I once believed I needed to be a pack leader. I was a huge fan of a certain Dog Whisperer and I was skilled at making many dogs listen to me. These days, though, I have a slightly different perspective on being a good pack leader.
How to Be a Pack Leader
Being a good pack leader takes some skill and some knowledge. Read these tips to become the best modern pack leader you can be:
1) Educate yourself. What kind of leader can you be if you have not educated yourself to the best of your ability? Just like any leader in the world, you should be able to explain, logically, what your are doing or why you are asking your dog to do something. The truth is, dogs are closely related to wolves AND humans are closely related to Chimpanzees. Does that mean we act like Chimps and dogs act like wolves? NO. We are all capable of learning without intimidation or pain. Using the knowledge that Pavlov and Skinner taught us, we can teach ANY species with the power of positive reinforcement, negative punishment, classical conditioning, counter conditioning, and desensitization!
2) Be a good teacher. Remember back in grade school when you had that one teacher that never smiled and always kept the kids in line? Well, you don’t want to be that person to your dog do you? Learn how to teach your dog instead of intimidate them into behaving. Dogs, unfortunately for us, learn by association. I wish they would just learn what we wanted them to learn, but they are always learning through association – it’s how animals survive in the wild after all: Stay away from “bad/scary things” and keep going back to “good/yummy things”. Many people in the training world forget about this one so choose to associate yourself with good things, instead of bad things.
3) Learn dog body language. Read up on “Calming Signals” so that you can correctly interpret what your dog is trying to communicate. Being a good pack leader, just like any leader, means listening to your pack. You can’t be a good leader if you don’t listen to those you are leading.
If you apply these three steps, you and your dog will have a deeper understanding of each other than you can ever imagine. How do I know? Because I made the switch. Sign up to the newsletter to the right to get my story with my dog, Loker, and get a small introduction into positive reinforcement training.
Read some more on becoming a good pack leader:
- Leader of the Pack
- Pack Leader
- Evaluating Cesar Millan Rehabilitation Methods
- Dominance Controversy
- How to Be a Pack Leader
Take a pledge today!
Pledge that you will never “alpha” roll your dog and that you will listen to their concerns. Pledge that you will trust your dog and not assume that they are always trying to be “dominant” over you. Pledge to motivate and reinforce your dog to make correct decisions instead of only punishing them when the do something wrong. They WANT to love you so make it easy and become a great teacher.
Please Share!
Please help spread the word about the modern/21st century way to be a good pack leader. Lets help all those voiceless dogs that are being intimidated into obeying commands because of old school train of thought. There is absolutely no reason you can’t make the switch today, I did it and so can you!
________________________________
Have you written an article about this subject? Submit it to the blog hop!
