While I’m happy to offer one, why doesn’t a theory of domestication matter to Natural Dog Training?

Because NDT is a theory that is based on energy and so therefore it isn’t therefore conflating the questions of – HOW did a dog become the way it is, with: WHY does a dog-do-what-it-does? Rather NDT studies things as they are so that these two questions are always distinct and don’t muddy the theoretical waters.

For example, Newton was profoundly mistaken about the nature of gravity and yet his laws of motion are predicated on the way objects work in the immediate-moment, in terms of energy. His principle that every action has an equal and opposite reaction is not predicated on answering the question: How come there is gravity? No matter how many extra dimensions there may be so that gravity turns out to be a symptom of another dimension leaking into ours, the premise that every action has an equal and opposite reaction will always be a valid interpretation for why a rifle recoils when fired. Likewise physicists, study the nature of electrical phenomena as a function of energy and it doesn’t matter in this pursuit how there happens to be electricity in the universe. Physicists study how energy works in real time and therefore whether the Big Bang theory proves to be true or not, nevertheless an energy theory of electrical and chemical behavior will by definition end up being consistent with whatever way the universe turns out to have evolved.

For that same reason whatever theory of domestication of the dog ultimately proves to be true, since the nature of an animal evolved from an energy process, even the human animal, an energy theory of animal behavior such as NDT will be consistent with this theory since it is predicated on the same laws of nature.

Meanwhile all other theories of behavior conflate WHY with HOW because these theories are based on the replication of genes (HOW) as a REASON for behavior (WHY). They are not based on the immediate moment laws of nature but rather some process in the past (mutation) being selected by some event in the future (change in environment). Interestingly and tellingly since behavioral science is a “personality theory” (i.e. individual as agency of intelligence) just as is the dominance theory, (individual as agent of dominance) it turns out that Operant Conditioning is as invested in the theory of dog as scavenger and therefore product of human culture more than the wolf, to the exact same degree that the dominance school is invested in the Pack Theory of the dog as a direct descendant of the wolf.