Rating: 
Summary: Practical solutions to canine dominance problems here!
Review: This is the best text for owners who are having difficulty attaining leadership status with their dogs. The lessons are written in plain English while drawing on sound, non-confrontational behavioral theory. The authors take the angle of basing each lesson on what is known about the functioning of a wolf pack. The position of dominant vs. lower-ranking wolves is explored. Who eats first? Who sleeps where? Who initiates play? Who goes through narrow passageways first? Especially interesting to me was the explanation of how meaningful body posture and physical positioning is to dogs. I especially recommend this book to dog trainers working with the general public or to any dog owner whose dog who perhaps has JUST BEGUN to exhibit dominant behaviors such as pulling on the leash, ignoring known commands, guarding of food or objects, or giving warning growls when disciplined. I would not recommend this book to owners trying to correct biting problems with a dog who already has a history of fear or dominance aggression. If that is your problem, you need to ask your vet for a referral to an animal behaviorist.
Rating: 
Summary: Some help, much dogma, some physiological impossibility
Review: You can buy into this if you wish, and it may make you feel more secure. In some sense, it will "work." But personally, I am tired of dogmatic dog books--the kind, like this one, that say, "Dogs think like this, this means that, blah, blah, blah"--all (a) without citing one iota of research, (b) often claiming things that are simply impossible, given the dog's brain structure, and (c) relying on notions of behavior modification that were falsified within science decades ago. These shortcomings, to me, undermine the credibility of the book. Fact one: Dogs do not have neocortex. NOTHING that depends on neocortex EVER constitutes part of a dog's psychology. Dogs do not have prefrontal lobes. NOTHING that depends on prefrontal lobes EVER constitutes part of a dog's psychology. They don't worry about responsibility or feel relief when they are relieved of it. They do not make plans. They don't sit back and reflect on their experience. They don't "get messages," so the messages you're allegedly "sending" never arrive. Oh--and as a matter of fact, they cannot symbolize--make note of that: NOTHING IS EVER SYMBOLIC OF ANYTHING TO A DOG. Whenever you read advice that includes the phrase "symbolizes to the dog," you are reading a fairy-tale. Fact two: Behaviorism proved to be false, even for animals, outside very limited lab strictures. An animal's "biological preparedness"--its innate physiological and mental structures--place severe limits on what will and will not be possible through conditioning. You'd never know that from reading this book, where apparently everything is possible to conditioning. What the nervous systems of different strains of animals, even of different individual animals, will and will not allow--what associations *can be* formed within their nervous systems, what things they will and will not do in the face of what rewards and punishments--these are complex matters, not limned by simpled-minded notions of behavior modification. Fact three: Much of what is said about "pack behavior" is simply confabulated, not discovered through research. Guess what? Different strains of dog *in the wild* have different behavior patterns. It simply is not the case that dogs in general all have the same pack behavior. And while a certain sort of romanticized wolf-lore appeals to many dog owners for reasons having nothing to do with evidence, the hard, cold fact is that in any species selective breeding does change psychology no less than it changes morphology. If your dog doesn't look like a wolf, he also doesn't think like a wolf. What offended me most, though, is that the authors of this book do NOT actually cite ANY research on wild (or other) dogs. They tell "just so" stories *as if* they were true accounts of dog behavior in the wild. These stories testify to nothing but the authors' imaginations. This book gives you rules to follow that will make some dogs do some things differently--rules that "work," in some sense-- and it gives you an ideology that lets you believe these are "the right" rules. You may even be able to feel self-righteous, that you "understand dogs" better than other people. Kind of like any true believer in a system of rules and its rationalizing ideology. "True believers" believe to relieve their anxiety--and raising dogs often involves a lot of anxiety. This book will give you the illusion that you know things that you don't, and it will relieve a lot of your anxiety. This is the dog owners analogy to a sermon about prayer--you can always believe it, if it makes you more comfortable, and whatever doesn't work you can explain away as due to failures to practice faithful, virtuous adherence to the dogma offered. Meanwhile, it simply is not the case that these are the only rules that work, or that the author's self-justifying made-up tales of dog psychology ought to carry much weight with any responsible reader. If you find yourself incredulous or offended at various things in this book, good for you. Responsible readers do not accept dogma without sound evidence. And of course the book doesn't *really* work all that well. Dog training books are like most self-help books: people collect whole shelves of them looking for answers that they never find, but reading them provides inspiration and hope, so people keep reading and believing and then having to read more and believe more . . . In short, this book is dogmatic, comforting, psychologically ill-informed, sometimes neuropsychologically impossible, and often just flat fictitious.
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