Why Dominance Talk Drives Dog Trainers To Scream In The Void

Imagine if you landed in a new country and everyone talked about the importance of earlobe attachment. It does sound vaguely familiar…you poke through your memory enough to recall some distant high school science class lesson about earlobes being attached or not, and that it’s governed by a single¹ gene. But why are people in this wonderful new country talking about it so much? Like, all the time. You’re in a line up to get a nice taco from the new food truck, and…people are talking about earlobe attachment. At the dentist? Talking about earlobe attachment. In the bank? Earlobe attachment. Watching the game? Earlobes.

Earlobes, earlobes, earlobes.

Sure, you think to yourself. Earlobes are attached or not. This is a thing that exists, but it is so absolutely not important to the reality of day-to-day living.

This, my dearest of dear readers, gives you some sense of how dog trainers feel when we hear about dominance. Sure, it exists in the field of ethology, and it’s obviously super dooper pooper important to humans and other primates. But when it comes to changing a dog’s behaviour, or helping a scared dog feel more confident, or helping our lovely human clients live more peaceably with their dogs…it’s all earlobes. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t matter. There is literally no evidence that harping on about dominance helps us or helps our dogs. Period.

But tuck your shirt in, friend. It gets worse.

Imagine now that the earlobe talk was the premise for a ton of abuse, in your vacation destination. Maybe people who have attached earlobes get all kinds of painful stuff tossed their way. They are regularly struck, threatened, yelled at, electrically shocked, or have their throats constricted by metal chains to reduce airflow. Imagine they live a life of wary uncertainty, but we call it polite obedience. Imagine.

Awful stuff, right?

Well, dog trainers don’t have to imagine. We regularly meet dogs who experience all that stuff, and experience it because the dogs have been called dominant…even though they are not being dominant, they are just being dogs. They are jumping up, but they do this out of doggish joy. Or they are not coming when they’re called, because there is something interesting out in the world and they are not well-trained. They are showing affiliative behaviours or acting out of fear, and instead of getting help, they are labelled dominant. And in the most heart-wrenching of happenstances, humans feel like they must quash dominance in an animal, and pull out training methods and techniques that produce no reduction in rank but instead, produce an animal that lives a life of wary uncertainty, which is labelled polite obedience.

So sure, earlobe attachment is a thing. But it’s not a useful thing to talk about at length, is it? And if it were being used to inappropriately harm people, shouldn’t we…you know, kinda stop putting it on a pedestal? And yeah, social dominance is a thing in some species. But it is absolutely not an important, or even particularly interesting, thing about dogs. It gives us no way forward to change a dog’s behaviour and no way to improve our relationships with dogs. And as a concept, no matter how misapplied it is to dogs, it has given dog trainers who choose to use painful devices and dog guardians who have been misled about this stuff a reason to continue hurting and scaring dogs in the name of training.

So here is what us dog trainers are screaming into the void: Dominance doesn’t really matter, even if it exists. It gives us nothing useful or helpful. It doesn’t give us insight into our dog’s behaviour, which is much better characterised by evolution and learning. And furthermore, the idea of it is used every single day to justify harming dogs.

Or maybe we’re not screaming, maybe we’re just thinking it into the void. Because here is the abject truth of the matter: our earlobes are really, really tired of hearing that word muttered out loud. Whether those earlobes are attached or not.

Well turns out it’s probably more complicated than that. Science, am I right?

Kristi BensonAugust 16, 2021