The Dog Listener book - what's the consensus

Mr. Flibble

The book "The Dog Listener" seems to me to contain sensible advice on how to deal with dogs. The overall message is that, if you have a dog that is stressing out because it thinks it has to make decisions / take lead in the household then you should show it that you are the leader in the household.
Some of her suggestions on how to do this are
1) Act aloof to the dog when you return home and don't give it attention for a few moments until you decide it's time.
2) Make the dog think you eat your food before it does
3) Don't let the dog decide what direction to move when on a walk

I'm not so concerned with the methods that the author suggests using, but am wondering if the aim is considered legitimate? A few days of browsing the the forum here suggests to me many people do not agree. Is the consensus here that it is a load of tripe, expecting a dog to understand leadership.

If this has been discussed ad-nauseum here before it would be great if you point me to some threads and I'll take a look there.

Pretzill

Mr. Flibble wrote: »

The book "The Dog Listener" seems to me to contain sensible advice on how to deal with dogs. The overall message is that, if you have a dog that is stressing out because it thinks it has to make decisions / take lead in the household then you should show it that you are the leader in the household.
Some of her suggestions on how to do this are
1) Act aloof to the dog when you return home and don't give it attention for a few moments until you decide it's time.
2) Make the dog think you eat your food before it does
3) Don't let the dog decide what direction to move when on a walk

I'm not so concerned with the methods that the author suggests using, but am wondering if the aim is considered legitimate? A few days of browsing the the forum here suggests to me many people do not agree. Is the consensus here that it is a load of tripe, expecting a dog to understand leadership.

If this has been discussed ad-nauseum here before it would be great if you point me to some threads and I'll take a look there.

I haven't an opinion on the book as I haven't read it but I think I've seen the authors TV show. I'm in two minds about all this though, I could'nt ignore my dogs when I come in because even if I've only been away for an hour I get jumped , tails wagging etc - I enjoy that and I feel they enjoy welcoming me home I wouldn't ignore this no more than I'd ignore a hug from my hubby!

The dogs always get fed before us and will watch me while I cook hopeful of a little treat. And when we go walking they're just so happy to be out walking don't they've ever changed my direction, tho one refused to go any further one day and being the superstitious sod I am I went along with her and turned for home! I think once you give a dog love, food, walks+games and a comfy bed they don't really need much else.

But then I've been lucky over my 30 odd years as a dog owner and I do believe they picked me not the other way around!

DBB

There are loads of threads on it!
To answer your question, Jan Fennell's approach is considered to be outdated and disproven by qualified dog trainers and behaviourists. The dominance hierarchy model as described by TV "dog whisperers" has been shown not to exist in natural wolf families, and even less in pet dogs.
The plus of Fennell's methods is that at least she doesn't use abusive training methods, as many who use the Pack Leadership approach do. The stuff she advises is fairly passive. Useless, but at least it doesn't do any harm
One of the big criticisms of her approach, other than being based on a disproven model, is that it's a "one size fits all" approach, which just cannot work, because there is so much individual variation between dogs: their personalities, their histories, their learned associations, their living environments are all so variable... using a blanket approach will work for some dogs, but will come nowhere near helping most dogs.
It might help you to have a read of http://www.dogwelfarecampaign.org.uk, as it explains a lot of the information we now have about using pack leadership as a model for dog training, but bear in mind that we know even more now than we did when that website went live.
And here's a good article by David Appleby of the greatly respected Association of Pet Behaviour Counsellors (APBC): http://www.apbc.org.uk/articles/caninedominance

And another by David Ryan, also of the APBC: http://www.apbc.org.uk/articles/why-wont-dominance-die

Happy reading

Mr. Flibble

Thanks Pretzill and DBB. These articles will keep me busy for a while.