Pass Along PDJ
January 2008

Who Would Be King?
by Steve Smith

n the years I've been the editor of hunting dog magazines, I have seen one thing, one behavior by owners, that makes training a dog difficult, an unforced error way too many of us make – including Our Favorite Editor. That's treating our dogs like people.

It's almost a cliché that dogs think they're people – we say it about all of them, but usually and mostly about those dogs that stay in the house with us, the ones that get to interact with us the most often. But the reality is, it isn't so much that they think they're people – they actually behave as though they think of us as other dogs.

Let me give you an example. My Lab and pointer are inside dogs. This winter – and I don't know what made me do it – I invited them to hop up on the couch with me in front of the fireplace one snowy evening (maybe it was the eggnog). Now, the Lab's 13 and retired, and the pointer's five and in her prime, and neither had ever tried to get on the furniture, at least not when I was watching. But the next evening, they trotted downstairs to the family room and hopped up on the couch like they'd been doing it their whole lives. In fact, after a few nights, it got so there wasn't room for me and they crowded me right off.

It was an idiot move on my part, but what it showed is that I had allowed them into my "space," and they took that as a sign of weakness on my part, took it to mean I was relinquishing my Alpha position, and they were now calling the shots. How this would have transferred to the field, I'll never know because I put a stop to their shenanigans pronto.

The point is, our dogs want to know who's in charge, and if it isn't going to be us, brother, it will be them. Democracy isn't in their vocabulary – their political system is a monarchy, and if you don't occupy the throne, they will, it's that simple.

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