There’s an aspect of your dog’s psychology that I only touched on in the Dog Psychology, but it couldn’t be a more important concept when it comes to understanding the relationship between you and the dogs in your life. This is the concept of the pack. Your dog’s pack mentality is one of the greatest natural forces involved in shaping his or her behavior.
A dog’s pack is his life force. The pack instinct is his primal instinct. His status in the pack is his self, his identity. The pack is all important to a dog because if anything threatens the pack’s harmony, it threatens each individual dog’s harmony. If something threatens the pack’s survival, it threatens the very survival of every dog in it. The need to keep the pack stable and running smoothly is a powerful motivating force in every dog—even in a pampered poodle that has never met another dog or left the confines of your backyard. Why? It’s deeply ingrained in his brain. Evolution and Mother Nature took care of that.
It’s vital for you to understand that your dog views all his interactions with other dogs, with you, and even with other animals in your household in the “pack” context. Even though I’ve spent the Dog Psychology outlining the many differences between how dogs and humans see the world, humans—in fact, all primates—are pack animals, too. In fact, dog packs are really not so different from the human equivalent of packs. We call our packs families. Clubs. Football teams. Churches. Corporations. Governments. Sure, we think of our social groups as infinitely more complicated than dogs’ groups, but are they really all that different? When you break it down, the basics are the same: every one of the “packs” I’ve mentioned has a hierarchy, or it doesn’t work. There is a father or mother, a chairman, a quarterback, a minister, a CEO, a president. Then there are varying levels of status for the people under him or her. That’s how a pack of canines works, too.
The concept of pack and pack leader is directly related to the way in which dogs interact with us when we bring them into our homes.
The Natural Pack
If you study a wolf pack in the wild, you’ll observe a natural rhythm to its days and nights. First, the animals in the pack walk, sometimes up to ten hours a day, to find food and water. Then they eat. If they kill a deer, the pack leader gets the biggest piece, but everyone cooperates in sharing the rest. They’ll eat until the entire deer is gone—not just because they don’t have Saran Wrap in the wild, but because they don’t know when there’s going to be another deer again. What they eat today may have to hold them for a long time. That’s where the expression “wolfing down” food comes from, and you’ll see it in your own dog’s behavior much of the time. Wolves don’t necessarily eat just when they’re hungry; they eat when the food is there. Their bodies are designed to conserve. It’s the root of your own dog’s often seemingly insatiable appetite.
Only after wolves and wild dogs have finished their daily work do they play. That’s when they celebrate. And in nature, they usually go to sleep exhausted. Not once, while watching the dogs on my grandfather’s farm, did I ever see a sleeping dog having nightmares, the way domestic dogs in America do. Their ears would twitch, their eyes would move, but there was no whimpering or whining or moaning. They were so completely worn out from their day’s work and play that they slept peacefully, every night.
Every pack has its rituals. These include traveling, working for food and water, eating, playing, resting, and mating. Most important, the pack always has a pack leader. The rest of the animals are followers. Within the pack, the animals fall into their own order of status, usually determined by that animal’s inborn energy level. The leader determines—and enforces—the rules and boundaries by which the members will live.
I’ve already explained that a puppy’s first pack leader is his mother. From birth, puppies learn how to be cooperative members of a pack-oriented society. At about three or four months, after they’re weaned, they fall into the regular pack structure, and take their cues from the pack leader, not their mother. In packs of wolves and wild dogs, the leader is often a male, because the hormone testosterone—present in male puppies from the time they are very small—seems to be a cue to dominance behaviors. You’ll see a male puppy mounting both other males and females long before he is sexually mature—and no, that doesn’t mean he’s bisexual. It means he is acting out in play the dominance and submission behaviors that will be such a big part of his future life as an adult dog.
Though hormones are part of what makes a pack leader, energy plays an even greater role. When humans live in households with more than one dog, the dominant dog can be either male or female. The gender doesn’t matter, only the inborn energy level, and who establishes dominance. In many packs, there is an “alpha couple,” a male and female pair who seem to run things between them.
In the wild, pack leaders are born, not made. They don’t take classes to become leaders; they don’t fill out applications and go on interviews. Leaders develop early and they show their dominant qualities quite young. It’s that all-important energy we discussed earlier that separates the pack leader from the follower. A pack leader must be born with high or very high energy. The energy must also be dominant energy, as well as calm-assertive energy. Medium- and low-energy dogs do not make natural pack leaders. Most dogs—like most humans—are born to be followers, not leaders. Being a pack leader isn’t only about dominance, it’s also about responsibility. Think about our own species, and the percentage of people who would like to have the power and perks of the president, or the money and goodies of a Bill Gates. Then tell those people that the trade-off is that they will have to work around the clock, 24-7, almost never see their families, and rarely take weekends off. Tell them they’ll be financially responsible for thousands of people, or responsible for the national security of hundreds of millions of people. How many people would choose those leadership roles after being presented with such daunting realities? I believe most people would choose comfortable but simpler lives over great power and wealth—if they truly understood the work and sacrifice that leadership costs.
