A Dog in Wolf’s Clothing? Part 2

Part 2: Dog in Wolf’s Clothing

What if your belief system regarding how a dog thinks and acts were incorrect? If dogs are like computers, Junk in = Junk out, it is little wonder why so many women are experiencing problems with their dogs.

For example, women tend to dread the puppy stage, especially the house-training phase and with good reason. Most of them are left with the task for housetraining the family pet. I will address this issue in future blogs. For now, if you follow the advice of most trainers, your puppy may take several weeks longer (if ever) to become reliable and trustworthy in your home. Using treats to house trained a puppy can be counterintuitive and cause it to have more accidents. Are you aware that staring at a puppy while it is eliminating outdoors may be misinterpreted by your pet as a threat? 

How many times have we heard an owner lament, “My dog flunked obedience class at Petdumb.” Worse still, “My dog and I were asked to leave before the course ended!”  Ladies:  It’s not your fault. It’s not the dog's fault. You have been working with the wrong information.

As preschoolers, most of us were introduced to the “Dick and Jane” series to help facilitate our reading ability. Dick and Jane run and jump and play with their dog, Spot. We delight in the fact that the dog is having a wonderful time with its human playmates. Unfortunately, for the remaining 12 or more years of our education, few of us receive any further information regarding dogs.

For centuries, some historians have perpetuated the idea that a cave man one day found a cute wolf puppy and brought it home as a companion for his mate and

children.  Survival was a daily struggle, it is pure conjecture and highly unlikely that the wolf puppy would have been regarded as anything less than a source of food and clothing. Wolves are also wild animals, not amenable to human contact or being confined and would require too much attention. If you were stranded in the Yukon and 1000 miles from civilization with limited shelter or food resources, would you go out and adopt a wolf puppy?

Research facilities focusing on wolf studies continue to report incidents of caretakers being challenged or attacked by a wolf that the attendant cared for since it was a pup. This is more likely to occur during the wolf's mating season or when vying for food or attention. A dog owner should never encourage or forcibly teach her dog to display wolf-like behavior.

Although wolves are capable of developing a lasting though perhaps unpredictable bond with humans and perform rudimentary tasks, they cannot pass this trait to their offspring. Wolf puppies, not unlike tiger kittens or bear cubs, are wild animals. They will not adopt their parents' passive behavior around humans unless imprinted at an early age or trained to do so. Many circus trainers and zoo animal handlers are mauled and killed every year by their unpredictable, wild charges. Even domesticated dogs that are one-quarter or more wolf stock must be considered potentially dangerous, because unlike their wild wolf, the hybrid has lost its fear of man.

Archeological research of primitive cave drawings provides no conclusive evidence that wolves ever mingled with humans. Sandia Cave in Las Huertas Canyon, New Mexico, one of the oldest sites to contain both human and wolf bones, cannot confirm that cave dwellers and wolves lived together. It would take another 100,000 years and the inception of agriculture and village life before the human-canine bond could develop.         

If the current theory that dogs are domesticated wolves continues to go unchallenged, dogs will continue to suffer the consequences. How many dogs have been abandoned, relinquished to animal shelters or euthanized by their owners because the dog couldn’t comprehend obedience instructions or behavioral modification directives based on wolf behavior? Your dog has no concept of pack order and is even less inclined to comprehend or obey the whims of that mythical creature, the alpha dog. No other domesticated animal (cat, pig) is compared with or expected to display similar behavioral traits as its wild (lion, boar) counterparts. What brought us to the belief that dogs are somehow domesticated wolves? 

Dr. Kohler, an internationally recognized and respected canine trainer and behaviorist during the late 1940s, developed a theory that dogs shared many behavioral commonalities with wolves. Although Dr. Kohler is to be praised for the significant contributions he made to the field of cynology (the study of dogs), he appears to have overlooked two important details: Dogs are not wolves. Dogs are not pack animals.