It is easy to see why trainers and owners alike are fond of the concepts of “pack” and “dominance” in relation to pet dogs. A pack means we’re all part of the same gang. “Dominance” explains our respective positions in that pack. We live in a pack with our pet dogs and they either dominate us or we dominate them. To be at the top of the pack with total dominance would make you the “alpha”, with all the esteem that entails, therefore dogs will strive for dominance unless you beat them to it. It’s a neat explanation.
Except that none of it actually bears scientific scrutiny.
This meme originated in the “dogs are wolves” theory in the late 1960s. It was spawned in the pond of genetics from the premise that if a dog is the same species as the wolf they must behave identically. The perceived wisdom at the time, emanating from L. David Mech’s book, The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species(2), was that wolves pack and dominate each other, therefore dogs must also pack and dominate each other. The theories of wolf and dog “dominance” and the “alpha” firmly entered the imagination of not only the public, but also the scientific community.
...However, as science advances our viewpoint changes and in Mech’s case, as he points out in his 2008 article Whatever Happened to the Term Alpha Wolf?(3) more rigorous examination of wild living wolves revealed that their social behaviour was centred on the family unit, built around cohesion and co-operation, not conflict. A fight for pack dominance would mean striving to displace one parent in order to mate with the other. The model of the wolf’s supposed fight for dominance and alpha status was replaced with one where parents and older siblings guide and lead younger offspring in order to enhance overall genetic fitness. In 1999 Mech published Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs(4), in which he corrected his earlier mistaken ideas.
It has been well established that the social behaviour of the domestic dog is unlike that of the wolf. The domestic dog is a neotonised version of the wolf-type ancestor, a specialised variant that evolved into a newly formed environmental niche to scavenge the domestic waste of human settlements. These adaptations removed the need to operate as a true wolf pack and consequently there is little collaboration in hunting or in care of offspring, but much more cooperation with strangers, dog or human. Although dogs congregate in groups around resources, they do not form packs in the cohesive family way that wolves still do.
Preferences will become established in repeated encounters, but pet dog relationships are far too complicated to be defined through a simple, “one individual dominates another”. A smooth relationship is one in which each knows the other’s preferences and defers accordingly. This is often described in terms of resource holding potential(6), but the important aspect of it is that it is emergent, not the result of pre-programmed “dominance”.