[spidey]

Skip, as always, you bring a breath of fresh air. I couldn't agree with you more, and in fact I often wish the general dog-owning public had never even HEARD the term "alpha", it is misused, misunderstood, and often used as an excuse for bullying or intimidating a dog instead of actually training it. The vast majority of people have a very poor understanding of pack dynamics (especially the more modern research which shows that we don't understand pack dynamics well at all: they are rarely static, they are very fluid and situational), especially as regards body language and day to day existence. We absolutely should train dogs with an eye on what makes sense to a dog in terms of how their minds work and how they learn, but we are not dogs, we cannot even approximate dogs beyond some very basic body language, so we should not pretend that behaving as if we were dogs is useful.

Living well with dogs is all about understanding how their minds work and finding ways to communicate which are accessible to BOTH species. Dogs are masters of body language and adaptability, we do them a great disservice by thinking that they only understand "pack dynamics" and "alpha", especially when most of the people who use these terms as regards training don't even really understand them.