I woke up this morning thinking about wolves and reminded myself that Wolfpack’s function as a social group, as a tight family. That family is governed by social rules, consistent communication, boundaries and limitations. Everyone has his role and that the reason why the pack functions so well and succeeds because everyone acts within the parameters of their role and that when they don’t the pack starts falling apart. Actually very similar how humans are organized. We have social structures and rules too, defined socially acceptable communication and laws that are designed to create and maintain order and balance. On a smaller scale, our family is also organized in a very similar fashion. Parents create certain rules, boundaries and limitation and set communication standards that are understood and acceptable within the family unit. When we as humans live within the parameters set we tend to stay out of trouble, if we don’t, people may get looked upon or in worst case end up in jail.
The big difference between us humans and dogs is that in the human world, social rules constantly change, the way we deal with conflict now is much different from the wild west and that was different from the Roman Empire. In the animal world rules stay the same, unless via domestication and adaptation to new environments, communication and interaction with the environment can change.
When we bring dogs into our lives most people don’t realize the big difference between our two species. Many dog mom’s interact with their pooch similar like it if they would with a human baby. Depending on their mood they will change their communication, the way they interact and that with social rules and communication set for the human world, not the dog world.
So how do dogs perceive that communication? How do dogs cope with the constant changing challenges of dynamic relationships within the human pack and how do they adapt to constant changing social environments?
Via domestication, dogs have developed a social tolerance and cooperation with humans. Because of their high degree of social attentiveness, dogs are able to learn a lot from humans. Many social learning theories proof (Hubert et al.,2009,2014) that dogs have high attention to humans and observe their behavior. Observational learning is a key component in how all animals learn. Many of the behaviors developed in young wolves are from observing the adult wolves. However interspecies observational learning is possible and often very strong. Dogs can learn a lot from humans. For example: You have a very calm young dog that generally likes to relax in your living room. You also have two children that in the summer like to play outside with a lot of high energy. Now in the winter month you children bring the game inside, with high energy and outside voices. After a couple of weeks your dogs start changing his behavior and is now barking and chasing the children, a behavior he or she picked up via observational learning.
Faces are for many species an important part of the visual communication. Faces provide a rich sources of perceptual cues. Dogs obtain important social information from studying the human face. They focus on the eyes to infer where the humans attends, where we are interested in and predict with that what we will do next. Gaze following is present in many species, like primates, however dogs outperform primates in following human gaze. They use the observation of our eyes to judge our attentive state (Schwab and Huber, 2006). Humans however don’t just express their emotions via visual cues, our voices also convey information on how we feel, happy, playful, agree, etc. Dogs are believed to form multimodal representations of the combination of our visual and auditory cues. The result of this is that dogs are believed to recognize the emotional content of the humor face. Their is evidence that dogs can obtain social information from their experiences with humans just from their facial expression and can remember each individual human.
Important to understand. For example: when you train or work with your dog he or she is performing a task quite well, but all of a sudden, because of a change in the environment, your dog starts acting up, maybe barking at people. Your facial expression has subtle changes and portraits disappointment. Your dog will pick up on that and can read your emotional state which in turn can lead to a damage in trust in the relationship. The whole matter is far more complex than this as changes in our endocrine system and the release of pheromones also play an important part in the communication of our emotional state, but that is beyond the scope of this article.
Dogs have a special skill, developed trough domestication and social learning, to understand and interact with humans. Latest research shows evidence of their understanding of human emotions, actions and therefore become a part of our human social game. The affiliation with our social circle and consistencies in our communication, rules, boundaries and limitations set for and in our social unit plays a motivational role how the dog will shape their behavior and attitude in our family unit and will also shape their individual interaction with each human in that pack. If we as humans are unaware how much our dogs pay attention to our individual behaviors, consistent energy, communication and our interaction within our family unit, a range of conflicts and challenges between us and the dog will arise.
So “dog training” is much more than taking fido to the training field or doggie school. Its much more than the 10 week obedience classes. I would argue that your scheduled training has less than 5% impact on how your dog behaves at home, and more than 95% is impacted by your actions within your family unit. So building a balanced relationship between different species is complex however with the human-dog relationship we have one advantage and that is that the dog is very motivated to learn form us humans. So its up to you to change from being a Tyrant to becoming a Teacher.
Bart de Gols