Similarly, in a dog’s world, the pack leader has the responsibility for the survival of all the pack members. The leader leads the pack to food and water. He decides when to hunt; decides who eats, how much, and when; decides when to rest and when to sleep and when to play. The leader sets all the regulations and structures that the other pack members must live by. A pack leader has to have total confidence and know what he’s doing. And just as in the human world, most dogs are born to follow rather than do all the work it takes to maintain the position of pack leader. Life is easier and less stressful for them when they live within the rules, boundaries, and limitations that the pack leader has set for them.
For a dog born with a dominant disposition and energy, yes, it is harder and may take a little longer for him to accept a human as his leader. Such animals were not born to be followers; but their instinct for being in a smoothly running pack is stronger than their instinct for being the one and only leader. It is important to remember that a very dominant, high-energy dog should only be with a human who has the energy, skills, and knowledge for being the leader for a dominant, strong-breed dog. The person who chooses a dominant, strong-breed dog also must make a commitment to leadership—and needs to take that commitment seriously.
As we’ve discussed before, pack leaders project calm-assertive energy. Even if you’ve never observed a pack of dogs or wolves before, it shouldn’t take you long to pick out the leader. He will have a dominant posture—head alert, chest forward, ears up, tail stiff; sometimes he almost swaggers. Pack leaders are clearly very confident dogs, and it comes naturally to them. They aren’t faking it, and they couldn’t if they tried. Their followers, on the other hand, project the energy known as “calm submission.” They walk with their heads in line with their bodies or down, and they stay behind the pack leader while traveling, their ears relaxed or back, their tails wagging but always kept low. If the pack leader challenges them, they might back away, bend down, or even lie down and roll over, exposing their bellies. By doing that, basically they’re saying, “You’re the boss, and I’m not questioning that. Whatever you say goes.”
No Room for Weakness
In nature, if a pack leader shows any weakness at all, he will be attacked and replaced by a stronger member of the pack. This is true across all animal species that live in tiered social systems. Only the strong can lead. In fact, extreme weakness among any member of the pack is not to be tolerated. If there is a dog in the pack that is unusually weak or timid, he will be assaulted by the others. Weakness doesn’t cut it among any animal species—except our own. This is one of the most interesting differences between modern human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom. Not only do we accept weakness in some of our pack members, we also actually rescue our “weak” brothers and sisters! We rehabilitate people in wheelchairs; we tend to our sick; we risk our lives to save a “pack member” who might not make it anyway. While what some researchers call “altruistic behavior” has been documented in many other species (especially the other higher primates), compared with most other animals, human beings take this kind of graciousness to an extraordinary level.
Not only do humans rescue our own; we save other animals, too. We are the only species that rescues sea gulls, crocodiles, hyenas, and whales. You’ll never see a zebra rescuing an injured elephant. Think about the animal lovers you know—dog lovers, lion lovers, horse lovers. Every animal seems to have its own “fan club” among humans—a group of people with such compassion for a chosen species that they’ll rescue even the sorriest specimen of that species. Many of the dogs at my Dog Psychology Center came to me in such bad shape that it was their last chance, and I brought them back from the brink. I’ve got a dog with three legs, a dog with no ears, a dog with one eye, and a dog who’s the product of such severe inbreeding, he’s always going to be mentally handicapped. It’s because I’m a human and I feel sorry for these dogs that I’ll do whatever it takes to give them another chance at a full, happy life. But in their natural habitat, other dogs don’t feel sorry for the frail and the feeble. They attack and execute them. There’s nothing intentionally cruel about it—remember, we’re also the only species with a system of morality, of right and wrong. It’s simply that a weak animal endangers the rest of the pack, and nature has ingrained in animals the instinct to breed together the strongest members, so the next generation will have a better chance of surviving to breed again. Nature polices its own.
Our tendency to rescue others comes from our emotional energy. Our compassion and our loving natures are beautiful things, and part of the miracle of being human. But to other animals, emotional energy can be perceived as weakness. Love is a soft energy, so when it comes to pack survival at least, love on its own is indeed a kind of weakness. Animals won’t follow soft or weak energy. They won’t follow compassionate energy. St. Francis of Assisi and his birds notwithstanding, animals won’t follow a spiritual leader. They won’t follow a lovable leader. Nor will they follow overly excited energy. We are a pack-oriented species, but as I’ve said, we are also the only species on the planet that will follow an unstable leader. Animals—whether horses, dogs, cats, or sheep—will follow only a stable leader. That leader’s balance is reflected in his consistently calm-assertive energy. So when we project excited or loving or emotional or even overly aggressive energy to the animals in our lives—especially if that is the only energy we’re projecting—they are much more likely to see us as followers, not as leaders.
To Lead or to Follow?
To dogs, there are only two positions in a relationship: leader and follower. Dominant and submissive. It’s either black or white. There is no in-between in their world. When a dog lives with a human, in order for the human to be able to control the dog’s behavior, she must make the commitment to take on the role of pack leader, 100 percent of the time. It’s that simple.
