Teaching dogs manners often equates to safety not dominance!
December 30, 2011
Joyce Kesling, CDBC
Nothing is black and white, we are a huge population of dog owners with a variety of reasons for having them. The fixation on dominance comparisons seems to focus on such ridiculous reasoning. How does smearing your babies poop on the wall teach your dog to be "safe" around babies? Someone please explain this one to me, I’ve not encountered this reasoning yet!
Leadership is not the same as teaching manners and safety! However, the two are closely related. Allowing dogs to rush through doors is not at all related to dominance unless you're making getting to a resource first as part of the equation!
Teaching dogs to move out of your way is not any different from navigating through a crowded bar! Some people can be so drunk, mixed with a low tolerance for space issues that bumping into them might initiate an attack on you! This is why we use words like "excuse me" to pass safely. You could include "excuse me" in the safety signal category! I’m letting the person know what is going to happen, what they can expect! This by no means guarantees safe passage!
To suggest that dominance implies making your dog move out of your way establishes leadership is a bit far-fetched! Why can't we make more reasonable comparisons? For example (!) what IF you (professional dog trainer) were contacted by an 89 year old person using a walker to navigate their small condo and world? Is it really too much to ask in some situations that our dogs learn to move, learn to sit at doorways because it's simple manners that involve our safety?
Here's a great example! My 90# doberman decides to lay alongside my bed, right in the limited pathway I have to get by! What IF there were no exceptions to the idea floated around dogdom asking him to move would be compared to teaching my dog that I'm dominate! Has anyone considered the alternative? I at my much younger age and mobility say to myself, I'll just step over him and while doing so, he is startled and jumps up knocking me to the floor! This has nothing to do with neither teaching leadership nor dominance! It’s about safety!
I think there are perfectly good reasons and examples why teaching dogs signals that protect us as well as them that don’t equate to dominance!
