Common Sense Dog Training: How to Develop a Balanced Sociable Dog

By Sean Knowlson

This is the only dog training book you will ever need. Take advantage of Sean's decades of experience, training tens of thousands of dogs using proven science based psychology and methods that work.  Written in straight forward terms that every owner can

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sean Knowlson
• Release date: Mar 28, 2025
• ISBN: 9781805417040

Book preview

Chapter One

Understanding your dog

The Human Dog Pack

When we accept the responsibility of taking a dog into our home, we must remember they are social pack animals and require clear structure, socialisation, and consistency to achieve harmony in their human/dog packs. This is no different to how dogs exist when living in purely canine pack environments, be it on the street or in the wild.

To create harmony in your home it is important you understand how a dog thinks and sees its relationship status with others. All dogs establish and maintain their relationships upon the basis of dominant/submissive positioning. It is a failure to understand this basic concept, which causes most of the behavioural and control issues that many owners contend with daily.

The pack is built by establishing a strong bond between two or more individuals, based upon a clearly understood hierarchical order within the group. Members of a pack must be able to trust each other and learn how to be calm in each other’s presence. This promotes strength in numbers, as dogs are highly sensitive and reactive animals, so it creates a feeling of safety and security to the benefit of all.

To create a clear hierarchy, some individuals must therefore become more dominant than others.

Dominance - the fact of having power or influence over somebody/something.¹

It does not define dominance as an act of cruelty or aggression. It is a misconception, especially in some parts of the dog world, that dominance does not exist in the social interactions between domestic dogs. I have heard some people in the dog world state that dominance has a different meaning when relative to dogs and that it means being cruel by using aversive techniques. The word dominance does not have a different meaning in canine terms. You cannot change the meaning of a word to suit a different connotation just because it fits your personal narrative.

Denying dominance is like denying the force of gravity on Earth.²

Dominance by one individual over another is nature’s way of creating harmonious relationships. Yes, it is possible to be overly dominant in exerting one’s will over another, even to the point of it turning to excessively forceful status-based aggression. These overly dominant individuals are effectively bullies.

The people who deny the existence of dominance in dogs do accept some dogs display submissive behaviour. Well, you cannot have one without the other, it’s like Yin and Yang, or positive and negative. I can assure you, dominance does exist in any social or pack environment.

There have been numerous articles written by experts far more qualified in animal psychology than me around the theory of dominance in relation to the domestic dog that are worth reading.³

A dominant dog is one who is calm, assertive, and confident, the individual that other dogs want to follow without using any form of intimidation, threat, or aggression. The dominant dog controls access to food and toys when it wants to claim them. It does not mean the dominant dog is aggressive, nor does it mean a dominant dog will not allow other dogs in its social group access to such things. Intimidation and aggression are only used proportionally if their dominance is directly challenged.

When we live in a human dog pack, we must take on the dominant role. We should therefore maintain an assertive and confident attitude to our relationship with our dog, setting boundaries, calm control, and consequences as necessary to ensure harmony. Of course, dogs realise that we are not dogs, but we still form part of their social group (pack), along with the hierarchy it entails. Dogs thrive on clarity in their relationship with their humans, just like the relationship between a Shepherd and their Collie. Where would the sheep end up if the Collie did not follow his owner’s clear rules and directions?

Without order, there is chaos! Barnes, J.L.⁴

Within my personal pack, my six-year-old, entire male Malinois, Giggs, is the most dominant in the group. When I take my dogs out to exercise, the others will naturally follow his lead and general direction of travel. He can be quite dismissive of their attention and even snap at those members of the social group who harass him too much, such as the adolescent younger males who constantly demand his attention, sometimes barking incessantly in his direction. If there is a toy he desires, he takes control of it, regardless of the desire of other members within the group who wish to play with it and will use canine communication in the form of a show of teeth, or growl towards them, to back them away if he feels they desire to take it from him. The other dogs in my pack are therefore respectful (submissive) to him, and, if needs be, will show this by displaying the appropriate body language. These behaviours create a hierarchy and stability in the pack. The younger dogs are also submissive to the older bitch in the group, who in turn is submissive to Giggs. It is the way of the world. Not everyone can be a leader, and there are levels of rank.

