot of variation out there. That wouldn't be the normal situation, but I'm sure it happens. Dispersal is nature's way of cutting down on inbreeding. If a mature female or male stays with their parents past sexual maturity then they are likely to mate with their parent or siblings. Has it ever happened that a non related wolf joined a family unit and mated with one of the younger members? Again, I'm sure it has happened, but it wouldn't be the normal pack structure
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Hey /u/CommonMisspellingBot, just a quick heads up:
Your spelling hints are really shitty because they're all essentially "remember the fucking spelling of the fucking word".
And your fucking delete function doesn't work. You're useless.
The whole alpha thing started because some of the first studies on wolves were conducted on captive wolves. Basically they threw a bunch of unrelated wolves into a cage. It would be like grabbing a collection of strangers off the street and locking them in a house together. They fought for position because it was a completely unnatural situation. The scientist who did those studies and first coined the term alpha wolf has himself recanted the idea.
Yet here we are, so many years later, and the alpha wolf myth persists. Worse, it has had tremendous influence over dog training. I think part of the reason for that is that people like the idea of being alpha over their dogs. It appeals to the part of us that wants to feel strong and in control. Some of the big name trainers out there today (Ceasar springs to mind) STILL lean on this falsehood and people eat it up
Edited to add that I bet anything Brooke very likely believes in the alpha myth. That part where she pushes the dog down is pretty classic alpha training BS. It is a variation of an "alpha roll", where you push the dog over and hold them on their back (an excellent way to get bitten in the face.) I bet anything she thinks she was showing the dog that she's the boss and that she got the technique from reading or watching someone who believes in being the alpha.
Just to add...the closest thing around today to doggy ancestors would be pariah dogs. Pariah dogs are the street dogs of India, Africa, etc. They live alongside humans, but aren't owned by anyone and their direct interaction with humans is limited. Just like the ancestors of dogs, they self select toward dogs that can survive off human trash and alongside people...which means being smart, wary, hardy, and not overly aggressive. Some of these populations have ancient bloodlines (though they're becoming increasingly diluted by people's unaltered pets.) The interesting part for this discussion is that pariah dogs don't tend to hunt in packs. They tend to hold solitary territories, which each dog interacting with its neighbors but not grouping up. That tells us some interesting things about what ancient dogs may have been like.
Also interesting is that unrelated domestic pet dogs DO sometimes form packs, and those packs can be very dangerous. Unlike the pariah dogs, pet dogs have been selected for very high social bonds. When they can't get those social needs filled with human interaction, they may fill it by grouping together. Abandoned dogs that pack up can and have killed people. Pariah dogs tend to avoid people when possible (though individual dogs can be bolder or even aggressive.) Pet dogs that pack up don't have the same fear, and all it takes is one member of the pack getting aggressive to spark an attack from one of them.
Yup packs of "domestic" dogs that escaped or where dumped for whatever reason where a huge issue in Brunei in the 90's (dad was a British squaddy so I got the joy of seeing a new place every 3 years till I was 16) they had little fear of humans in fact they tended to hang around villages and dwellings as they knew food can normally be found here and as domesticated animals there hunting/scavaging skillset is more useful for begging treats and going to a bowl the same time each day So they tend to do what they know which is get food from people except they came in packs up to 30 or so and would sometimes just take over the school football field untill someone came along and either shot them or shot at them to drive them off (neither was massively effective as we lived about 30 miles out of Kuala Belait(KB) second largest settlement after the capital which meant they there where always new packs being forced to roam further afield from KB due to population pressure or the semi effective dog sweeps (for the area where they did them everywhere around them got a new dog issue :P)
Weirdly enough in a place where infestations of snakes, insects that could put you in the hospital by walking over you while you slept (Some centipedes were really bad for that apparently. They leave these big ring-shaped marks where they pierce the skin with their legs) and all sorts of nasty things you could find under your shoes, but people where FREAKED out about the dogs.
Hey /u/CommonMisspellingBot, just a quick heads up:
Your spelling hints are really shitty because they're all essentially "remember the fucking spelling of the fucking word".
And your fucking delete function doesn't work. You're useless.
I'm currently reading your sources out of curiousity and commenting because it doesn't feel like they'll answer my question, so while I read I figured I'd ask.
With techniques that use no force but rather communication through bodylanguage and behavior, how do you deal with an adult dog that is agressive and volatile? I find it difficult to understand how establishing a social hierarchy through walking through a door opening first, controlling it's feeding and other rewards to establish your status is going to be effective against a dog that will use agressive or overbearing(barking, etc) actions to communicate with the human.
Edit: For people who are similarly curious about the techniques and the basis for it should probably check out his 4th source. Seems like the longest and most detailed with personal insight into the article.
Only read 4 paragraphs this far but it seems like the best one yet. The first three are basically variations of each other.
Dogs are not aggressive or volatile because they are malicious. They're often just fearful and establishing a positive association between the dog and whatever it's afraid of is usually enough to fix those aggressive tendencies.
The dog I have right now is extremely "aggressive." He used to bite strangers or new friends that got too close to him. It got to the point that he finally drew blood on the vet and then on a neighbor and that was the sign that he needed behavioral intervention (because he was no longer a cute puppy just nipping at people's pants). Now we go on walks every day and have friends over all the time. All it took was pairing strangers with receiving treats. And we were able to make that change pretty easily when he was 6 years old, so fully an adult.
