Best Friend

Many people believe that dogs learn by dominance and/or submission. This is an interesting theory that appeals to our sense of logic and the way nature appears to be ordered from the point of view of the human ego. Supposedly, dogs can learn to respect another individual through dominance. This presupposes that they can perceive another being's point of view. Humans can indeed entertain others' points of view, yet we know that no one learns to work effectively through the dominance/submissive model.

No matter how much employees respect their boss or how submissive they may act around him, they expect to be paid fairly. Not enough pay and the attraction turns to resentment and a poor working attitude. Since humans reject and resist such an approach whenever they experience it, how can we expect the dog, with his more limited view, to work on this basis?

Not only does dominating a dog make him resistant to cooperation, but dominance has nothing to do with the smooth operation of wolf society. While it may appear that the leader is the most dominant in a pack of wolves, and that the inferiors have a profound respect for this "alpha" wolf because he is so dominant, that is a surface misreading of their lives.

Supposedly, this dominant individual teaches the other members of the pack what their lesser stations are, bringing order and stability into the group. However, the reason this individual is superior is because, within the group mood, he is endowed with the most uninhibited temperament and perceives order when the others sense disorder.

This produces an emotional balance, a self-confidence level that makes him active and direct in his behavior when the others are reactive and indirect. This confidence is then broadcast through his body language and probably through an internal chemistry revealed when he eliminates.

Given the pack leader's internal balance, he will experience the least amount of stress when passing on to less familiar ground, as negatives are smaller in his sense of order. In addition, the pack leader will feel the strongest compulsion to be first on any path that leads outward to the hunt as he acts in the most straightforward manner.

The inferiors will depend on the pack leader's enthusiasm to draw them across a threshold that may have a stronger inhibiting effect on them. An individual doesn't become superior by being dominant; the leader, to feel complete, needs the group behind him. Only by guiding the hunt does one becomes a leader.

At a quick glance, it seems that a dog takes many repetitions to grasp a lesson. According to �dogma�, a dog has to practice a behavior many times until the lesson seeps into his limited mind. Then, once a lesson is mastered, it becomes so ingrained in the dog's brain that it becomes a habit. That dogs require repetition to learn from an experience is particularly noticeable when we are trying to train the dog to do something that isn't natural for him, such as walking nicely on a lead in an area full of interesting sights, sounds, and smells. It would seem that this exercise is difficult for a dog to learn and would require many practice sessions for it to become a reliable habit.

Therefore, traditional thinking holds that it's best to start practicing the lesson with puppies before they might have the opportunity to practice the undesirable habit of pulling hard on the lead and also while they're small and easy to out-muscle.

A clue that repetition, while part of learning, isn't fundamental to learning is revealed by other observations that people commonly make that contradict this traditional premise. For example, we don't think of ball playing as something mastered through repetition. It looks like the dog is having fun, and that seems a sufficient explanation. The first time the owner attracted his dog's attention to the ball and rolled it away, the dog immediately chased it, grabbed it, and then carried it around proudly. The lesson took one repetition and had a permanent effect for the rest of the dog's life.

This pure example of learning shows us the formula at the core of the process. If an activity is natural, the dog gets it immediately without the need for repetition. And, since the most natural activities involve the prey instinct, we find the best examples of quick learning in this regard. In ball playing, what determines each individual dog's enthusiasm and rate of progress is how much prey value he invests in the ball. That some dogs may take longer to build an attraction to the ball is not due to a need for repetition, but because the prey instinct isn't yet turned on. Through repetition, as the dog grabs the ball, his sensitivity to its novelty or his owner's influence starts to relax until drive starts to flow into prey making. Once uninhibited, the ball no longer has a being to which the dog needs to appeal for access, which initially thwarted his drive to chase and bite it.

A habit is like a riverbed: The stronger the flow that courses through it, the deeper the bed is carved, and the more water it will be able to channel. When the full current rushes through the organism, a completely mature behavior emerges as if learned. In truth, the lesson was gained in the first instant of making contact through the prey instinct, no matter how feeble the first trickle. It just took time for the pathway to be scoured deeply enough in the dog's brain and body to handle the full load of drive.