This basic psychology is identical to that of a human who takes on the role of a natural leader in a group. That person does not have to be aggressive, or intimidating, as confident communication and body language are normally sufficient, and often the more naturally submissive individuals will follow their lead. Problems such as arguments may ensue when you have two naturally dominant people with differing opinions within the group. Therefore, two male dogs may fight to establish rank if neither is prepared to accept the other has a more dominant role within that particular social group environment.

When a parent tells their child to clean their teeth or to chew their food with their mouth closed, they are exerting their will, and therefore their dominance, over the child. They do not have to beat the child for them to comply, as the child should be naturally submissive to the parent. Only if the child refuses or fails to complete the task will a good parent administer discipline to ensure there is compliance. Discipline is not cruel, it is essential. It would only be deemed cruel if the discipline was inappropriate and/or excessive. The parent will ask the child to repeat this behaviour daily, thereby creating good habits. This is the same way we teach our dogs to learn, by creating habitual behaviours that we as humans desire. Dogs do not naturally want to sit or stay - it is a behaviour we teach them by repetitively exerting our will over them by rewarding the behaviour we desire. All obedience is a process of dominance.

Obedience - the act or practice of obeying; dutiful or submissive compliance.⁵

Therefore, the one asking for obedience is being dominant!

As good parents we control access to toys or the television, because we allow our children to use them when we deem it is an appropriate time to do so. We also control food, especially high value treats, which we will allow our children to have on our terms, often after we ensure they have earned them with good behaviour. These are the same principles we should adopt with our dogs. In any hierarchical social group, the responsibility for control gets passed on to the next in line. As humans, we also adopt this philosophy in our workplace by having managers, supervisors, and workers … a hierarchy that works for the good of all members within the group and creates harmony.

It is not unusual, especially with a rescue dog, that in households where there is a man and woman present, the dog will gravitate more to the man of the home, who automatically seems to achieve more natural compliance from the dog. This is because in the dog world … males rule! This is where the term alpha male originates. Now I am sure there are some women vehemently denying this statement of fact, even deeming it misogynistic. However, over many years of experience I see time and again women who complain that they do all the training, but it is their husband the dog naturally responds to better. Nervous dogs are often reactive when handled by a woman, but not when walked by a man. This is because generally men are more confident and authoritative, which creates a feeling of control and safety for the dog. You cannot fight Mother Nature.

Training Ideologies

Due to the minefield of conflicting information that dog owners are now subjected to via social media and the internet, I felt it necessary to outline the different training ideologies. In fact, I have had many a client start training who admits to being totally confused by the contradictory advice online and in the media. You only need to type a simple question into your search bar, and you will get a million or more conflicting answers, and even the same advice but given using varying terminology. I hope this chapter helps to clarify the main dog training ideologies, as well as the thought processes and ethics behind them, so you can make up your own mind as to what works for you and your dog based upon your own logical and moral compass.

Let me start by clarifying that I am what you would call a balanced dog trainer, someone who utilises scientific principals known as Operant and Classical Conditioning, which were put into documented form by well-respected psychologists (scientific people) and are explained in detail in the following section. I state, documented form, because their research simply presents in clear terms how all animals have always naturally interacted and responded to different stimuli. These methods, when used appropriately, allow us to achieve desirable behaviours by manipulating a dog’s natural response to a stimulus, methods that before they were officially documented have been used by humans during their interactions with dogs for centuries, for all we know thousands, of years.

As a balanced trainer understanding that most dogs are very responsive to positive reinforcement using food or play as a reward, this will always be my first method of training with any dog, and the vast majority of dogs are trained using these simple reward-based methods. After all, most dogs are compliant when offered food, especially puppies, which is why positive reinforcement works with nearly all dogs.

However, through decades of experience, there are certain behaviours which require a different approach to achieve success. Put simply, some behaviours are not going to be achieved or dissuaded regardless of the value of the reward offered. Ask any trainer who produces dogs for the Police, Military, Protection, or those who compete in high level dog sports such as IGP or Mondioring.

Alternative methods are necessary in most extreme behavioural cases, especially those involving aggression or reactivity. It is with these types of dogs that other tools out of the trainer’s toolbox are essential to introduce some form of correction through appropriate physical or psychological pressure to achieve a response which will interrupt, diminish, and hopefully eradicate the unwanted behaviour altogether.

