Come, people, observe. Dogs come in a great variety of personalities
and temperaments. You simply adapt the training to what you've got.
What happens in the wild? A would-be alpha dog gets swatted, bounces
up, gets swatted, learns where he or she fits. I write "swatted," not
beaten up or thumped. The degree of violence is a matter of canine
vocabulary, not human, and it's not about damage. Dogs in packs
damage, kill, eat other dogs. As Lawrence says, he was lucky his dog
didn't run into a pack of coyotes. In scuffles among themselves, dogs
of a kind work out power struggles. Dogs include people among their
kind.
Of course a dog that's attacked by a man will be dangerous; there was
no conversation there, no readable vocabulary, merely violence. The
swatting is part of a conversation about who gets to make the rules.
All that I've read on training is mostly about how one translates human
into canine and vice versa. It's a language problem.
But Lawrence is, I think generally right; dogs who want to lead the
pack will challenge until they either win, or figure out who really
ought to lead the pack. Less ambitious dogs have different
understandings of the world and should be trained differently.
Maybe I have a skewed view of things; border collies are not ordinary
dogs. But with the first dog I relied too much on gestures and
persuasion. A wise old trainer said, before I got my second dog,
"Knock him off his feet once, early on." I did. When the puppy pulled
I quite literally bowled him over. Now we just talk. I say, "Don't
pull." He looks at me. There's no cowering. The look says, "But
we're going to the PARK. Can't you walk faster than that?"
David Ritchie, Portland, Oregon
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