BJean

a dominant dog is not social hierachy. believing it is is what engenders the (hilarious) idea that dominance aggression = anxiety. the problem is not in the dominance aggression concept but in its over application. Sarah has provided us with lovely equations and a mighty lot of waffle There was lots I was going to bold and put a laughing emoticon next to, but really not worth the time. The problem is that the sarahs of the world are doing case studies on dogs who have had dominant natures bred out of them for 100s of years. owners are calling their dog 'dominant' when it misbehaves, because that is the word thrown around so much in the debates on pack theory, and when any training concept wishes to launch itself. fact is, dominance aggression - where dogs exhibit aggression towards humans - has been bred out of most breeds as a necessary part of the dogs function / purpose. in all of sarah's examples i read naughty dogs who are misbehaving towards their owners - NOT a dominant dog. so yes when we have dogs like this, dominance aggression is easy to disprove (and misunderstand), because it did not exist in the individuals in the first place. as i said, a dominant dog you recognise more from its behaviour towards what it doesn't know, rather than the owner it does know. hence social hierachy is describing 'dominance, middlemen, and the submissive individuals blah blah' quite distinct from a dominant dog, which is dominant in nature, independent of pack or no pack theory.

lol if you were in vic I'd be glad to have someone exercise/train two of mine that would benefit form outside time. perhaps contact some breeders in your area?

The two dogs of mine that would do that to you are dominant in nature but they are not alphas. imo dominant natured dogs have a strong psychologiacl ascendancy but this does not necessarily equate with being alpha. a DOMINANT dog is one that is prepared to exert its will onto others, people, dogs other animals. ALPHA reflects a dogs pack drive the two are not the same. i think many posts in this thread are referring to alpha and pack leader roles/theory/training perspectives not dominant dogs. Perhaps why there seems to be so much confusion / debate around what is a dominant dog is because some use the word 'dominant', lump it together with social hierachy and call it 'dominance theory'. You should be able to discuss a 'dominant dog' without going into pack theory ETA fwiw i think a dominant dog will always be more obedient and bonded to its owner than one that is not. so all this discussion on wolves and villages and who ignored who and what it meant i really don't see what it has to do with a dominant dog for the most part I read all these anecodtes as a discussion about pack dynamics / training theory. ;)

dominance imo is a dogs outlook, nothing to do with how much it is interested in you or whether it ignores you (as its owner) - that's training, the bond you have with your dog, and general breed aptitude for certain tasks. I've found my most attentive, intelligent (and interesting) dogs to be the dominant personalities. A dominant dog you wont pick from the way it interacts with me (or how obedient it is), but how it responds to you as a stranger or known acquaintance, even familiar acquaintance it may shoulder you, jump on you, shepherd your movement to keep you out of an area it considers 'theirs', or rather, 'not yours'. it will tolerate you but in its mind you're just a guest, an object of interest a dominant dog wil seek and maintain eye contact with you, if left in the room on your own you may find you really can't move from a certain area, the dog will impose on your personal space, may continually jump up on you, get in your face - if you were to try to remove it from a favourite / preferred area, bed, corner etc it would growl at you, challenge 'your challenge'. (after all you're have no influence in its world's function so who are you to assert what you want?)

I've seen some who are into schuhtzhund doggy dancing Star, Yeah, I've seen fear aggression treated with PP methods but never rank based. I think you will find that generally purely positive trainers with a rank HA dog, will prescribe medication. as according to *some* trainer's philosophy, if a dog is acting aggressively when you do not want it to (towards other people, not the handler), then the dog is anxious and/or because the handller is not being an adequate leader blah blah Also if one does not believe in rank, then one cannot diagnose it - therefore in a positive only world, a dog is more likey to be anxious than truely dominant; true dominant dogs are not born, so called dominant HA dogs are resorting to 'violence' because they are upset, fundamentally unhappy, eating disorder etc

'training' isn't something I think about all the time - by that I mean everyday management always happens and training is a part of that, but it is like feeding, careing -training is everything that I do with a dog. my goal is to minimise conflict and learn. also to educate others about dog differences. it's not important to me for dogs to be offlead at beaches /parks - bcz they cannot be - there are certain dogs that on maturity that is asking too much of them and the public. BUT the dogs have plenty of space to free run around here, so offlead jaunts are not that important. It's an achievement when I can take a dog out into a very public area and the dog doesn't react to other people and dogs. That we can go in a large park and enjoy the scenary - that people can approach and the dog be okay - or if not I read the body language early enough to avoid any problems. I'm also learning that 'old advice' is generally right, wrt a dog and its mental development. I learnt on the weekend that my resident doofas is not a doofas and his genes have just taken a little bit longer to kick in than his siblings/relatives. Sometimes I have to remember that. I can get au fait with something and forget how other people might react or get reacted to. RE advice when someone asks for breed advice, I tell them what the dogs can do. The good/bad and what this means for them in their situation. I give them examples of relatives and how they behave. I emphasise this is NORMAL for this type of dog, but do you want that type of dog / responsibility etc

Erny, cosmolo, tony et al you give me faith

ah yes i was wondering when someone was going to point that out i have Border Collies, the easier to train dogs... i don't think so.... i have seen some very unruly/pigheaded/arrogant Borders...