It doesn’t seem that simple, however, for many of my clients. Hundreds of them keep calling me because they are desperate, because their dogs’ problem behaviors are totally controlling their lives. Perhaps some of them have a hard time getting their minds around the dominant-submissive paradigm because, in the human world, those words sometimes come with baggage attached. When we hear the word dominance, perhaps we think of a wife-beater, a drunk in a bar fight, a playground bully extorting lunch money from the classroom runt, or even a masked man or woman in an S&M club with leather and whips. The word conjures up images of cruelty in our minds. It’s important to remember that, in the animal kingdom, the word cruelty doesn’t exist. And dominance isn’t a moral judgment or an emotional experience. It is simply a state of being, a behavior that is as natural in nature as is mating, or eating, or play.
Submissive, as we refer to it here, is not an ethical judgment, either. It doesn’t designate an animal or human who is a wimp or overly pliable. Submissive doesn’t mean vulnerable or ineffectual. It is merely the energy and the state of mind of a follower. Among all pack species, there has to be some degree of dominance and submission in order for any hierarchy to function. Think of an office full of workers. What would happen if they all came in and left whenever they felt like it, took four-hour lunches, and argued with one another and with the boss all day? It would be chaos, right? You don’t consider an employee who comes to work on time, gets along with her fellow workers, and completes her tasks with a minimum of conflict to be “weak,” do you? No. You consider her to be cooperative, a good team player. But in order for there even to be a “team,” that employee has to accept a degree of submission in her mind-set. She has to implicitly understand that the boss makes the decisions, and it’s her job to follow them.
At the risk of being considered politically incorrect, I still use the terms dominant and submissive. To me, they accurately describe the natural social structure of dogs. For a dog, there are no judgments attached to the issue of who in a pack is dominant or who is submissive, be it a pack of dogs or a pack consisting of one dog and one human. A dog doesn’t take it personally if you take over the leadership position from him. In my experience, most dogs are relieved to know their owners are the ones in charge. Now that we’ve integrated them into our human world, there are lots of complicated daily decisions to be made that nature hasn’t equipped dogs to make. Dogs can’t hail a taxi, or push a shopping cart, or get money out of the ATM—at least not without some very specialized training! Dogs can sense this, and I’ve seen thousands of dogs visibly relax for the first time in their lives once their owners finally committed to a true leadership position. But mark my words—when a dog senses that his owner isn’t up to the challenge of pack leadership, he will step in to try to fill the void. It’s in his nature to do this, to try to keep the pack functional. The way your dog sees it, somebody has to run the show. And when a dog takes over that role, it often has disastrous results for both dog and human.
The “Powerbroker Paradox”
As I’ve mentioned before, many of my clients are super powerful people who are used to calling the shots in every other area of their lives. To the humans around them, they project such strong energy that they can be almost frightening! I’ve seen some of them give orders and bark commands at their staff, and have watched those workers literally cower at the sound of their boss’s voice. Talk about projecting submissive energy! The staff will then scramble all over one another to fulfill their employer’s demands—and there’s no question of who is in charge. But here’s one of the ironies of my work, which I call the “powerbroker paradox.” Once these influential people come home, from the moment they open the front door, the only energy they project to their dogs is emotional energy. “Ooooh! Hellooo, Pookey, my little snookums! Give Mommy a kiss! Oh, look at you, you bad dog—that’s the second sofa you’ve eaten this month.”
I don’t mean to make fun of these clients because I truly empathize with them. Trying to be top dog in the human world is an incredibly stressful experience. I know it feels good to come home to an adorable animal and let your hair down, to hang out with a creature who doesn’t seem to judge you and to whom you don’t have to prove how great you are every minute. It’s such nice therapy for these clients to cuddle with their soft, furry dogs. It’s like a long, hot, soothing bath. And in some respects, it’s true—their dogs aren’t judging them, at least not by the standards by which these people are used to being judged. Dogs don’t care if their owner has a hundred million dollars or a beach house or a Ferrari. They don’t care if their owner’s last record album went platinum or was a flop, or whether she won the Academy Award this year or had her TV series canceled. They don’t even notice if their owner has gained twenty pounds or just had plastic surgery. What dogs do judge, however, is who is the leader and who is the follower in the relationship. And when these powerbrokers come home and let their dogs jump all over them, when they spend the whole evening feeding the dogs treats, chasing them around the house, and catering to their every whim, then it’s clear that their dogs have rendered a verdict: that same human who is considered such hot stuff in the human world has, in the dog’s eyes, become a follower.
Oprah and Sophie
Oprah Winfrey—my personal role model for my professional behavior—is a perfect case study of the phenomenon I’ve just described. In the human world, she is not only always in charge, she is also amazingly calm and even-tempered. In my seminars, I always use her as the classic example of calm-assertive energy in action, because she really is the best at it. Oprah doesn’t need to prove she’s important; it simply radiates out of her being. She is also a model for emulating animals in their ability to live in the moment. Oprah has publicly come out and told the story of her past, and it clearly wasn’t an easy one. She also had to overcome the obstacle of being an African American woman, which was a pretty formidable roadblock during the years when she was starting out in her career. But unlike most humans, Oprah has cultivated the ability to keep moving forward. Her past has never held her back. She is, in my opinion, a shining example of human potential. And she’s remained a really nice and generous person on top of it all.
