24/05/2025
You know I’m a fan of aggressive communication and I also think aggression is justified much more than the average trainer. But this is not a celebration of “good” aggression or dominance. This is what happens to a group of dogs that face chronic stress and are forced to live in an environment that is unnatural, where they cannot express natural behaviour or mange social tension using distances. Where communication fails so force is the only alternative. Where dogs do not feel safe, constantly, in their own home. Look at the other dogs’ facial expressions and postures in the photos. All of them.
If you know a bit about the nervous system, you know the psychological repercussions any mammal suffers from being chronically pushed into a sympathetic and dorsal-vagal response.
Dogs communicate, de-escalate, manage tension via one very important tool: distance.
Where this is possible, conflict rarely escalates and dogs learn to self-regulate their emotions, to communicate without needing force or repeated aggression or these extremes levels of frustration, arousal, and activation. They learn how to avoid conflict, how to establish relationships that are not based on fear but on trust.
This is not dominance. Dominance is a relationship where submission is offered to a dominant dog without it being imposed. It’s offered because the submitting dog feels safe with and trusts a leader to make the right choices to safeguard their welfare and has measured responses. Because they don’t fear retaliation. Instead, this is frustration, tension, insecurity, extreme emotional disregulation. Submission imposed or offered as a last resort to avoid violence has nothing to do with leadership.
If “cool dogs” is what the wider dog world sees when watching these videos, it’s time for all of us to go back to school and study dogs back to back, from zero. And also to rethink what we find attractive and the role models we want to follow - because they are distorted and say a lot of the small, insecure, and hateful creatures we can be.
