Today I'm going to write about one of the most controversial topics regarding dogs: the role of pack leader. Leadership is a very nice and important term, but it has become very dirty due to its misuse.
Every social group needs common norms for all its individuals, and every group needs a leader to lead that group, to represent it and direct it. This leadership can be carried out in different ways: there are democratic leaders, authoritarian leaders, passive or absent leaders and tyrannical leaders. Not all are effective, and of course some types of leadership work much better than others.
To consider what kind of leader we want to be, we only have to look back and learn from the leaders we have had in our lives: mothers, fathers, teachers or bosses at work can provide us with examples of what we want and what we don't want in order for a group to function well. It is important that we think about which leaders have earned our respect, our support and have made us grow and learn more.
A good leader must be admired and respected. This is not achieved by imposition, but by gaining the trust of the group. A good leader is one who makes good decisions, is fair, listens, and knows how to motivate and reward the members of his group. They will follow the leader because doing what is asked of them will always be the best decision, as it will have good consequences for the well-being of the individual and the group itself.
This theory works with both people and animals, but now we are going to focus on dogs, who suffer the most from misunderstood leadership.
Although scientifically it is obsolete, nowadays it is very common to continue seeing how dogs are trained based on dominance and a poorly understood hierarchy. All this comes from television programs that are not real, they are pure show. That is why some programs say that it is not recommended to use these techniques, and a couple of trainers who appear on television are denounced by training colleges and veterinarians in several countries, because the techniques they promote cause aggression in dogs.
Even some traditional training schools, which had their origins in military training using dogs in wars in the last century, have not evolved and still base their education on these completely outdated methods.
To begin with, canids do not lead based on dominance. If we take wolves as an example, their hierarchies are based on respect for age and wisdom. Generally, the leaders of a pack are the parents of the pack, and they exercise their leadership in a friendly and cooperative way. Everything we have been sold about alpha males, submission and power struggles comes from scientific studies from the 70s, which studied wolves in captivity, in unnatural and completely stressed packs. David Mech, the author of these studies, years later studied packs in freedom and had to apologize to the entire scientific community for his erroneous conclusions. However, despite this, the role of the alpha male has penetrated so deeply into society that it is still very much in force... perhaps because it is more real in some types of primates than in canids.
What happens when we train a dog based on dominance? It's very simple: if we train with aggression, we will generate aggression. If we train a dog with dominance, two things can happen: if the dog has a strong character, we will be teaching him to be dominant; if the dog is more insecure, we will create fear in him, and both consequences generate aggression.
It is vitally important to spread the word that specific aggression in dogs towards people is always caused by a history of fear of people in the past.
Another result we will obtain is to deteriorate the bond with us. The dog will lose confidence in us, he will avoid us. Maybe he will be obedient because he is a little afraid of us, but he will not learn anything, he will continue doing what we do not like when we are not present, and the relationship will get worse and worse.
We often scold puppies when they are small, without realizing that we are very big and we are scaring them... most of the time dogs don't even understand why we scold them, since they are doing natural dog things. We don't have to be ogres to cause fear in a dog without realizing it. But it is important that we are able to recognize that perhaps we haven't done it completely right, and that's okay, because once we are aware of it we can rectify it.
So how should we behave to be a good pack leader?
Well, with patience, perseverance and consistency. A leader has to make sure that the rules are followed, but he has to be smart enough not to do so by adding problems instead of removing them.
The first step is to understand that we have a dog that is going to behave like a dog in a pack of dogs… if we want it to do things that are not natural, we must teach it with patience. If the dog has already learned and makes a mistake, we must show it that it has made that mistake. The problem is often that we do not know how to set limits without using punishment, and that is what we must learn. If you are not able to do it you can always ask us for help, and if you want more advice on how to train your pet you can find more articles on this website. You will like to read How to train a dog or cat.
