Deference, not Dominance
Many dog trainers look to throw together a short and attractive sound-bite, then come up with a bunch of reasons why this is both so different and such a terrific approach. Since many people have heard that everything natural is so very good, why not call themselves Natural Trainers?
Here they explain that dominance is bad, and that you should always use deference, like the dogs do. However, their formula for deference seemed to be rather like something else, perhaps actually dominance(?).
I decided to follow this introduction by explaining the difference, using a few articles from Karen Overall, MA, VMD, PhD, DACVB, CAAB, who even more is just a generally smart behaviorist who I’ve followed for several decades.
Comes Now the Natural Trainer
Whether you are training a dog to sit, or working with a serious behavioural issue like aggression, there is one key ingredient that is necessary for success: Deference.
Deference is simply defined as the dog understanding that all information coming from you is the most important information it can receive. This is not randomly demanded but rather taught like any other skill the dog will learn.
Natural Dog, Neal Espeseth
While they go through a definition and all of the steps needed for this deference, Neal never really defines dominance. Actually, maybe they really do define it, just calling it deference?
Look at it this way: let’s take two married people. If one of them always gets their way, we might call that dominance. But if each difference was resolved by choosing which one of them was more excited by their direction, that could be called deference, but that’s not what they are suggesting here.
Instead, what person in what world would ever consider all information coming from you to be of such importance? Not a dog or a spouse, but perhaps only your computer?
My dog wanted to go play chase, but the other dog wants to run after the ball. My dog runs behind him, then cheers (standing and barking) as he starts running towards the ball. He may run a bit with him, but lets him get the ball, and both have fun. Dominance, or deference?
Being Natural, he know more than others
The scary part is that a lot of obedience trainers do not understand deference, or how to teach it. Some trainers who still use force and dominance don’t even know what it is.
I can walk my dogs to the middle of a very busy off-leash park and touch my nose and my dogs will sit and not take their eyes off me.
Natural Dog
Their first issue is in criticizing others while making the same mistake. There’s no textbook or research which even suggests his description is correct, or even that it makes any sense at all. The other is in him teaching only obedience, instead of behavior. Pressing a button (his nose touch) to get a guaranteed specific behavior is what I expect from my TV remote. My dog is a companion with intelligence and feelings. Instead, I find his approach rather scary.
I’m walking with my dog (off leash) and we pass several pups playing. He looks up at me, and I suggest we let the young kids play and just go on a walk. We just keep walking. If there was a dog that he really wanted to see, he would say so, and we’d stop by there for a minute. If passing by a bunch of people and other dogs, I may simply ask him to stay by me, or just let him walk over and meet everybody. I see that type of interchange as far more natural than the robotic obedience that Neal describes. As for actual deference protocols, there’s a bit more to that than he realizes, as I discuss in another post.
His Steps for Deference
Put your dog on leash in the house and just stand in the middle of the room, but do not look directly at your dog. DO NOT SAY ANYTHING!
At first you dog will be a little bewildered, but he will eventually look at you. When he does, mark it (reinforcer) with a treat. DO NOT SAY ANYTHING!
Then move to different areas in your home and repeat.
Perhaps the first thing to wonder here is just what anybody would find natural about any of that? Next, from the viewpoint of behavior conditioning, you have just taught your dog to look at you whenever you stand there, doing nothing. Finally, what’s the utility? If your dog’s about to run off or do something and you just stand there quietly, how much of a response would you expect? Instead, we commonly use both verbal and physical cues (gestures) here to prompt desired behaviors.
The likelihood of the dog repeating anything you teach them elsewhere in your house is pretty high, enough that I rarely bother. Instead, it’s far more useful to do that in the back yard then on a walk, then the park.
Once you have mastered just having him look at you, then start requiring a sit. When he looks up, simply touch the end of your nose with your finger, leaning very slightly toward him (do not bend down to him) to imply and emphasize a sit. When he does, mark it (reinforcer) with a treat.
We are expecting the dog to figure out what we are asking for, when he guesses correctly with a sit, we reinforce it. The dog is starting to understand that information that comes from you is important, and problem solving and that in order to get it he has to look at you.
* Please note, we a NOT teaching sit, we are actually teaching: predictability, focus, trust
Perhaps this is something to do with Neal forming some kind of secret commands? More typically, holding your hand just above and behind a dog’s head may cause them to look up and naturally sit. So why on earth would one want to touch one’s nose for a sit cue? And, if so, I would really hate to ask Neal what I should do to cue a come. And, if that dog sits every time you touch your nose, how is that not teaching sit?
As for that trust, while predictability and focus are part of nearly every training protocol, trust is one of the end results, and can never be directly taught. Similarly, predictability may be ensured by repetition, but it cannot be directly taught without it. These are all common words, with common meanings.
The Behaviorist
Besides Neal including the use of natural and deference, his simple examples rapidly fall apart under even a cursory examination. But, then we can see how he attempts to identify himself as a dog behaviorist, with yet more misinformation.
A consultation with a properly trained behaviorist helps you obtain results faster and more effectively
Natural Dog
However, most of the time that is simply not true. First, look at the very large number of dog trainers we have as compared to the relatively few actual animal behaviorists. The core function of most dog trainers is to teach the person how to teach the dog, in areas ranging from simple obedience to agility and competition. For something well over 90% of the cases, a behaviorist not only isn’t needed, but most would be far more expensive than a dog trainer’s class handling a dozen dogs and people at one time.
The Absolute Normal
Animal behaviorists are trained to observe behavior and body language of animals, and can determine whether the animal’s reactions to a situation are typical and/or normal
Excepting that for a behaviorist Neal’s clearly an amateur, as he left out the most important part. It is not uncommon to see two dogs both exhibiting the same undesired behaviors. But where the methods and efforts needed to change each dog are wildly different, as the two dogs differ in habituation, learned behaviors, temperament, and the behavioral momentum of the undesired behaviors.
