Originally
published in slightly different form on May 25, 2011 at PsychologyToday.com.
First I want to express my
gratitude to Dr. Loretta Graziano Breuning for writing her response to my previous post. She’s done a great deal to help me prove my thesis that
dominant behaviors are not normal in dogs, but are symptoms of anxiety and
stress.
Before I get to the ways
that Dr. Graziano Bruening (hereafter, LGB) has helped prove my thesis, I’d
like to counter a few of the statements she made in her reply to my most recent
post.
LGB: “City folk are
curiously uncomfortable with the striving for social status that’s obvious in
every mammalian herd or pack or troop.”
Really? Every social
mammal is striving for social status?
Let’s examine this idea.
In order for a social mammal to strive for higher status it would mean that
said organism would have to understand the concept of status, have a sense of
himself as a separate, independent being, and to be aware of the differences in
status between himself and others. Certainly all this is possible in humans and cetaceans. But most biologists agree that the
cognitive divide for these kinds of abilities probably lies between primates
and “lower” (evolutionarily speaking) animals.
LGB: “Academics are it
downright intolerant of these facts of life and rush to cover them up with
studies representing animals as altruists. Researchers that refuse to run with
the altruism herd are ridiculed, ostracized, and denied grant funding. So they
crank out ‘evidence’ that protects their status, which of course promotes their
sexual prospects too.”
I have no great attachment
to some of the ways altruism in animals has been misrepresented, or over-emphasized
in current science. But since I’m a dog lover, and since dogs are the most
social animal on earth, for me, personally, they are a particularly interesting
window into this subject.
I also have no interest in
whether this is or isn’t politically correct, nor do I understand enough about
the politics of academic life to know if LGB is right in her assertions. But I
find it odd that she’s framing her argument about whether dominance is real in
dogs and wolves in terms of scientific status, and how it supposedly helps
obedient academics “get laid.”
LGB: “Lee Charles Kelley
is not such an ideologue. He seems like a decent person trying to make sense of
the research in order to do right by dogs and their owners. So how can he
reconcile the progressive orthodoxy with the evidence he sees with his eyes?”
First of all “progressive
orthodoxy” is an oxymoron. If the word progressive applies to scientific
thinking it would indicate favoring or promoting movement toward new ideas and
freeing oneself from old, outdated ones. If so, I’m guilty as charged. But
orthodoxy indicates adhering to the tried-and-true. Dr. LGB is clearly the one
clinging to orthodoxy here. That said, there are some tried-and-true rules I do
stick to: the laws of parsimony, i.e., Ockham’s razor and Morgan’s canon.
“[Kelley] concludes that
dominance is limited to the sexual context and thus not a generalized social
pattern.”
Dominance should be thought of as a sexual, not a social behavior. The subtitle of LGB’s
original post—“Mammals seek power because sex is the reward”—is a clear
indicator of that.
In her reply she gives
examples of dominance in primates to serve her argument. I have no problem with
that. As I wrote in my article, “Within a social context, dominance has no place
in the behaviors of most social animals, except primates.” So the social
behaviors of chimps and bonobos, et al, aren’t really germane to this
discussion.
LGB does say that “Sex,
aggression and dominance are different behaviors motivated by different
neurochemicals. Testosterone and oxytocin motivate sex, serotonin rewards
dominance, and aggression is a cocktail of neurochemicals.”
The main problem I have
with this is the idea that “serotonin rewards dominance.” This can only hold
true if one is already on board with the dominance label. In other words
whatever behaviors serotonin does or does not “reward” could be labeled any
number of things: aggression, agonistic, controlling behaviors, etc. By
labeling them “dominance” LGB is a) engaging in a tautological argument
(proving that dominance exists because it’s released when animals act
“dominant”), and b) implying that said animals are consciously aware of their
rank and status.
Much of the literature on
serotonin’s effect on dominance is based on species like lobsters, crayfish,
etc., which clearly could have no idea what rank and status mean. How do we
explain this? What could possibly motivate a lobster to “rise in status?” I
think the very idea is silly.
In their 2008 paper,
“Serotonin, social status and sex change in the bluebanded goby Lythrypnus
dalli,” Lorenzi, Carpenter, Summers, Earley, and Grober write: “In a variety of
vertebrates, highly aggressive individuals tend to have high social status and
low serotonergic function.” (The blue-banded goby is a small aquarium fish,
whose systems operate in direct opposition to the norm.)
What are the symptoms of
low serotonergic function?
Anxiety is one. And it’s
pretty high on the list.
LGB: “Mammals seek
dominance because the serotonin feels good.”
Yes, but again, only if
you’re comfortable with the dominance label. One could as easily say that some
mammals may act aggressively toward their conspecifics because doing so
releases serotonin. Serotonin’s relationship to dominance only applies if you
already believe in the tautology. So the question remains, is such an animal
seeking to rise in status, or is he simply trying to reduce his own feelings of
anxiety? Absent any clear indication that such animals are capable of abstract
and conceptual thought, the laws of parsimony require that we go with the
latter.
LGB states that “Dogs calm
down when they follow a dominant, and become aggressive when there is no
dominant. That’s the message of TV’s Dog Whisperer, and it’s easy to see this
with your own eyes.”