Ever since I came to America, it was my dream to be on the Oprah show. To me, that was the very definition of “making it” in this country. And when I did finally get on the show, the encounter exceeded even my wildest expectations. Oprah was gracious, perceptive, inquisitive, and witty, and she even reached out to my wife, Ilusion, sitting in the audience, to include her in the experience. The whole day was like a dream to me. The reason I was on the show, however, was because of Oprah’s private nightmare, her hidden weakness. Oprah—my calm-assertive role model—was letting her dog, Sophie, walk all over her!
When I first met Oprah at her forty-two-acre, ocean-view estate outside Santa Barbara in 2005, she had two dogs—Sophie and Solomon, both cocker spaniels. Solomon was the submissive of the two and was very old and feeble. Sophie, however—ten years old at the time—had a problem that was becoming dangerous. When Oprah walked her, if another dog came near them, Sophie would bare her teeth, get into defensive posture, and sometimes even strike out at the other dog. She also had serious separation-anxiety issues, and would howl for hours when Oprah and her partner, Steadman, left her alone. Unlike some of my clients, Oprah was too on the ball to have convinced herself that the problem was all Sophie’s fault. She knew that there were things she could be doing differently to help change Sophie’s behavior. Still, I’m not sure she was totally prepared for what I had to say to her.
During the consultation—the part of my visit when I sit down and simply listen to the human’s side of the story—I could tell simply by the words Oprah used to describe Sophie that Sophie wasn’t just her dog, she was her little baby. “She’s my daughter!” Oprah told me. “I love her like I gave birth to her myself.” To say Oprah had “humanized” Sophie would be an understatement.
As we talked, I learned that Sophie had been a very insecure little girl from day one. Both Oprah and Steadman described her hiding under the table and having very low self-esteem when they first brought her home. So what did Oprah do? What most dog owners do. She used human psychology and lovingly coaxed Sophie out, petting her and consoling her. Every time Sophie was nervous or fearful, Oprah would reach out and comfort her with affection and emotional energy. Unknowingly, Oprah was doing exactly the same thing Marina had done with Kane after he slipped on the linoleum floor. By applying human psychology to a dog in distress, both women were unintentionally nurturing their dogs’ insecure behaviors.
I can’t emphasize enough that dogs pick up every energy signal we send them. They are reading our emotions every minute of the day. Oprah, who has overcome a painful past by embracing life in the “now,” never lived in the moment when it came to Sophie! From the moment she even started thinking about taking Sophie for a walk, she was anticipating the possibility that Sophie might attack another dog. She was playing back in her head past confrontations, and imagining new ones. All that catastrophizing was making Oprah tense and emotional—energies that Sophie naturally interpreted as weakness. This set the dynamic between them from the moment Oprah picked up the leash—even before the walk.
Oprah would begin the walk by letting Sophie go out the door first—a classic mistake almost all dog owners make. It’s important to establish the leadership position on the threshold of the doorway. Whoever walks out first is the leader. Next, Oprah would compound that mistake by letting Sophie lead her on the walk. In a pack, the pack leader is always in front, unless he specifically gives “permission” for another dog to walk ahead. With Sophie in front of the leash, the two basically went where Sophie wanted to go. Because of her constant fear that Sophie would get into an altercation, Oprah was unsure of herself and anxious. Meanwhile, Sophie would be plowing ahead. A third-grader could have sussed out who was the leader and who was the follower in that twosome!
I had to remind Oprah that she, the dog owner, was the only one in the relationship who was worrying about what might happen on the walk based on what had happened in the past. Sophie wasn’t thinking about those things. Sophie was living in the moment, enjoying the grass, enjoying the trees, enjoying the clean sea air. She wasn’t thinking, “I wonder if I’m going to have to attack one of those nasty neighborhood dogs today.” None of her earlier confrontations had been premeditated, either. Sophie didn’t lie awake nights fantasizing: “I really hate that cockapoo, Shana, and I plan to bite her the first chance I get.” Like all dogs, in attacking other dogs, she had merely been reacting to a stimulus that was occurring at that moment.
And what happened when Sophie did encounter another dog and start to show signs of aggression? Oprah would either scoop her up and rescue her from the situation, or become very emotional, plead with her to stop, and apologize to the other dog owner. She didn’t act like a pack leader and just correct Sophie’s behavior. When a pack leader corrects another dog in a pack, he stops the dog’s disagreeable behavior. Calm-submissive dogs always pay attention to their pack leader’s instructions.
So what was driving Sophie to these aggressive reactions? Sophie was what I describe as insecure-dominant—she wasn’t a naturally aggressive dog, but when she saw another dog that caused a fear reaction in her, she responded by baring her teeth and making threats. Remember, an animal has only four possible responses to any threat—fight, flight, avoidance, or submission. Oprah’s reaction to Sophie’s aggressive posturing simply intensified the situation. Oprah would tense up and be filled with dread, flashing red lights for Sophie that her owner wasn’t in control. After the incident, Oprah would coo at Sophie, pet her, try to comfort her and let her know that everything was all right. Again, plausible psychology for a human child who is scared, but not dog psychology by any means! It’s natural for human beings to reach out and comfort other animals in distress in the best way we know how—with gentleness and reassurance. To a dog, however, giving Sophie affection at that moment was like saying, “Good for you, you show that mean other dog who’s threatening us.” When we show affection to a mind that has developed unstable behavior, that mind doesn’t move on. In Sophie’s case, it increased her anxiety to the point that, when feeling cornered, she actually lashed out.