To assess that, we first make small changes in the stimuli and scenario, then observe the change (if any) in the dog’s response. For a starting point, that gives you both the type and intensity of the work needed. And, without this, you’re doing nothing more than just guessing, over and over again.
To nitpick a bit further, his use of normal behavior is nonsense. The actual criteria relates to behaviors which are acceptable by people in that environment, and which support the well-being and happiness of the dog. Behaviors normal for a working farm dog are very different for a city apartment-dwelling dog.
Finally, the common limit in resolving severe behavior issues is often not the dog, but the person. If the person is unable or unwilling to do what is needed, they will either fail now, or fail slowly later on after you leave and they’re on their own. In those cases, you have to try and find some practical compromise which gives some realistic results.
When dealing with many severe behavior issues, it is important to explain these limits to the person very early on. You always need to set realistic goals.
Summary of the Natural Trainer
We start with Neal not knowing what deference actually is, and instead just making up his own definition. One which perhaps makes for a good sound bite, but which will often be highly aversive and uncaring for your dog.
Neal then explains his very large difference between a dog behaviorist and trainer, claiming his knowledge of a science which clearly seems far beyond him. To explain that statement, I’ll next go into the real science that he missed.
The Science – Resolving Misconceptions and Myths
Dumbed down by dominance, Part 1
Among the characteristics of social behavior that dogs share with humans is that their social systems are based in deference. Additionally, associated signaling is often redundant, and most signaling or affirmation of signaling is nonvocal rather than vocal.
Karen Overall
It’s pretty common to hear about dogs responding to body language as much or more than to your words. And that’s often pointed out as a major difference. However, people have always had actors doing the same, even when the early movies were silent.
Dominance is a traditional ethological concept that pertains to an individual’s ability, generally under controlled conditions, to maintain or regulate access to some resource. It is a description of the regularities of winning or losing staged contests over those resources. It is not to be confused with status and, in fact, does not need to confer priority of access to resources.
Regarding animal behavior and the meaning of dominance, you can find some variations of this at different places. However, this is about the most complete and consistant definition that I’ve seen, and follows everything I learned decades ago.
In situations in which the concept of dominance has been used with regard to status, it is important to realize that it is not defined as aggression on the part of the “dominant” animal but rather as the withdrawal of the “subordinate.”
The behavior of the relatively lower status individuals, not the relatively higher ranking one, is what determines the relative hierarchical rank.
The point here is that aggression is not and need not be a common component of dominance.
Rank itself is contextually relative. Truly high-ranking animals are tolerant of lower-ranking ones.
Without seeing large numbers of very socialized dogs, people instead tend to conclude that the dogs who seem to get their way with aggressive methods are the dominant ones. Yet it’s often only the lack of social skills and fear aggression that causes what they see.
The misuse and misperception of the concept of dominance with respect to pet animals has seriously confused any understanding of the behavioral diagnosis that was formerly called dominance aggression (now more often called impulse control aggression or conflict aggression).
For that reason I stopped ever trying to use dominance. However, most dog trainers that I have met over the years still support the aggression view of dominance. Dr. Overall then spells out several areas of resulting harm, but I’ll focus here on just her last one.
Finally, dogs exhibiting this diagnosis, which is based in pathological anxiety and not in use of inadequate force, were to be treated by physically and behaviorally dominating them. The single most devastating advice ever given to people with dogs is that they should dominate their dogs and show the problem dogs “who is boss.” Under this rubric, untold numbers of humans have been bitten by dogs they have betrayed, terrified and given no choice.
And, that well describes some of the dogs that I worked with. They were scared because they didn’t know the social rules on how to behave in order to handle a situation, but knew any misstep would get them punished. Some didn’t know how to stop the punishment, so they were backed into a corner, and aggression was the only thing left to them.
And for dogs with an actual anxiety disorder, it can range from severe human aggression to learned helplessness and pathological apathy.
Dumbed down by dominance, Part 2: Change your dominant thinking
In short, in both dog and human interactions, violence is often a sign that something has gone wrong.
Karen Overall
An the deference part of this is…
What do we mean by deference? Deference occurs when social individuals assess an ongoing situation and wait calmly to get input from another member of the group before pursuing another set of behaviors or social interactions.
Karen Overall
In a simple case, often when walking my dog he gets input into where we go. He likes to track scents, and if he indicates that, I’m mostly following him. After his early training he learned enough basic skills to start making more and more decisions as we continued. What’s sometimes called choice training is important for a dog who is training to work in rehabilitating other dogs, as he must get used to very often making his own informed decisions.
By thoughtlessly using the word pack, we have assumed that humans must be the leaders of the pack. This assumption has caused us to behave badly toward animals.
Instead, as Dr. Overall also says earlier, I relate a pack of dogs to a gaggle of geese, and nothing more.
Interacting with a dog is not about having dominion over the dog. It’s about signaling clearly to the dog and being reliable so that the dog learns to take its clues about the appropriateness of its behaviors from you.
The basis for all efficient interactions here would be effective communications, which requires that clarity and reliability.
The true definition of punishment doesn’t require pain; it requires a stimulus sufficiently powerful that the undesirable behavior is abandoned by the dog with the subsequent result that the probability of the dog exhibiting the behavior in the future is lowered.
Even further, many places claim it require an aversive, which can be harmful. However, none of them define either aversives or even pain. If my dog wants to run and I hold him back with the leash, he doesn’t like it and it causes some discomfort. Therefore, we have a painful aversive, just one which is a world apart from forcing a submission roll or hitting the dog with a bat.