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Location: God's Own County
Joined: Apr 2005
Posts: 7,584
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I personally have no time for him.
If you watch the programs without the sound on & concentrate on the dogs body language, it soon becomes apparent that the dogs are being bullied, they have their tails down often between their legs, their heads are down, they do a lots of licking lips or nose, yawning, shifty eyes, whale eye, white showing, blinking, avoids eye contact (turns head away), looks to handler frequently for directions, mouth corners back, (mistakenly sometimes referred to as a smile), ears back or uneven, veins prominent under eyes etc. This he calls the dogs accepting the human as pack leader when in fact he is subjecting the dogs to undue stress-tantamount to cruelty in my eyes.
After studying hours & hours of research videos on real wild packs of wolves & wild dogs plus reading up on lots of studies in book form by David Mech & like minded experts plus my own observations of my own"pack"of domestic dogs, I have come to the conclusion that true Alpha leaders for canine packs is rarely if ever the obvious one, they do not use biting(CM's stiff finger pokes)to stop unwanted behaviour & to subdue lower ranked members, they do not stand in the way forcing the lower dogs to wait behind them by physically being between the pack member & an opening, they do not Alpha roll lower ranked members, but may pin down a member that offers the submissive behaviour of belly up, the Alphas once they have control of a pack really do little physically, it is looks & growls often very very low growls & sometimes silent baring of teeth. Certainly in wild packs with cubs/pups the Alphas do not actually eat first after hunting, they return to the den & regurgitate food for both lower ranked members who have stayed behind to act as nannies & cubs/pups. It is only when the pack consists solely of hunting age members that the Alphas might force the others to wait to eat & a pregnant Alpha is always allowed to eat first.
The problem is as I have written so many times is that the "Dominance""Human Packer"believers base their theories on studies of captive artificially bred packs, that are not all genetically related, but consist of animals originally from many sources reared as youngsters together, in the real world packs are formed when young adult males & females are driven from the parental pack & mate up as a breeding pair. From these come the pack, the Alpha female secretes a hormone in her urine that prevents the lower ranked females from ovulating(although it doesn't prevent seasons)& thus results in only single litters each year, the lower ranked females often have what dog owners call phantom pregnancies with lactation. The lactation means that the Alpha female can return to hunting earlier that a bitch that has to rear her litter on her own. Multiple litters are often seen in captive packs. Wild packs are often formed totally of two Alphas & their offspring
Dogs are 1,000s of years away from wolves & have had most of their behaviour developed by humans, so trying to compare wolves & domestic dogs directly is misguided & misleading.
Humans are
NOT dog pack Alphas or leader, they are providers of food & comfort & play.
Cats are much closer to their wild cousins & usually(with the exceptions of some breeds)able to live wild, I know most "moggies"could sustain themselves without the help of humans. My kittens showed a "pack"reaction the other day, they hunted & killed a mouse & presented it to my puppy to eat
(didn't let him of course :smt002 ), they have also been grooming him !! & spending time playing with him, far more so than my dogs !!
I do not need to prove I am an Alpha/Pack Leader to get the behaviour I require, I don't need slip leads tightly held at the top of the dogs neck, nor a pinch or electric collar, nor an "Illusion"CM collar to have control of my"Pack". My dogs wear normal collars or figure of eight head collars(they use T Touch calming methods). I teach everything at home hands off for titbits or toys, this means my dogs do as I ask because they want to including walking to heel & recall
Sorry but CM has little real understanding of dog pyschology, if he did have he would use stress &/or pain to "retrain"the dogs in his programs