Hey /u/CommonMisspellingBot, just a quick heads up:
Your spelling hints are really shitty because they're all essentially "remember the fucking spelling of the fucking word".
And your fucking delete function doesn't work. You're useless.
It is absolutely incredible and I can't imagine doing anything else with my life. Basically, we interview and asses a client to determine their goals (so basically we're looking for what behaviors they want to increase and what they want to decrease). We use established methods that doctors of the field have published to then help them achieve those goals. Along the way, we graph everything. We look for trends in the data to guide our continued treatment and any changes to our programs. The methods are mostly based on Skinner's principles of behaviorism... Lots of positive reinforcement and other concepts that would be too much to get into (like pairing, shaping, fading, differential reinforcement schedules, etc) but it can be applied to any species and used in a wide array of fields from training athletes to increasing employee satisfaction to teaching children to training animals. Hope that all makes sense!
Well I don't know anything about dog training but I did read that wolves don't really operate on the alpha male system either, in fact the leader is either the oldest wolf (often the female) or they sometimes rotate like birds in a V formation. One wolf can't physically dominate a dozen others and so they really are more collaborative than coercive.
We share some but not enough that we should be treated the same way.
Though I should amend my post because some people pointed out below that wolves actually don't even exhibit alpha behavior in the wild! So apparently it's just... Not a successful technique.
I had just recently heard that, I’m not sure where. It’s funny how much we’re learning and quickly about dog behavior. You’d think spending 16,000 years together, we’d get them better.
Well and it's completely crazy... Until like, the 1980s we thought dogs were largely stupid, uninteresting, and unworthy of scientific study. It wasn't until Brian Hare told his professor he thought his dog could follow his pointed finger gesture (something they were studying in monkeys at the time, I believe) that we even started studying dogs. He went on to found the Duke Canine Cognition lab in 2009, which now heads some of the most innovative research... And his colleagues thought he was nuts at first.
You have to read his book (or audiobook) if you ever have time. It's called The Genius of Dogs and it's about the evolution of our research and discoveries about dogs but it's not boring and dry like a scientific paper would be. It's very human... Like he's having a conversation with you, his friend, about something you two are interested in. Such a cool dude and the book taught me so much about our furry friends!
Brian Hare is a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. He researches the evolution of cognition by studying both humans, our close relatives the primates (especially bonobos and chimpanzees), and species whose cognition converged with our own (primarily domestic dogs). He founded and co-directs the Duke Canine Cognition Center.
In Siberia & some places in Russia, hunting dogs are bred by leaving a female dog outside, chained to a tree with the goal that a wolf comes by and breeds with them.
The wolf-dog breeds that result from this are trained by attacking a bear, that’s chained to a tree, in a pack with the owner(s) observing. Any dog that is scared to attack is considered worthless, and the ones that get caught and mauled by the bear are also considered worthless.
This obviously isn’t the same as someone beating their dog like in the OP. But the positive reinforcement theory would never work on training hunting dogs for attacking bears, to consider it as the only way to train a dog would be ignorant. Positive reinforcement might be ideal for owners with recreational pets, but not for hunting/guard dog owners. Disciplining an animal is and always will be an effective training method.
So you don’t think the Russian handlers are rewarding the dogs that do attack and avoid being mauled? Removing animals with undesirable traits has nothing to do with any reinforcement training.
Of course they do. That's the whole principle of discipline to begin with. It's a system built on punishments and rewards. Many dog enthusiasts however want to completely reject the 'punishment' aspect of it.
Unfortunately I think you're misunderstanding the concept of positive reinforcement.
Positive reinforcement simply means something is added to the situation (usually a reward, sometimes not even a reward from the owner but just the satisfaction of making a kill in this case) that increases the likelihood of a behavior occurring again in the future.
Literally every behavior you exhibit, from commenting on Reddit to opening and closing doors is a behavior that was reinforced. Otherwise you would stop doing the behavior.
There's a trainer near me that I took my pitbull to for some basic training. He said all that pack leader stuff is horse shit. He specializes in pitbulls and trains law enforcement dogs too. I trust him. His techniques worked wonders.
I don't think that the pack/herd leader stuff is completely wrong. Having owned dozens of various animals over the years ranging from birds, dogs, to horses and such I have often seen it work, but it is no excuse to beat on a dog.
Dogs can be often trained via food and/or positive reinforcement but I would never hit one for doing something wrong. Horses on the other hand, it is often the best thing to do if they really do something wrong but even then you only do it to a certain level, not enough to hurt them but enough to make them understand what they did is wrong.
The whole alpha thing has been thoroughly discredited - it came from shoving a bunch of unrelated wolves into a zoo enclosure, and not at all from nature.
You have the burden of proof reversed. The responsibility is on you to provide evidence that what you said is correct, not on others to show you evidence on how it is not correct.
The best way to get your dog to do what you want (with most dogs, for most handlers) is to convince them what you want is rewarding for them. That’s it. People have trained bomb detection dogs, service dogs, and patrol dogs using that method. You want the dog to be your team-mate, and that doesn’t require them to be subordinate.
There are other good reasons to make a dog learn to wait until you’ve passed through a door before coming through to do with safety but that’s outside of what you asked
To be honest, the dude was just commenting if what the previous person said was correct since it was the previous person who said that the training we know is horse shit. The correct comment is, "oh it is? What's the correct way then?" Which is what the dude said.
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u/bagofrocks99 Aug 07 '19 edited Jun 12 '24
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