"Instead of leaning towards suppression of the nature of the dog (which both the positive reinforcement and dominance methods take), we need to magnify the wild heart of the animal and channel that liberation towards us as owners and handlers."

At this point, it’s common knowledge: Wolves and dogs are from the same family tree. Furthermore, it’s a contested belief that dogs evolved directly from wolves. Due to this, the wolf is highly studied and analyzed by ethologists and professional dog trainers alike. At the root of these studies is a common question: What makes the dog able to live and cooperate so closely with mankind? To answer this question, I look to one of the most unique aspects of the wolf: The fact that they hunt prey much larger than themselves.

I believe that the sociability of the dog derives from the wolf’s capacity to hunt as a highly collectivized team in order to bring down a prey of such intense resistance. Wolves didn’t come to man because they were scavenging scraps from the village; they came because we amplified their ability to hunt, and we helped feed into the wild heart of the wolves — which felt good to them.

People have wondered for years how wolves are able to communicate with each other so aptly. How can animals that can’t talk and converse verbally work together so seamlessly? In my view, they can move together so well because they are all attuned to one Big Want (the prey). By having one common desire, they can move together as one unit without discussion. They don’t have to converse verbally in order to work as a team; they only have to work towards one common goal that they can’t individually obtain. Wolves’ rapport with one another comes not from the ability to verbally communicate, but through sharing a mutual feeling of attraction towards the one Big Want.

If we look at professional sports, we can see the same collectivized behavior around a shared want. In professional soccer, there are eleven people moving in harmony with one another around one Big Want. They communicate sometimes by speaking, but by and large, they move without talking to one another. They move together because they form one mind, around one shared feeling, and thus the many can move as a unit… A common desire is a powerful thing.

This understanding of dogs being able to form a group-mind working towards a common goal should be a central principle in our approach to training. Instead of leaning towards suppression of the nature of the dog (which both the positive reinforcement and dominance methods take), we need to magnify the wild heart of the animal and channel that liberation towards us as owners and handlers. Though it can seem counter-intuitive, trying to work against your dog’s nature isn’t going to be fruitful in the long run. For example, if you scold your dog every time it tries to bite or chase, the dog will eventually ignore you in a moment of extreme excitement and pressure. If you learn ways to exercise those urges in controlled settings, the dog will feel fulfilled and less inclined to “act out” when excited. If we can embrace the fact that dogs are, at heart, wild animals (and we are too!), then we can learn to connect with them in new and insightful ways.

To a dog, the only thing that really matters is how something feels. Dogs don’t have to hunt, they just have to feel as though they are hunting. If a dog sees a squirrel and starts to pick up a “charge”, he doesn’t need to kill the squirrel, he just needs to feel the release of that tension from his body by moving well and overcoming resistance with the handler. In this sense, it would be adequate to describe this phenomenon as the handler learning to act as the prey .