01/11/2026
A great post by my friend, Jennie
Dominance Theory Part 1
We cannot talk about training methodologies without addressing dominance theory, as its rhetoric is extremely popular across the training world, but especially, it seems, in the horse world. In the next few weeks, I will get into that rhetoric and how it is a hindrance to your training, but first, I want to talk about what it is and its history.
Dominance theory was first coined by Rudolph Schenkel in the 1930s from a short and incomplete study that he performed on captive wolves in a zoo in Switzerland. The theory was popularized in 1970 by wildlife biologist David Mech in his book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species. As often happens with science, Mech continued to study wolf behavior, realized he was wrong, and spent the rest of his career discrediting his earlier work.
Before we get into why it was discredited, let’s talk about what it is. Dominance theory is the idea that a wolf pack is led by an “alpha” or dominant individual, who fights to hold dominance over the rest of the pack, while other individuals fill out lower ranks in the hierarchy.
As it pertains to training, it states that we should insert ourselves into the pack hierarchy and attempt to occupy that dominant role. The essence is that we are in constant competition with our animals for dominance and that they are most comfortable as our subordinates.
I am not sure how dominance theory got translated from dogs into horses, but the crossover does make a certain amount of sense. My hypothesis is this: horses have always been taught with a mixture of positive punishment and negative reinforcement, mostly because they are large and can be dangerous when they are not well trained. For most of our history with horses, men were the only ones allowed to train, and they were teaching horses to do a job. It wasn’t until the late 1800s and early 1900s that women were really allowed to train horses in any real way.
In recent history, the demographic of horse owners has gone from men who used them to perform a job to middle aged women and young girls who enjoy riding, but mostly just want a pet. Around this time, dominance theory took the dog world by storm, gaining traction with shows like The Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan. Horse trainers, who were trying to find ways to get women to be more firm with their pet horses so that they didn’t get hurt, co-opted the methods to make people who didn’t want to scare or hurt their pets more comfortable doing just that.
Though I know that certain very prominent trainers have admitted that they did this on purpose, I like to believe that most trainers at this time just saw an explanation for why their methods were working, and confirmation bias led them to believe that similar things were happening in horse herds.
This brings us to 1986, when David Mech realized that all of the observations for his previous work had been done on captive wolves. He went to Ellesmere Island and observed wild wolves for the next 25 summers. What he found painted a much different picture. It turned out that packs consisted of a breeding pair and their offspring between six months and three years old. The breeding pair were dominant in the sense that their offspring would look to them for guidance until they dispersed to meet up with other dispersed wolves to become breeding pairs themselves. In Mech’s 25 years of observing wild wolves, no disputes over dominance were observed.
Similarly, more recent observations of feral horse herds have found no support for a dominance hierarchy. Horses tend to create relatively stable harems that are watched over by one to two stallions.
Offspring disperse at a young age to either create their own harems or bachelor herds. Harems are usually guided by older mares who have the most experience.
Why do we still see the remnants of dominance theory in horse training? One thing that we need to realize when we ask this question is that positive punishment is reinforcing for the punisher because it creates immediate behavior change. Dominance theory is a way to make people comfortable with the idea of exerting enough pressure on their horse to create immediate behavioral change, which further reinforces the person using pressure.
Consequences of that pressure are usually not immediate and are explained away by the horse attempting to assert their dominance, thus met with more force. Coupled with the fact that these ideas have now been passed down through many training traditions and we have generations of people who grew up with them, it becomes very hard to completely eliminate it from our culture.
Over the next few weeks, I will be doing a few more posts on how to look for dominance theory, how its ideals affect how we train, and how to start changing your views even if you don’t change how you train. As always, feel free to reach out with questions or comments, and let me know if there are any specific things you would like me to write about.
References:
https://www.wolf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/267alphastatus_english.pdf
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.848741/full
Photo credit Roy Stansell
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