It’s a TV show. Whenever
I’ve watched it what I’ve seen with my own eyes is a charming, charismatic man
with a somewhat limited gift for working with dogs, and almost no real
understanding of canine psychology. Millan’s techniques are designed to suppress
not only a dog’s emotions but his own. And I would argue that when one suppresses a dog’s emotions, one
runs the risk of increasing the levels of aggression that will eventually
re-surface later. This is one reason why playing tug-of-war—letting the dog
win, and praising him for winning—reduces symptoms of aggression and dominance
in dogs. That’s because it’s a safe release-valve for the dog’s underlying
aggressive tendencies, tendencies all dogs have because they are, at heart,
predators, and, as such, need to release their predatory energy in one way or
another.
LGB writes, “Mammals
submit to stronger group mates to avoid getting bitten and scratched,” then
adds, “It’s why authoritative leadership calms down dogs, children, and
committees. Mr. Kelley accuses The Dog Whisperer’s Cesar Millan of cruelty, so
I wonder how he would react to my citing him as a parenting guide.”
I think it should be clear
that raising a child by inculcating a fear of being bitten or scratched would
not qualify as good parenting. It would probably be a criminal act. (And I
would hope that few chairpersons would bully their committees by threatening to
bite the members.)
LGB: “The fact is, stern
authority prevails in every mammalian herd or pack or group.”
Ray Coppinger has said
that wolves who settle near a garbage dump don’t form packs. Coyotes also form
packs, but only when they need to hunt large prey. So the central organizing
principle in canine social behavior is the need to hunt large prey by working
as a cooperative unit. In fact, wolf society is nothing if not cooperative in
nature. The concept of the pack leader as a “stern authority” has begun to
crumble in recent years.
In fact, the variations in
temperament seen in pack structure, that for so many years were thought to
prove the existence of a dominance hierarchy, may actually only exist to
facilitate the pack style of hunting. If all members of the pack had an “alpha”
or “omega” temperament, the hunt would fail. It’s only when you have a mix of
approaches to the prey—some direct, others indirect—, that the pack style of
hunting gets results.
LGB: “You can choose to
know the truth or you can sift for facts that fit your world view. Most people
prefer to reinforce their comforting world view.” Then she adds, “A wolf pack
is a totalitarian despotism.”
It’s true that people
prefer to reinforce their world view. Thomas Kuhn suggested that even our most
brilliant scientists do this. So I think it’s interesting that LGB calls the
wolf pack a “totalitarian despotism” when the genesis of that idea (which has
been proven false by modern research) came primarily from the mind of Konrad
Lorenz, who as a member of the Nazi Party. (“What Is a Jewish Dog? Konrad
Lorenz and the Cult of Wildness,” Boria Sax, Society and Animals Forum, 1997.)
In her book The 100
Silliest Things People Say About Dogs, Alexandra Semyonova writes, “[Konrad]
Lorenz specialized in studying birds. His ideas about dogs were shaped
informally by watching his own dogs. There were no published studies of domestic
dogs at the time, thus nothing to contradict Lorenz. He watched dogs who had
been raised only by himself and who never left the estate he lived on. He in
fact had no idea about how dogs other than his own behaved, or how his own
would have behaved if they had been properly socialized. But that didn’t
matter. Lorenz limited himself to popular publications about dogs—an arena that
permitted Lorenz to ignore [fellow-biologist Rudolph] Schenkel, who was at the
time the great authority on wolves, and who strongly protested the idea of a
dominance hierarchy among them. It was an arena in which Lorenz has been caught
in more than one blatant lie, but also an arena where lying has no
consequences.”
So let’s go back to LGB’s
view of dog society, where dogs are calmer when they have a strong, dominant
pack leader, who’s always threatening to bite them, and that in the absence of
such a leader, dogs become aggressive. She really goes off track when she
writes, “The whole pack hunts to support the offspring of the alpha pair,” and
they do it “to avoid getting bitten and scratched.”
There is absolutely no
data supporting this statement, and plenty supporting the opposite! The pack
hunts because it’s pleasurable, it feels good to release pent-up emotions.
That’s it. That’s the only reason. Using neurotransmitters as our guide, at
every successive step in the predatory sequence, the wolf’s body releases
endorphins into the bloodstream. There is no evidence that the subordinate
wolves are only hunting out of fear of being bitten by their “superiors.”
However, what LGB has
added to the discussion is the role serotonin probably plays in canine social
behavior. It turns out that the literature on supposed social hierarchies shows
that so-called dominant members generally have chronically lowered levels of
serotonin—making them anxious—while “subordinates” have elevated levels of
cortisol—which means they’re under a lot of stress. (You would be too if you
were living in constant fear of being bitten or scratched!)
So where exactly is this
“calmness” LGB describes?
I stand by original
thesis, that dominance is not a real behavior, character trait, or tendency in
dogs or wolves. And that when canines do exhibit these characteristics, they’re
symptoms of stress and anxiety, not an attempt to rise in status. And the best
way to reduce stress and anxiety in dogs is to play hunting games where the dog
gets to release his pent-up emotions by biting a toy.
I’m a dog trainer. I know
dogs. And I know that when you can get a dog to play with you outdoors, and put
his whole heart and soul into the enterprise, sooner or later, all of his
so-called dominant or submissive tendencies will begin to melt away.
Who knows? Maybe it’s the
endorphins.
“Life Is an Adventure—Where Will Your Dog Take You?”
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