First of all, the style of American "documentary" programs is apparently going through puberty right now. SLOMO 3D FUCKING ATTACK! LET'S SEE THAT AGAIN FOUR FUCKING TIMES!

Second of all, I'm not a big fan of "dog psychology" as it is generally peddled, probably because of trauma caused by my mother's obsession with Cesar Millan, but also every trainer gets their own unique ideas on the subject (that being said, thanks for posting this, I'll get paranoid about observing dogs now).

21st century ethologists generally cringe at notions such as "alpha" (canine packs correspond to kinship groups, so "alpha" basically translates into "father" or "oldest sibling" in nature). This doesn't particularly change what you posted, I'm just saying :p

Don't get me started on that. People who spread the lovely image of petting dogs by patting their heads should be mauled. Take a wild guess what is the first thing every kid in my neighbourhood tries doing whenever they see my dog. It's kind of "intuitive" to people, I guess, one of those brilliant dumb ideas people always arrive at independently when left to their own TV commercials-influenced logic.

Actually alpha is a personality type in dogs. Alpha is leader and thus why humans need this position to work with their dog. I'm actually in school for this stuff so I tend to trust my teacher an RVT, over anything people say out of practice.

None of this is 'dog psychology' but merely reading the body language. This is just the basics so what I said here is very reliable. We aren't reading their minds, just the language they use to communicate with each other. That's the point of animal behavior.

I'm an expert at reading Dog body language.

My advice?

Stay the fuck away from other people's Monday to Friday Dogs, you Monkey Fighters.

"Alpha" is really just an ad hoc term. Alpha wolves are leaders much in the same sense a father and a mother are "leaders" to children, and dispersion and rivalry within the pack undermines any consistency of this status. In "emergent" packs (what most dogs end up in), position of the hierarchy has even less consistent implications. Sometimes dogs fight among one another for position, sometimes recognise position based on age, sometimes work out something even more haphazard. They're hierarchic animals all right, but any kind of neat alpha-to-omega classification doesn't work, position can mean anything from being an older brother substitute to being a might-makes-right gang leader.

Also, I'm going with Alexandra Horowitz' Inside of a Dog here, but it's hard to say what dogs see humans as in the first place. She goes with "useful friend" IIRC, and stresses that dogs definitely don't see humans as mere pack members. Their attitude towards humans is completely different from attitude towards other dogs, for a start, although they obviously apply some "dog logic" to determine status of specific human beings.

Yeah, "psychology" was a bad term.

What is generally accepted in the medical field is this: dogs have the alpha-omega hierarchy, but its not based on age, intelligence, or even experience. The only thing that makes a dog an alpha is if it was born with the personality. You can't train a dog to be an alpha if it isn't already. That being said, you also can't have two alphas in the same household unless they are opposite genders. This is where the infighting occurs. In the wild, a fight would occur one would win and the other would either back down and wait or leave entirely. However, when they live Ina home people keep them from fighting (a good thing) and leaving thus the dynamic of the pack remains unbalanced.

The same goes for the betas. The rest, the Gamma, deltas, epsilons, and omegas, can all have multiple dogs.

Think of alphas as you extrovert personalities, the are the fastest to react and have the self confidence to do so. Essentially the are the CEO of the pack.

The betas are still leaders, and often are more intelligent than the alpha. The difference is they report to the alphas while the rest of the dogs under them look to them for direction. They are kind of the managers.

At the other end of the spectrum is the omegas which are those dogs most sensitive to the environment around them. The are often the ones who can easily pick out the injured prey. Think of them as the introverts of the group.

What is generally accepted in ethology and studies of animal cognition is this: they don't. I don't know too many veterinarians who believe in it either (then again, I don't know too many veterinarians).

Wikipedia only mentions alpha, beta and omega terms in reference to hierarchy, not personality. The system you're talking about has the scientific plausibility of horoscopes. Are you sure you haven't confused "medical science" with "charts floating around 4chan /fit/"?

An average wolf pack consists of two parents and one or two generations of their children, plus, in rare cases, adopted members. Wolf and dog interactions are also separated by gender (as you said), so it only makes sense to speak of male and female hierarchies separately. There is also rivalry within siblings, which leads to internal "hierarchies" in them.

So in the end, what we get is usually: a wolf male + 2 or 3 of his sons (+ optionally, 2 or 3 younger sons). If you need to use the word "CEO" to describe what the wolf male is towards his own children, you're really looking for metaphors in weird places.

Yes, I know you're talking about personalities here, but that makes even less sense, see below.

In the wild, oldest siblings disperse from the pack almost universally at a certain point. Not because of a certain personality type, but because they need to find a partner to start their own pack, and wolves of opposite gender in their current pack are their family members.

What I'm saying is basically, if there is any indication for personalities "in the wild", it would be the more subtle differences between levels of aggression towards siblings and parents and/or tendency to disperse early. Even in those cases, "personalities" would be largely dictated by physical strength or life experience.

Can you have an "omega" personality dog without any other dogs being around?

My point is that even if reality sometimes coincides with the kind of divisions you're trying to draw, there's absolutely zero point in using neat pseudoscientific classifications where basic terms such as "dominant" or "opportunistic" do the job just fine. Hell, even "introvert" could do.

It's the cop's fault, because he should know his dog. The dog kept trying to pull away, he was putting his ears back. Then the idiot grabbed his face with both hands as he loomed over his face. What an idiot.

I muted the video so I could just watch the dog and the dog reacted reasonably.

