Dogs Need Understanding, Not Dominance

As “gentle parenting” has become a popular method of raising kids punishment-free, a parallel shift is happening in the world of dog training.

By Kelly Conaboy

September 20, 2023

In 2022, the researchers Lauren Brubaker and Monique Udell recruited 48 parents and their children for a study on the behavioral effects of different parenting styles. The adult subjects were given a survey about their expectations for their children, and how they typically respond to their needs; the children were tested to determine their attachment style, sociability, and problem-solving skills. I should probably mention that the children involved were dogs.

The dogs who were cared for by owners with an “authoritative” style, meaning one where high expectations matched a high responsiveness toward their dog’s needs, were secure, highly social, and more successful at problem solving. They bested those with “authoritarian” owners (high expectations but low responsiveness) and “permissive” owners (low expectations, low responsiveness). These results mirrored those in similar studies done on human children. “This is an important finding,” Udell said, “because it suggests that dog owners who take the time to understand and meet their dog’s needs are more likely to end up with secure, resilient dogs.”

The language might sound familiar to those acquainted with the concept of “gentle parenting,” a philosophy that’s become popular in recent years. Tenets of gentle parenting, including a focus on empathy in parent-child interactions, and avoiding punishment in favor of helping the child understand the reasons behind their actions and emotions, have been linked to positive outcomes for kids.

Read: The comic strip that explains the evolution of American parenting

And although children are obviously very different from dogs, a parallel shift in approach has been happening in humans’ relationships with their canine kids. Recent science shows that the best way to change a dog’s behavior is not through aversive techniques, such as prong collars or scolding, but through positive reinforcement and curiosity about the root of behaviors. It requires working in partnership with a dog’s nature, rather than trying to get it to suppress that nature to more easily conform to a human world. This way, change can come from a place of mutual understanding and comfort, rather than from a place of fear.

The idea is now gaining traction, a fact that Susan Friedman, a psychology professor emeritus at Utah State University, attributes to a “long-standing march towards more humane and effective interaction” between parents and children, and between animals and their caregivers. This march sees society “moving away from the ‘do it or else’ model that is the legacy of most of us,” she told me, “to ‘How can we have a dialogue about what you do, and can I provide reasons for you doing it that matter to you?’”

Read: What kind of villain doesn’t clean up after their dog?

In dog training, this “do it or else” model has its roots in the concept of the “alpha wolf,” a long-debunked theory that originated in the 1940s with the Swiss researcher Rudolph Schenkel. In his study, Schenkel placed unrelated wolves in a small enclosure; they fought, and he erroneously interpreted this fighting as a battle for dominance. (It has since been proved that wolf packs are not led by an “alpha” and instead comprise a set of adults, called “parents,” and their children.)

The dominance-focused model is rife with physical punishment, deprivation, and, perhaps most bizarre, the idea that humans must eat dinner first. Its influence is such that even people who would never physically punish their pets may still assume that the most important quality in a dog is obedience. This might lead them to, for example, discourage pausing and sniffing on walks to try to keep the dog matching their pace. This desire for control undermines the dog’s natural need for scent; dogs depend on their sense of smell to communicate and assess their surroundings. (Research has shown that dogs have up to 300 million olfactory receptors, whereas humans have only 6 million; most of us primarily perceive the world through sight, but they use smell.) Beyond that need, sniffing offers other benefits: Studies have shown it to mentally stimulate dogs, help them de-stress, and maybe even make them more optimistic.

Despite the mounting evidence against it, the dominance model persists, perhaps pushed most famously by the celebrity trainer Cesar Millan but also by many others working in the largely unregulated field of dog training today. This is due in part to the fact that coercive training, which uses fear and pain avoidance, can indeed appear to be an effective shortcut to so-called good behavior. But the results are often short-term, the product of the dog merely suppressing a behavior rather than modifying it, and they can come at the cost of the dog’s mental and physical well-being. Coercive training also fails to take into account the possibility that an unwanted behavior is an expression of pain. Accepting that these techniques are misguided can be uncomfortable for those who have used them, which may be another reason they persist. Most people want to do right by their pets, and learning that you inflicted unnecessary pain, panic, and suffering on an innocent creature can be hard to accept. It requires admitting that you made a mistake.

Read: Is it okay to let my dog sleep in my bed?

The best way to shift people toward a kinder and scientifically backed approach to dog-human relationships might be—as, by now, you could have guessed—through gentle methods. If you want to talk to someone about their use of physical punishment or their apparent need to be the alpha, Friedman said it’s not particularly helpful to ask, How could you punish your dog like that? She suggests instead something like Are you willing to let me show you that there’s another way that does not compromise your goals?

Though the parallels between the rise of gentle human parenting and the movement for gentle pet parenting show a widespread reordering of how people think about caretaking generally, an obvious difference is that human children will grow up into a world built for humans. The project of dog ownership is to help dogs exist happily and safely in a world not made for them. How fortunate, then, for both sides, that the most effective method is kindness.

Kelly Conaboy is a writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in Gawker, The Awl, and The New Yorker.