I had to communicate to Oprah that she would have to change her entire approach toward Sophie if she wanted her dog to be the balanced and stable pet she was born to be. Because she’s so intelligent, Oprah grasped the basics of this concept immediately, but it still wasn’t easy to break through the very personal barrier of her thinking of Sophie as “her little girl.” At one point I remember saying to her, “You aren’t showing her leadership.” Oprah was speechless for a second. She turned and looked at Steadman. Then she said to me, very slowly, “You’re saying I’m not a leader?” That’s right. I was telling the same woman who Forbes claims is worth over one billion dollars and who currently ranks as the number one most powerful celebrity and the ninth most powerful woman in the world that she was not being a leader to her twenty-pound cocker spaniel.
Like all humans who love their pets, Oprah wanted only the best for her dogs. But her understanding of what was “best” came from a human perspective. She only wanted to love her dogs and give them the most wonderful life possible. But Oprah’s dogs hadn’t read the Forbes list or checked out Oprah’s bank balance. They didn’t care if her home was furnished by the world’s finest decorators or by the Salvation Army. Oprah’s dogs would love her just the same if she went broke tomorrow (although, as Oprah dryly observed, both dogs would certainly appreciate the difference if they were suddenly forced to fly in the cargo hold of a commercial airline instead of in the comfort of her private plane). What her dogs wanted most out of life was to feel secure in their places in the “pack” of Oprah’s family. And clearly, Sophie wasn’t feeling secure.
Oprah needed to learn to become a pack leader. She already was one in the human world. Now she had to practice the kind of leadership a dog would understand.
Rules, Boundaries, and Limitations
In nature, a pack leader makes rules, and sticks to them. A pack couldn’t survive without rules, no matter what the species. In many human households, the rules, boundaries, and limitations for dogs are unclear, if they exist at all. Just like children, dogs need rules, boundaries, and limitations in order to be properly socialized. In Oprah’s household, for example, Sophie didn’t have many rules, and those that did exist weren’t always followed. Sometimes, for instance, when Sophie would whine after Oprah left her alone, Oprah would relent, come back, and take Sophie with her. Other times, she’d come back and tell Sophie to “stop it”—but usually, the behavior had already escalated past the point of correction. Both human and animal psychologists call this “intermittent reinforcement,” and if you are a parent, you probably know that this type of discipline never works. If you allow your child to sneak a cookie from the jar one day and punish him for it the next, the child will always try again, on the off chance that he’ll get away with it. The same goes for dogs. Intermittent reinforcement of rules is a surefire way to raise an unbalanced, unstable dog.
Despite the fact that Sophie had lived in an unbalanced state for ten years, without solid rules, boundaries, or limitations, I stressed to Oprah that it was almost never too late for a dog to be rehabilitated. Even humans can turn their own lives around at age fifty, sixty, or seventy, and we have many more issues than dogs do! Oprah was looking forward to working on the problem, but was shocked when I arrived at her house with five other dogs—Coco, our Chihuahua; Lida and Rex, our Italian greyhound pair; a Lhasa apso named Luigi, who belongs to Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith; and the dog that made Oprah the most nervous, Daddy, the burly and very scary-looking pit bull who spends time in my pack when his owner, hip-hop artist Redman, is on the road. Daddy actually has the best energy of all the dogs in the pack. I first met him when he was four months old, when Redman brought him by my newly opened center. It has become a fad among rap artists to have big, tough-looking dogs for status. Redman was different—he was a responsible dog owner. He said, “I want a dog I can take anywhere in the world with me. I don’t want a lawsuit.” I started working with Daddy that day, and he has never missed a day of being fulfilled as a dog. Everybody who meets him falls in love with him, even though on the outside he’s very formidable. Daddy has helped hundreds of dogs become balanced, simply by sharing his own calm-submissive energy. And he’s a pit bull—which goes to show you that when it comes to dog behavior, energy and balance can and do overcome the influence of breed. All the dogs I brought with me to Oprah were very balanced dogs. They were there to give Sophie “group therapy.”
Sophie’s reaction to the other dogs was pretty predictable. When she first saw them, she stood on the doorstep, frozen. Between fight, flight, avoidance, and submission, she was choosing avoidance! I moved her down among the dogs and gave her a slight correction with the leash every time I noticed her lip begin to curl up as she became fearful or anxious. My energy was calm and assertive at all times. At first, I actually had to ask Oprah to remove herself from the situation; she was so terrified that Sophie was picking up on her energy. After about ten minutes, Sophie was able to relax. In about half an hour, she was picking up on the group’s calm-submissive energy and seemed actually to be enjoying herself. She was still tentative, but her body language was becoming calm and relaxed. That’s the power of the pack at work for you—a group of balanced dogs helping an unstable dog turn around in a matter of minutes. But the energy I was sending Sophie through the leash was vital, too. I was her pack leader, and I was instructing her to get along with the rest of the pack. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. And Sophie got the message.