Honey, I'm attending VTI Houston right now and am being taught by Veterinarians so I do know quite a few. Additionally the program I'm in is essentially nursing for animals. I less than a year I will be a nurse, hygienist, phlebotomist, anesthesiologist, radiology nurse, and, that's right, a behavioral resource for pet owners. They are not exactly going to teach me something that is wrong. Especially not at an accredited (must follow specific guidelines for education) private school.

So you're going to question my sources but get information from Wikipedia for the argument? I know Wikipedia is fairly reliable for normal day to day information gathering, but when you are discussing something in depth, probably not what you want to fall back on. My source for all of this was my teacher and my personal experience. Her sources were the Clinical Textbook of Veterinary Technology, http://www.floridapetpages.com/articles/packmentalityindogs.html, http://www.wolfdogproject.com/packdynamics.htm, and yes, your hated Cesar Milan's book "Be the pack leader."

What I was talking about was groups of unrelated dogs living together and thus there is no 'children' involved. That was you applying your ideas to my metaphor. It works with the alpha dog mentality. Using the term children as you did to disagree with is applying the human view of how we see our children to dogs. We would find it weird to manage a big family that way, but its what dogs did to survive and still do. The second their 'children' mature and are trained, they are more than willing to chase him off or treat him as a full pack member, something human parents don't tend to do.

I won't dispute that that is what wild wolves do, but what I'm talking about is dogs who have been placed together by humans and don't have the option to leave. Also, these dogs tend not to be related. Additionally, they are DOGS not wolves which are actually different species. The pack dynamics between a wild wolf and a tame dog are similar but probably not the same.

What you aren't talking about, though, are the packs that have more than one breeding pair and thus need a social structure. Saying the structure is based solely on the family itself is fine for the small packs you mentioned, but what of those that aren't just family?

This may sound crazy, but in domesticated household dogs there are cases where a Chihuahua leads a pack of much bigger dogs. There is no way it is stronger, more intelligent, or more experienced than the other dogs. There are only two things that could that could allow this to happen: a hierarchy based on breed or personality. Now, breeds can 'tend' to produce more alphas or more omegas, but then 'all Chihuahuas would be alphas' or 'all Labs omegas' which is obviously not the case. Thus, personality of the individual dog must play a role, allowing the confident and self-assured Chihuahua to lead a pack of dogs who could squish him in one try.

Sure, why not?

These classifications are there and have been a lot longer than the newer ideas about family only dynamics. In my eyes there is no point in changing what reality coincides with. In know of no cases that disprove all of this. And there is actually a very important point to using these classifications it's for the education of dog owners. When owners have dogs that fight or dogs that submit when logically they wouldn't they ask us why and so we have an easy to understand response. It also helps owners minimize the squabbles by know how to test the alpha in regards to the other dogs.

Are we into some sort of authority competition? Because I'm, technically speaking, a cognitive scientist, I've read perhaps six different books on the subjects of dogs and two books on wolves, and I've had an interest in ethology since the age of six when my father taught me how to read using Konrad Lorenz books.

And none of this matters, of course, because what matters is evaluating claims on the basis of their descriptive accuracy, and scientific plausibility, not whether the person making them is a phlebotomist or not.

First of all, you didn't list any sources up until this point.

Second of all: yes, because Wikipedia is a brilliant starting point for issues you're not familiar with. I find it odd your entire proposed model (supported by every veterinarian you know) isn't there.

All right, thanks then.

But as far as I gather:

1. The Clinical Textbook of Veterinary Technology concerns mostly physiological issues (I'm going with the contents list here, in any case, it doesn't sound like it devotes a lot of time to dog "personalities")

2. The first website you linked to seems to contradict your definition of "alpha" as a personality type (it's used as a synonym for the pack leader)

3. The second website is a total joke. Its definition of omega is (again) as a rank, and definition of an alpha is contradictory (again, mostly implying rank). Also, I've never ever heard or seen dogs or wolves hamstring one another during play, so I have no idea what they're going on about.

I haven't read Milan's book (ugh), but apart from that, I see no relationship between your (teacher's) idea of "dog personalities" and the sources you listed :|

As the ethologists say: Drawing conclusions about dog mentality by studying artificial groups is like drawing conclusions about human mentality by studying refugee camps.

Small family-based packs are the natural way wolves are organised. Their attitudes and evolution have been shaped by this kind of environment. If you take unrelated members out of this environment and put them together, they will transpose instincts evolved from in-pack or cross-pack interaction and combine it with general experience. They don't have any natural "personality types" , they're just rule-of-thumb superficial results that don't reflect the natural situation (and as a result, are generally less reliable).

That's true, although I think dogs' attitudes towards other dogs are similar to wolves' attitudes towards other wolves, it's their attitudes towards humans that differs. Dogs' attitudes towards other dogs also depend on breed.

I meant "experience" as in what a certain dog has gone through. Also, I have no bloody idea how dogs decide hierarchies sometimes, but saying it's because they have alpha/beta/delta/gamma/epsilon/whatever personality is just as accurate as saying it was aliens who did it.

…or maybe there are no "personality types" but a number of different mental traits which have been statistically selected for in certain breeds, which then give raise to this or that kind of hierarchy depending on the context the dogs are put in.

And so was the idea that the Sun goes around the Earth, that eating tiger penises prolongs erection, etc, etc. This is a counter-argument in research!

Yes, because you're already analysing dogs exclusively in those terms. My mother similarly knows of no cases where she can't assign people into four temperament categories (which she strongly believes in). If it doesn't work, just re-assign people to a different category and it will!

So… like I said. It's an ad hoc simplified definition to peddle around without getting into details and facts. Telling people bacteria "learn" how to resist drugs also "helps".

P.S. I randomly found this when trying to find something about Cesar Milan's views - I take it the American Veterinary Medical Association and the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior disagree with your educators.