Dr. Marc Bekoff in a recent article ….. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201607/dogs-display-dominance-deniers-offer-no-credible-debate ……  claims that if one doesn’t believe in dominance as an organizing principle in canine social life then they are therefore “deniers.” (BTW Lee Charles Kelley offers some excellent rebuttals in the comment section. I wonder if they will be addressed.) Meanwhile in the article Bekoff […]

“Design In Nature” Zane, J. Peder; Bejan, Adrian (2012-01-24). Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization (Kindle Locations 1560-1564). Random House, Inc.. DIN: “One of the most powerful insights born from the constructal law is that social systems are natural designs that emerge and evolve to […]

It’s my premise that whenever one tries to explain a natural system (such as the animal mind) with a personality theory (the animal as a self-contained entity of intelligence) one will always generate self-defeating logic loops and this will require more and more complex rationales to keep these self-annihilating principles from running into each other. […]

Without a model for the animal mind, Dogdom must always return to the notion of dominance in order to explain social structure. Learning theory hasn’t been able to fill the bill and neuroscience merely reduces behavior to its biological nuts and bolts. Furthermore the notion of dominance seems consistent with evolutionary theory, given the assumption […]

Actually, I may be the first one to discredit the “old wolf pack theory.” Rather I am into the canine “group theory” and the first to posit the distinction between pack and group, and that there’s no such thing as Alpha-Leader-hood. In 1991 David Mech wrote in “The Way of the Wolf” p. 36: “Perhaps […]

Kevin Behan and Trisha Selbach discuss dominance in dog training and Kevin Behan’s Immediate Moment theory of social organization in wolf packs.

Kevin Behan and Trisha Selbach discuss dominance in dog training and Kevin Behan’s “Immediate Moment” theory of social organization in wolf packs. Continue on to Part III of this episode.

To expose themselves, their underside in general, their genitalia in particular. While “submission” may at first appear to be fundamentally different from “dominance,” in reality they are opposite and yet equal expressions of the same urge to make contact (indirectly, i.e. via sexual contact) with something they are attracted to but, have associated a strong […]