How Do I Show Dominance Over My Dog?
You don’t. Please don’t.
Dogs have been domesticated over 30,000 years now. They are very far removed from wolves (which have their own misconceptions about how packs work) and are very far removed from a lot of “wolf behaviors”. Instead, you should be thinking about it in terms of family structure. Your dog is a member of your family and the way they learn and view themselves is more akin to a child to their parent. If you at the very least approach the question “why is my dog doing this?” with that thought in mind, you will most likely find a more understandable answer to their behavior. Scaring your dog into listening to you will not teach them to listen to you.
That being said, some people may not like being told that their dog is comparative to their child. Understandably, there are key differences between a human child and a dog, however the way that they learn is not one of those things. One big difference is the blank slate theory; where all children are born with a blank slate that can be altered via nature or nurturing. Dogs and puppies, on the other hand, have a bit of an altered beginning slate, depending on their breed (or mixes of breed). Some dogs were bred to herd and others were bred to hunt. This means your dog will come with a basic blueprint that you can build upon rather than a blank slate that you help fill in. All the behaviors you see your dog demonstrate are them trying to satisfy this blue print because they feel a need to work and complete what dogs like them have been doing for longer than you can probably trace your lineage back to. If you think scaring your dog into not guarding something, when guarding and defending is something that type of dog has been doing for thousands of years, then you are sadly mistaken. Instead, teach your dog what their new job is, because you still need to satisfy their desire for a job. That impulse to protect something comes from a long history of being told to protect something, so you just need to give them something else to do and the behavior you’re seeing will most likely go away without and intense interventions.
Coming back to this misconception that asserting dominance over your dog is like putting their place in the pack; your dog is not a wolf. Your dog has ever been a wolf just as a coyote or a fox or a hyena has never been a wolf. Chickens have evolved from dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are no longer to be found. Wolves are still found today. It would make no sense based on all the information we have about evolution to connect them more than them both belonging to the canine family.
There was a study done in the 1940s where a scientist went and observed a wolf pack and established these “alpha wolf” language. However that same scientist later redid the study, only to find that it was a wolf family, where the “alpha” was actually the dad, and the “beta” was the youngest runt of the litter. Of course there is a somewhat more complex level of hierarchy than a human household, but it is still a family structure and not just a bunch of random wolves, where one is superior to the others because of how dominant or aggressive they are. It’s usually just the dad looking out for his kids, and that’s what you should think about when you think about addressing your dogs’ behavior.
