The use of the word dominance to explain domestic dog behavior dates back to Rudolf Schenkel’s early research on the social interactions of captive wolves. The dominance theory, which was originally based on early studies of captive wolves in the 1940’s, and later popularized by the Monks of New Skete in 1978, relies on the belief that domestic dogs, like wolves, are pack animals with a clear hierarchy and are motivated to achieve a higher ‘status’ relative to other dogs and/or people. Because the domestic dog is descended from the wolf, early wolf behavior studies formed the belief that the domestic dog took on a similar social structure to their wild counterparts and is commonly used to explain and describe domestic dog behavior.
Although
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The real credit for the now outdated terminology goes to Rudolf Schenkel, who conducted research on a pack of captive wolves in 1947. Schenkel was the first to coin the terms “Alpha” and “Beta” in relation to the dominant wolves within the pack structure in his 1947 publication, “Expressions Studies on Wolves.” Existing research now identifies that this concept was based on the idea that wolves fight within a pack to gain dominance and that the winner is the “alpha” wolf. Today the understanding is that that most wolf packs consist of a pair of adults called “parents” or “breeders,” (not “alphas”), and their offspring (. Further research also suggests that domestic dogs, although domesticated from wolves, are not wolves and therefore do not form the typical pack structure commonly seen in their wild counterparts. In fact, current genetic research shows that domestic dogs are more closely related to each other than they are to wolves (Freedman et al.,