Oprah and Steadman were amazed to see Sophie interacting calmly with other dogs. Just the fact that it was even possible seemed thrilling to them. I gave them the “homework” of making a regular habit of allowing Sophie around other dogs, while practicing calm-assertive leadership. Like a diet, calm assertive leadership doesn’t work unless you practice it every day. It was only through such regular “therapy” that Sophie would permanently change.
A dog will usually accept a human as its pack leader if that human projects the correct calm-assertive energy, sets solid rules, boundaries, and limitations, and acts responsibly in the cause of the pack’s survival. This doesn’t mean that we can’t still be uniquely human pack leaders. Just as dogs shouldn’t have to give up what’s unique about them to live with us, we shouldn’t have to give up what’s so special about being human. We are, for instance, the only pack leaders who are going to love the dogs in the way we humans define love. Their canine pack leader will not buy them squeaky toys or throw birthday parties for them. Their canine pack leader won’t directly reward their good behavior. He won’t turn around and say, “Gee, guys, thanks for following me ten miles.” It’s expected that they do that! A mother dog won’t say, “You know, you pups have behaved so well today. Let’s go to the beach!” In their natural world, the reward is in the process. (That’s a concept we humans could sometimes do well to remember.) For a dog there’s a reward in simply fitting in with the pack and helping to ensure its survival. Cooperation automatically results in the primal rewards of food, water, play, and sleep. Rewarding our dogs with treats and the things that they love is one way we can bond with them and reinforce good behavior. But if we don’t project strong leadership energy before we give rewards, we’re never going to have a truly functional “pack.”
Homeless Pack Leaders
While the human-dog bond is unique on both sides of the equation, we can’t just play the role of best friend, or dog lover. Whether we know it or not, when we play that role, we are automatically fulfilling our own needs first, not our dog’s. We’re the ones who need the constant affection and the unconditional acceptance.
Who do you think are among the happiest, most emotionally stable dogs in America? This is my observation, and you may find it pretty hard to believe, but I think that dogs that live with homeless people often have the most fulfilling, balanced lives. Go to downtown Los Angeles someday, or to the park overlooking the Santa Monica Pier, and pick out the homeless people who have dogs. Those dogs don’t exactly look like American Kennel Club champs, but they’re almost always well behaved and nonaggressive. Watch a homeless person walking with a dog and you will witness a good example of pack leader–pack follower body language. Usually, the homeless person doesn’t have a leash, but the dog follows either beside the human or just behind her. The dog is migrating with his pack leader, the way nature has ingrained in him.
“Homeless people?” you ask. “How can their dogs be happier? They can’t afford to feed them expensive organic dog food! They can’t take them to the groomer twice a month or even to the vet!” How true, but remember, dogs don’t know the difference between organic and regular dog food; they don’t think about groomers; and in nature, there aren’t any vets. Many times, homeless people don’t even have goals in their lives—not the way some type A achievers do, anyway. Some of them seem to be content to walk from place to place, pick up cans, and seek a meal and a warm place to sleep. This lifestyle might seem unacceptable to many humans. But for a dog, this is the ideal, natural routine that nature created for him. He is getting the consistent amount of primal exercise that he needs. And he is free to travel. In nature, all animals have “territories”—some large and some small—which they love to traverse, over and over again. Exploration is a natural animal trait, and genetically, it’s equated with survival because the more an animal explores, the more likely it is to find food and water, and the more information it will have about the world. In L.A., I’ve observed that the dogs that live with homeless people really get to know their city far better than a dog that lives in Bel Air. The dog that lives in Bel Air has a giant backyard. But to him, it’s just a big kennel. The homeless dog gets to wander for miles and then go to bed tired. The Bel Air dog gets to see the house, the inside of the car, and the groomer’s—and then goes to bed with another day’s worth of pent-up energy and frustration.
Balance in a dog isn’t created by giving them material things. It’s created by allowing them to express fully the physical and psychological parts of their being. Living with a homeless person, a dog migrates for food. It usually works for food, and even without a leash, there’s a clear leader-follower relationship between the person and the dog.
Many of the people who call me in to help them have trouble walking their dogs because of all the distractions that cause the dog to pull on the leash or run away or bark—kids, cars, other dogs. They think this is the dog’s problem. But check out a dog with a homeless person. The dog has never been to a training academy in his life. He and the homeless person walk along the busy streets passing cats, strollers, scooters, people with yapping little dogs on flexi leashes—yet the dog keeps on moving forward. This is what happens in nature; a dog or wolf pack would never hold together if individual dogs were running off all the time, getting distracted by frogs or butterflies! The homeless person acts as a pack leader does if the dog gets distracted—she only has to send a glance or a grunt the dog’s way to remind him of the rules and get him back on track. At the end of the day, the homeless person will reward the dog with food and affection right before settling down to sleep. They share a very elemental existence, probably very much like the earliest relationships between our human ancestors and dogs.
Who’s Top Dog in Your House?
Once my clients start to grasp the concept of the pack and the pack leader, they usually ask me, “How can I tell who’s the pack leader in my house?” The answer is very simple: who controls the dynamics of your relationship?
