How do I know if my dog is dominant?

They’re not, I promise.

If you’re struggling with your dog’s training or behaviour you’re probably wondering if you’ve got a dominant dog and what you’re supposed to do to fix that. Some trainers will tell you that any problem behaviour is because your dog is ‘dominant’, ‘doesn’t know their place in the pack’ or ‘doesn’t see you as their leader’. These trainers think the solution to everything from pulling on-lead and ignoring recall cues to severe aggression and separation anxiety is that you need to ‘be the alpha’ or ‘teach your dog to respect you’. But the truth is that dominance is a complete myth and has no relevance in dog training and behaviour.

A brief history of the dominance fallacy

In the 1940s a study was done on captive wolves in a zoo. They were found to be fighting over resources like food and the conclusion was that wolf packs had a hierarchy with the alpha wolf controlling all the resources. Then in the 1970s a wolf researcher, Dr David Mech, took this belief that wolves fought for dominance and said that because dogs are descended from wolves, dogs must also live in packs and fight for dominance. Quickly trainers started to say every single problem behaviour was caused by dogs being dominant. And long lists of rules were created that were supposed to show dogs that they were at the bottom of the pack and place the humans as ‘pack leaders’.

There was only one problem… The initial study was massively flawed. The wolves were not a proper wolf pack. They’d caught unrelated wild wolves and shoved them in an enclosure together. As this was an 1940s zoo, the cage would have been tiny and very barren (nothing like the large, enriched enclosures modern zoos have). It’s not a surprise these wolves fought over resources - they didn’t have enough and they were stuck with strangers they didn’t choose to live with. This was a massively unnatural environment and so the way these wolves behaved was also completely unnatural. In the wild, wolf packs are family groups which are usually made up of the parents and their cubs. Cubs from previous litters stay and hunt with their parents and help care for their younger siblings. They don’t fight their parents to become the ‘leader of the pack’, they just leave to find a mate and have their own cubs.

Unlike wolves, dogs aren’t pack animals. Observations of feral village dogs have found dogs live in much more fluid social groups. Instead of a pack structure where mum and dad live, hunt and raise their pups together, mother dogs will raise their pups alone without the father’s help. When pups grow up and leave their mother they don’t find a mate and form their own pack, they often live in friendship groups.

We know wolves don’t fight to ‘be the alpha’ of their pack and we also know that dogs don’t live in packs. So it makes zero sense why dominance would somehow become a factor in dog behaviour when they live with humans. Oh, and Dr. David Mech, who originally brought dominance theory to dog training, he’s dedicated A LOT of his career to trying to persuade everyone he was wrong…

The dangers of dominance theory

Dominance theory may be completely false, but it can have hugely harmful effects on dogs and their humans. When people assume every problem behaviour because the dog is being ‘dominant’, they miss the chance to understand the real reason for that behaviour. Dogs might be doing something we as humans don’t want them to do because they’re ill or in pain, confused about what we expect of them or feeling scared or anxious about something. There are so many different reasons for behaviours we find undesirable, and sometimes it’s just because they’re a dog doing normal dog things… It’s only by understanding and addressing the true cause of a behaviour that we can achieve a good solution for the humans and the dog.

Your dog isn’t going to suddenly start planning world domination because they sleep on the sofa

When a dog is deemed to be ‘dominant’, people are usually given a long list of rules to follow. Some of them might seem reasonable like being told to eat before your dog, walk through doorways before your dog and not letting your dog in your bed. Others are, let’s be honest, super weird like lying in your dog’s bed, pretending to eat their food and not allowing your dog to ever be physically higher up than you. And lots of them are completely contradictory. You’re not supposed to fuss your dog if they come up to you because they’re ‘being dominant’ by asking for attention, but you’re also not supposed to ever approach your dog first because the ‘lower ranking wolves always greet the alpha’. So when are you allowed to fuss your dog? Often never.

People are told that if they follow these rules their dog’s behaviour problems will be fixed because their dog will learn they’re not dominant. But in the vast majority of situations, the rules are completely irrelevant and won’t change the dog’s behaviour. (Sometimes following a single rule may be beneficial because it relates to the specific problem behaviour, but there’s no situation in which you’ll ever need to follow a long, blanket list of rules.) They also take a lot of the joy out of you and your dog’s life. You probably decided to get a dog because you wanted cuddles on the sofa, games of fetch and to get to fuss your excited dog when you get home from work. But now you’re being told that all the things you love about having a dog are the cause of all your problems (they really aren’t).

So why does dominance theory persist?

Because it’s an easy get-out-of-jail-free card. Instead of having to spend hundreds of hours and thousands of pounds learning about dog behaviour, trainers can save all that time and money by saying every dog is dominant. They can give every single client the exact same plan full of the exact same rules to follow and don’t even have to think about treating their human and dog clients like individuals. And when people inevitably break those rules (because they’re practically impossible to implement) the trainer gets to blame their clients for not ‘teaching their dog their place in the pack’. Even if they do somehow follow all those rules, it’s just because the client doesn’t have the right ‘alpha energy’. So even though the dog’s behaviour never gets better, the trainer always has a way to blame that on their clients so they don’t realise their trainer doesn’t know anything about dogs…

Written by Juniper Indigo, dog trainer in Tiverton and Exeter