As a dog trainer who travels the country training dogs and working with many clients and dogs every week, it is so important for folks to understand how a dog thinks. And when there is no authority figure present, the kind of chaos and bad behavior that can happen. Remember the bad behavior of your dog is not the problem it is just the outcome of a breakdown of leadership in your home.
My friend, co-host of the Train The Trainers Seminar Series, and LA dog training colleague Sean O’Shea from The Good Dog Training and Rehabilitation puts out such a great blog that I feature it here on my blog. Since the message is so powerful and important it needs to be shared by all. Enjoy the read.

The Lord Of The Flies Principle

By Sean O’Shea

If you have a multi-dog household, and are experiencing tension, squabbles, or all out fights, the reason is almost always lack of leadership, structure, and rules. This results in doggy chaos. When dogs don’t have a strong pack structure in their house – meaning if they’re not 100% sure who’s in charge, what’s allowed and not allowed, and that someone will effectively enforce the rules – they can quickly become stressed, anxious, pushy, bratty, possessive, worried, fearful etc.

As you can imagine, dogs co-habitating in this fashion are going to be ripe for trouble and fighting. If you’ve ever read The Lord Of The Flies (I know this is going back a long way for most of us!!) you’ve got a great example of the psychological and behavioral breakdown that occurs when structure, rules, and authority are absent. Just replace all the kids in the story with your dogs. 🙂

When structure, rules, and authority are removed, stress, anxiety, and fear start to manifest. Why? Because of survival instincts. Social creatures understand that the absence of structure, rules, and authority mean danger, risk, and fear, and that puts everyone on edge. It also creates the opportunity for personality traits that might have remained managed or suppressed in the presence of authority (dominant, bratty, possessive etc) to surface and blossom when that authority pressure is removed.

So understanding this dynamic it becomes clear that in order to create a harmonious household with multiple dogs (and of course this applies to single dog homes as well!), we need to make sure that we clearly and consistently share STRUCTURE (place command, thresholds, structured walk etc), RULES (no jumping on people, no harassing or pressuring other dogs, no possessive behavior etc), and AUTHORITY (sharing believable and valuable consequences for unwanted behavior etc).

The absence of these elements creates the opportunity for chaos and unhappy, stressed out dogs. (And kids!!)

Remember the end of the story, when the boys where finally rescued? They immediately reverted back to their normal, courteous, polite, thoughtful, and civilized selves. Why? Because they had to – and also because they wanted to.

For those of you not familiar with the book, here’s a link: http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Flies-William-Golding/dp/0399501487/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407085329&sr=8-1&keywords=Lord+of+the+flies

Sean’s website www.thegooddog.net

Solid K9 Training Training Center- 25 Acorn Street, Providence, RI 02903

(401) 274 1078 Providence Training Center Info

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