There are dozens and dozens of different ways in which your dog will tell you, loud and clear, who’s the dominant one between the two of you. If he jumps on you when you come home from work in the evening, he’s not just happy to see you. He is the pack leader. If you open the door to go for a walk and he exits ahead of you, it’s not just because he loves his walks so much. He is the pack leader. If he barks at you and then you feed him, it’s not “cute.” He is the pack leader. If you are sleeping and he wakes you up at five in the morning pawing you to say “Let me out; I gotta pee,” then he’s showing you even before the sun comes up who’s running the house. Whenever he makes you do anything, he is the pack leader. Simple as that.
Most of the time dogs are the pack leaders of the human world because the human will say, “Isn’t that adorable? He’s trying to tell me something.” There it is, that old Lassie syndrome again, “What’s that, Lassie? Gramps fell down the well?” Yes, in this case, human, your dog is trying to tell you something—he’s trying to remind you that he is the leader and you are his follower.
So, when you wake up on your own terms, you are the pack leader. When you open the door on own your terms, you are the pack leader. When you exit the house ahead of your dog, you are the pack leader. When you are the one who makes the decisions in the household, then you are the pack leader. And I’m not talking about 80 percent of the time. I’m talking about 100 percent of the time. If you give only 80 percent leadership, your dog will give you 80 percent following. And the other 20 percent of the time he will run the show. If you give your dog any opportunity for him to lead you, he will take it.
Pepper and the Perils of Partial Leadership
What happens when we give only partial leadership to our dogs? I’ve seen many situations where the human asserted the correct leadership energy and behaviors in all but certain situations. This is a great formula for an unbalanced dog because even more confusing for him than having to be a leader over a human is not knowing when he has to lead and when he has to follow.
Take another case from the first season of Dog Whisperer. Christopher, a photographer, had adopted an adorable eight-year-old Wheaton terrier mix named Pepper, and the two of them had bonded deeply. Every day Chris walked from home to the studio he shared with another photographer, and he had trained Pepper to walk there with him. Pepper was such a good dog on their walks that Chris no longer even needed to use a leash with her for their “commute.” To see the two of them together was to witness the same correct leader-follower body language seen in homeless people and their dogs. Traffic could pass, kids on skateboards could whiz by, horns could honk, and Pepper kept right on trotting beside Chris, head down, tail wagging. One little word from him was enough to correct her if she got distracted. It was clear Pepper loved their walking time together; she always arrived at the studio refreshed and relaxed.
Once inside the studio, however, another side of Pepper would rear its head.
The studio where Chris and his business partner, Scott, worked was also the space where they took pictures of clients. This meant that new people came in and out of the place several times a day. Pepper didn’t seem to like anyone coming in to the studio. She’d run to the door, bark, growl, and nip at the new person’s heels, “herding” him into the center of the room.
While Chris and Scott set up their lights and props, clients would usually be invited to sit in a designated waiting area. Unfortunately, Pepper had decided that the big vinyl couch in the waiting area was “her” couch. Clients who sat there would be met with fearsome growling and barking, and even threatened with bites.
This clearly wasn’t the kind of behavior that could be tolerated. It wasn’t harmless—Pepper had torn the hem off someone’s pant leg once, and if she kept on threatening Chris and Scott’s clients, it could be very damaging to their business. Chris was afraid he’d have to get rid of her—for many dogs whose owners can’t find substitute homes for them (and how many people will take on a dog that they know has problems?), this means being given back to a shelter. Unfortunately, 56 percent of dogs who go to shelters—especially dogs who’ve been returned multiple times—end up being euthanized, simply because they can’t find a human who can get along with them.
Chris called me in as a last resort. He was seriously thinking about giving Pepper away. In talking with him and Scott, it was clear to me that the two of them were giving Pepper no leadership whatsoever in the studio. From the moment she walked in, the place was hers—no rules, boundaries, or limitations. Chris would walk in the door and immediately start concentrating on his work, and Pepper would be left to fend for herself. Since neither Chris nor Scott was acting like the “leader” in the environment of the studio—at least, not in dog terms—Pepper assumed that it was all up to her. She was the queen, and she neurotically protected her territory in the only ways she knew how.
It was in the course of our conversation that I found out that Chris had been perfectly successful in walking Pepper out in the street—even off-leash. It’s much more difficult to get a dog to obey you in the great outdoors, with all its distractions, than it is inside the boundaries of home. I have many more cases of dogs that are compliant in the house but that misbehave on walks than the other way around, so I found this case intriguing. I asked Chris to demonstrate for me how he walked to work with Pepper, and I saw a completely different animal. I also saw a completely different Chris! He was focused, in control, and clearly looking out for Pepper, and they seemed to be emotionally in tune with each other. Why was the situation so radically different in the studio?
Basically when Chris came to work, he shifted into a different mind-set. All the great discipline that he had instilled in Pepper went out the window the minute the two of them came through the studio door. Chris had reneged on his leadership obligations, partly out of lack of information about dog psychology, but also partly because being a leader is hard work. It does take a certain amount of energy and concentration to be one all the time, and Chris was often so busy and harried at work that he couldn’t be bothered with setting proper rules for Pepper. Once they left work, he redirected his energy to being her leader again, and everything was fine. But now, because the situation had gotten so far out of control, he’d have to go back to the drawing board if he was ever to get her to respect him within the walls of the studio.