I've asked this before and I'll ask it again....what "wild dogs" do you keep referring to? Other naturally wild canids, which are not domestic dogs and have not evolved like the domestic dog has, or domestic dogs turned "wild" who are more likely to revert back to their scavenging ways rather than hunt to survive ie, stalk, chase, kill, consume, in packs?? If the latter, please provide proof that such "wild domestic" dogs exist and where...I will not accept feral dogs out for a good time with the neighbours sheep as an answer to this. proof on what feral dogs do? most funding for feral dogs is put into their extermination, not on how they get their food source. what matters to the DPI and farmers is that they are there and it costs them money. The DPI has only just now funded a project in QLD on LGDs and how they work with preventing feral dogs - as part of the study - feral dogs wil be looked at but not in the way that you require. If a farmer tells me he has a pair of feral dogs that come and hunt from his stock once or twice a week, I believe him. I reckon he knows the difference between local dogs out for a night on the town and a feral dog using his stock as a food source

Hi Kelpie-i I know it was mentioned in your earlier (probably your opening) post, but I'm finding it difficult to comprehend that it 'matters' whether the dogs are hunting for actual survival (which, amongst our domestic dogs they generally don't need to do) or hunting as a 'pack' because of some ancient instinct. Likewise Erny To assert that feral dog pack only hunts out of self survival - unlike the ultruist wild dog which hunts because it is living for the pack - extricates self survival from pack instinct, when in fact in animals that have an innate sense to form groups, the two are intertwined. ahhh but then this brings us to the whole point of the topic - dogs do not have an innate sense of pack - they have a communication system or understanding - lol or hierachy can't see new material here other than dalliances with the English langauge and its interpretation. on feral dog packs killing stock: they do eat what they kill when the dogs dont belong to a home and have no other food source, and therefore eat for self survival which in turn is survival for the pack - the DIFFERENCE between chasing an animal and killing it in the wild and chasing an animal and killing it in a confined space - is that once the first animal is down, the other animals can't really ascape anywhere. So in feral dog pack of 1 or x generations where they target farm stock - the dogs can kill for more than just their appetite. The dogs don't just live off livestock, they catch and eat native/wild animals when they can. But also do not miss an opportunity when it presents itself - no hunter does. On wild dogs: last time I caught attenborough chatting about them, I didn't see any altruist pack member dishing out food to the older or weaker - they had to wait their turn until the more assertive ate their fill. And if there wasn't enough food to go around - the lower ranked dogs went without. And in tough times, they died of starvation. Is that survival for the pack or self? same thing. You cannot have pack without first ensuring survival of the self.

Great point...you could see this is as a mutual understanding and agreement between two distinct personalities for the purpose of calm co-existence or you could see this as hierarchy. isn't that hierachy?

The same would then be applied to 'herd' animals bred and manipulated by humans for farming. I'm asuming if 'pack' is not relevant wrt dogs then 'herd' is not relevant to sheep, cattle, horse . . . maybe it's not, and on this new round world there is another word / defintion / explanation for what is instincitve in them? if dogs do not have an innate sense of pack - because of their human influenced dumpster pdog ancestory - then do sheep, cattle etc have an innate sense of herd? if so, why?

how are animals that descended from 'herds' going wrt their instinct? Bison, zebra are wild and will do as our 'wolf' counterparts - but our village dumpster pdog equivalent - sheep and dairy cattle - have been coddled, bred, fed and protected by humans - yet their herd instinct remains. or maybe I just dont get it and am handicapped by my neolithic capacity - living on a flat earth and all.

i read a lot of sweeping assumptions in the above about how mankind lived and evolved - not all humans lived in villages there were humans who lived an isolated nomadic existence without villages and pdogs from dumpsters and I don't even have to remain in BC, we can leap forward to AD. ray and his pdogs seem plausible in more moderate and 'modern' environments but in areas where there were long harsh winters -20 - 40C, high mountains - where environments did not sustain human life all year around - i don't see pdogs and their evolution as described above (I hope 'pdogs' doesn't become the new buzz word when newly trained dog trainers are explaining to their clients why the theory of 'pack' is archaic - when ye olde dogmen didn't know any better )