As explained, most dogs can be trained using positive only methods, especially from a very young age, where they are a blank canvas and naturally compliant. However, it is simply nonsense for some trainers to state that positive only methods will work on every dog or every undesirable behaviour. You are not stopping a lurcher with naturally high prey drive from chasing a lamb by waving around a food treat or tennis ball.

A lot of trainers will promote management of a behaviour as a concept. However, this should only be a short-term solution whilst the behaviour is being modified. Unfortunately, the positive only trainers seem to advocate environmental management and avoidance without actually dealing with the underlying problematic behaviour.

I saw a post on social media that was advocating to solve numerous problematic canine behaviours was a simple process of managing them by removing the dog’s access. So, to solve the problem of a dog that steals food, stop leaving any food lying around. To stop your dog stealing socks, shoes, clothing, etc, stop leaving them around. To stop your dog barking out of the window, close your curtains. I did chuckle to myself reading the last one, as I imagined some poor family permanently living in darkness with the outside world shut out because their dog barks at the window. This is all just management of the environment that is impossible to achieve permanently, and not training the dog to perform an alternative, desirable, behaviour.

A few years ago, I remember visiting a client for the first time who had an issue with their dog that when left unattended, was getting stressed. The dog would enter different rooms and destroy her things, including furniture. When I entered the home, she beckoned me in past her towards a room where the dog was situated. I went to enter by grabbing the door handle, but it appeared locked, then I noticed the door handle was upside down, as were all in her home. Questioning this, the woman stated this was the advice that had cost her £400 from a certified behaviourist that her veterinarian had recommended and the cost of a tradesman to do the work. Instead of solving the behaviour through rectifying the underlying separation anxiety of the woman’s dog, her advice had been to turn all the door handles upside down. She had avoided the issue through managing it, perhaps not understanding how to actually solve the problem.

I am not sure how the behaviourist concerned could justify the fee and believe she was providing a good service. Unfortunately, this scenario is all too common.

Avoidance of an issue will never solve it. The only way to solve these kinds of issues is to deal with any underlying behavioural cause. If necessary, you may need to create a negative association to specific things so the dog will not want to touch them in the future or teach them a more desirable behaviour is far more rewarding.

I have consistently had to modify behavioural issues in dogs that have previously been to trainers who label themselves modern, force free, and/or positive only trainers, who appear to have had no idea how to solve the issues presented to them. Sadly, I also know a few veterinarians who get referrals for euthanasia from clients who have been told by such trainers that their dogs are beyond hope and too aggressive to keep. Obviously, throwing treats around was not effective. Luckily, some of these clients listen to their veterinarian’s advice and seek a second opinion from other trainers who manage to solve the behaviour, which allows them to keep their dog.

So, who’s the most effective trainer?

Type A:  Those who work only with the more compliant breeds, using one teaching philosophy and throw around gold stars and certificates as participation rewards, even when standards are not actually met.  They would refuse their services to those who would appear more of a challenge and deem them a lost cause.  

This is the person who would place themselves on a self-proclaimed pedestal, stick a nice label on themselves and prescribe themselves a neat little box to fit into, subsequently vilifying and looking down their nose at anyone who doesn’t fit into the same box. They seek public recognition, constantly using social media as a platform to preach and seek high reward for their supposed efforts.  

Type A is the self-proclaimed modern, positive only, R+, force free trainer (and numerous other fancy labels) who denies the existence of dominance, hierarchy and pack behaviour. They ignore any bad behaviours, as they do not believe in corrections of any kind, as they deem them to be cruel, and view pretty much anything other than a harness as an evil piece of equipment. They are the anti-discipline, pink and fluffy fraternity who call their dogs fur babies, and label themselves as pet guardians or companions because their dogs are apparently not their property. In law, animals are property, and you are accountable for the responsibilities and consequences that go hand in hand with ownership. That is why so many laws exist that hold owners to account for their dog’s potential wrongdoings. I wonder if these guardians make their dogs pay their own vet bills and a share of the household costs. I also wonder if they parent their children with the same non-disciplinary ideologies.

They state their ideology is modern science based and cannot be argued with, however, having personally studied the science to which they constantly refer, it is entirely contradictory, with poor subject choice, insufficient