We rehearsed several scenarios of people coming to the door, and I observed how Chris allowed Pepper to go berserk every time the bell rang. I showed him how to make her sit quietly, in a submissive state, even before the door opened. You can tell a submissive posture in a dog from the position of the ears and the look in the eyes, but you must also be attuned to sensing submissive energy. Chris had taught Pepper to respond to commands, and I watched him telling her (not very convincingly) to “lie down” over and over. Her body went down, but it was clear her mind was still active and agitated. Her ears were twitching and her eyes were fixated on the door. When it opened and the visitor entered, she went wild again.
I showed Chris that it was less important that Pepper be lying down when the door opened than it was that her mind be submissive and relaxed. I also showed him how to give her a command that meant business. Basically, Chris was being a pushover, and he couldn’t fool Pepper about this. Remember, energy doesn’t lie. He wasn’t yet committed to the hard work it would take to split his concentration at the office between being Pepper’s leader and being a full-time photographer. It seemed overwhelming to him to have to do both at once. Chris really wanted to keep Pepper, and I helped him to realize that salvaging this dire situation was his responsibility alone.
When I finally saw him really mean it when he gave Pepper a command, he didn’t use words at all. He did what I do. He just made a sound: shhhhh. It wasn’t the specific kind of the sound that was important—in fact, I chose that sound because it was the sound my mother used to use to keep me and my brothers and sisters in line! What mattered was the energy behind the sound. The key, I told Chris, was in correcting Pepper before her mind got caught up in its excited, aggressive state. That would mean correcting her—shhhhhing her—again and again, until she became conditioned to remaining calm and submissive at all times while she was with him at the studio.
The case of “Picture Perfect Pepper” shows an extreme outcome of giving our dogs only partial leadership. With lower-energy, naturally happy-go-lucky dogs, the consequences might not be so serious, but in the case of Chris and Pepper, the stakes were high indeed. Chris risked lawsuits, losing clients, and ultimately losing his business if he couldn’t control Pepper—and Pepper risked losing her home, her owner, and very possibly her life (if Chris failed at finding a permanent home for her). Fortunately, once he understood the gravity of the problem, Chris took his responsibility seriously, and stepped up to the plate. There is no need for a dog like Pepper to live such an unbalanced life. All the elements she needed to be happy and stable were inside of her. However, she needed Chris, as her pack leader, to help her bring them to the surface.
Leading Is a Full-time Job
Dogs need leadership, from the day they’re born to the day they die. They instinctively need to know what their position is in regard to us. Usually owners have a position for their dogs in their hearts but not in their “packs.” That’s when the dogs take over. They take advantage of a human who loves them but offers no leadership. Dogs don’t reason. They don’t think, “Gee, it’s so great that this person loves me. It makes me feel so good, I’ll never attack another dog again.” You can’t say to a dog like you’d say to a child, “Unless you behave, you’re not going to the dog park tomorrow.” A dog can’t make that connection. Any show of leadership you give dogs must be given at the moment of the behavior that needs correction.
In your household, anybody can be a pack leader. In fact, it is vital that all the humans in the house be the dog’s pack leader—from the smallest infant to the oldest adult. Male or female. Everybody must get with the program. I go to many households where the dog respects one person, but runs roughshod over the rest of the family. This can be another recipe for disaster. In my family, I am the dogs’ pack leader, but so are my wife and two sons. Andre and Calvin can walk through my pack dogs at the Dog Psychology Center without the dogs so much as blinking an eye. The boys learned pack leadership from watching me, but all children can be taught how to assert leadership with animals.
Pack leadership doesn’t hinge on size or weight or gender or age. Jada Pinkett Smith weighs maybe 110 pounds soaking wet, but she was able to handle four Rottweilers at once even better than her husband was. Will Smith was good with the dogs and they respected him, but Jada really put in the time and energy needed to be a strong pack leader. She’s gone with me to the beach and the mountains, where I take the pack out for off-leash walks.
Leading a dog on a walk—as evidenced by the dogs who live with the homeless—is the best way to establish pack leadership. It’s a primal activity that creates and cements those pack leader– follower bonds. I’ll go into more details about mastering the walk in a Issues, but as simple as it sounds, it’s one of the keys to creating stability in the mind of your dog.
In dogs that are trained for specific jobs, the pack leader doesn’t even need to be out in front. In Siberian husky dogsled teams, though the human pack leader is at the back of the sled, it’s she who is running the sled. Dogs who live with handicapped people—people in wheelchairs, the blind, people with special needs—often have to take the physical lead in some situations. But the person they are helping is always the one in control. It’s a beautiful thing to watch a service dog who lives with a handicapped person. Often, the two seem to have a kind of supernatural connection between them—a sixth sense. They are so in tune with each other that the dog can often sense what that person needs before being given a command. That’s the kind of bond dogs in packs have with one another. Their communication is unspoken, and it comes from the security they have within the pack structure.
With the proper calm-assertive energy, pack leadership, and discipline, you, too, can have this sort of deep connection with your dog. In order to accomplish this, however, it’s important to be aware of the things you may be inadvertently doing that are contributing to your dog’s problems.
Cesar Millan with Melissa Jo Peltier.
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