beautiful postcards from nature

I think much depends on how you define pack - do hyenas function and hunt as a pack? They're also one of the biggest free loader scavengers on the continent what about lions, do they live in packs? Is the definition of 'pack' how an animal hunts or why it hunts - who/what defined the boundaries of what constitutes a pack? Like any theory / or legal document how you define the boundaries and parameters of key words, influences not only how a theory / document is to be understood - but it also tells you a lot about the philosophical platform from which it was engendered. Langauge can be cleverly repackaged - I am not sure from what I have read of ray that he is purporting anything significantly different other than setting parameters for what he thinks is pack, and then going on with creation from there. Why groups of feral town dogs are referred to as a point of references, I don't know Already they share their territory with humans and therefore to a certain extent consider humans as part of their environmental hierachy. All animals have environmental hierachy - but I guess that depends on how you define environmental hierachy LGDs that patrol open range will hunt and obtain their own food - what keeps them with the stock is not just a need for survival of the self - otherwise they would not follow the herd, nor protect them from danger, nor refrain from eating the yummy ones when they get hungry. Incidently this is what makes a shiite LGD - the ones that eat the stock when no one is watching ie: the LGD whose sense of pack is less engrained than others. (nb: what turns a lion into a rogue lion ie one that kills both female and males of its species and does not form a lion pack?) I do think that some dogs/breed have less instinct for pack than others but it does not mean I have to redefine 'pack' in hunting terms only and conclude that technically 'pack' is not corect to use when referrng to dogs. Before any species can do anything together - their must be some kind of organizational structure in place. Ray imo has focused only one of the reasons this organisational structure exists.

this one is better www.takasvolkodav.com (other one is old and no info I don't think! ) Aphra sent you PM for boo boo

If she goes to the same training ground with more or less the same dogs then she is familair with the dogs at training and associates sharing the training ground with other dogs. In a different environment with strange dogs, she may be not that confident with other dogs. Maybe she is only okay with what she knows / can predict and needs to work on what she perceives as being familiar ie the norm

I don't believe CAO work with the same reliability and detailed command response / precision as typical working dogs. Manstopper or dogs used by areas of interpol in Bulgaria, Romania etc work in a very different way to say a patrol dog in Australia. but lol way OT

I am not sure whether it is resource guarding or defence wrt territory which makes them protect me eg: my male kimba seems to have a 1 - 3 metre tolerance towards people when it comes to his space/paddock/pen and on lead with me, wherever we may be. Whereas my other dogs will not react at all on lead off the property - they go into defence from sense of territory. There are no pack/leadership issues with kimba and I even though there would seem to be by the way he will 'not listen' to me ie: if I told Kimba to not growl at a person approaching he wont really obey, he might sit or stop growling for a moment but there is no way I can make him accept someone. kimba is just the atypical dominant male anatolian they can be bastards to manage but his loyalty and level of protection is second to none.

yep thought so many of the points raised would be like "yeah but ..." "yeah but ..." wrt to ASD and CAO and then different again for both. In countries with different dog laws, some CAO are used as PP / army / police manstopper dogs.

does it inlcude traditional LGD like Anatolian and Central Asian? not sure as there can be a lot of contradictions

Lilli do you find that they hold their weight without dry food? I have a young male here who tends to be a bit light on and I'm worried that if I drop the dry he may get even thinner. I've found it is easier to put weight on with raw food than kibble - my adolescent males each need about 9 cups a day of kibble plue eg/milk or sardines and were still trim on dry food. With the raw I deliberately give them the fattier off cuts, lamb flaps where as those that are too heavy or mature and less active, I give beef bone off cuts with more bone than meat and little fat, like brisket bones. Only those which are in growth phase or need to put on weight, I give the lamb necks to. Before I found a cheap meat source kibble+milk/egg/sardine was the only option as butcher/supermarket prices to feed the dogs on raw was more expensive than to feed them on premium brand kibble. Now it costs about $120 per week to feed the dogs, but I do use kgs and kgs of meat, maybe 80kgs a week? Honest I have never weighed it or added it up, I just get it by the bag /barrel

agreed my dogs get the lamb/beef off cuts and bones etc bcz its cheaper and they do better on it than any dry food. dry food is my dog food equivalent to fast food / take away - unlce albers is my dog mcdonalds of choice bcz quite simply its the best value for money and is in the next ailse to the horse feed I never have fed dry food on its own, always comes with calf weaning milk, sardines, or egg. A 15kg bag of any brand would last me 3-4 days and it doesn't matter if its royal canin, eukanuba, hills, optimum or uncle albers. Much easier to throw lambs necks and bones out to the dogs than cook up a storm with bucket loads of kibble and sardine/egg appertiser. Les rubbish, less s**t, less preparation, less money - much better all round if only I could feed the horses the same

Uncle Albers is higher in protein and is beef/chicken, Great Barko is beef/lamb. Apart from that, I couldn't tell you!