May 28 2009
Toothless Research About Dogs
The bigger a claim, the better your evidence need be to adequately back it up. New research has been released “showing” that people and dog experts around the globe misunderstand dogs. They really aren’t interested in dominance and becoming leader of a pack.
What data was this finding based upon?
The researchers spent six months studying dogs freely interacting at a Dogs Trust rehoming centre, and reanalysing data from studies of feral dogs.
Okay, I guess that is something. But how were the dogs studied and the previous data analyzed? Unfortunately, I couldn’t gain access to the published article to find out. What the news release did contain was pack of accusations about what people are wrong about in their understanding of dogs.
In the first paragraph above I put quotes around the word show. Why? Because the article preached more than it taught. It didn’t show me solid evidence. In fact, most of what it did was argue against the alternative position. If current beliefs about dogs are wrong, I want to know how they know it is — “just trust us” doesn’t cut it. I also would like to know what instead is right.
The researchers probably have a point, but perhaps not the paradigm-shifting one they claim. It is my hunch that much of talk of dominance in the context of dog and dog training is shorthand. As with the vast majority of species that live in a sort of hierarchically organized group, there is no simple, static, linear array of individuals. Individual A can get its way over B and B over C, yet C may trump A. And this “ordering” can and will change from month to month and even from specific resource being tussled over. If tussled is the right word.
Dominance talk is usually shorthand for a very complex set of behaviors and dynamic social interactions. To understand better why that shorthand may be misleading, we need to better understand what is actually going on in these types of canine-canine and canine-human interactions. Researchers . . . . please inform us.
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