Letting Go of the Dominance Paradigm

If the photo above of the 3 dogs offends you, then I would invite you to look at your own personal inner feelings around sexuality and dominance. I see natural dog behavior! I took the photo above and this behavior (social overture)lasted 30 seconds without any human interference. I then signaled all 3 dogs to sit. You cannot change the dog, but you can affect their emotional state at the moment. In this example they went from an aroused to calm emotional state.

You cannot teach a dog not to react to the world around them, but you can calmly redirect them. Your dog Mirrors your emotional state.

One of the constant bits of advice you'll hear from most trainers is: "you have to be your dog's pack leader." This idea has a lot of appeal for most people. "Yes!" they think. "That's what's wrong with my dog. He doesn't see me as his pack leader!"

But according to David Mech, the world's leading experts on wolves, real wolf packs don't have pack leaders, at least not in the traditional sense. The idea that they do came from studies done on captive wolves, culled from various sources, who didn't know one another, and behaved more like rivals than pack mates.

http://www.unleashyourself.biz/documents/LettingGoofDominance.pdf