What are some of your major findings?

Owners interpreted dominance based on specific behaviors, obtaining resources and certain personality traits, which supports that dominance relationships are robust and well-perceivable components of companion dog behavior. Dogs rated as dominant usually have priority access to certain resources, such as food, rewards, resting places, and they are perceived to undertake specific tasks, such as “guarding” through barking more, walking in the front during walks (i.e., “leading” the group), defending the group in case of perceived danger, etc. They display dominance: more frequently accept that the other dogs lick their mouth and mark over the other’s urination. They have characteristic personality traits: smarter, more aggressive, and impulsive, and they are older than subordinates according to the owners. Asking which dog wins fights is highly predictive if it did occur (fighting occurred in approximately 70 percent of pairs). Physical condition, obedience, sequence of greeting the owner and retrieving balls were unrelated to the perceived dominance.

Were there any surprises?

We were surprised that 87 percent of owners indicated that their dogs differed in their social status, and only 10 percent perceived them as similar. We assumed that more owners would be unable to detect differences in rank in their dogs, perhaps because the dogs had a different type of relationship, which was not based on dominance: For example, they were non-interactive (they co-existed without social interactions, i.e., they avoided each other), or they had an “egalitarian” relationship (the partners affiliated regularly, e.g., played with each other, without agonistic behavior). Also, we did not expect to find that in mixed-sex dyads, females were more frequently rated as dominant than males. This might be because dominant females were more often neutered than dominant males, and previous studies have found that aggression occurs more often in neutered females compared to intact females and neutered males.

We expected to find that age would explain the relationships between the dyads, perhaps better than dominance status, as previous studies have found that older dogs are more often dominant than young individuals. However, in the current study, dominance status, as perceived by the owner, explained dog-to-dog interactions better than the age of the dogs. Yet when we examined only the dyads where a younger individual was dominant, we found that 64 percent of the dominants licked the mouth of the older individual, which is a sign of submission. We reasoned that the owners may have perceived the younger individual to be dominant, as it was more motivated to obtain resources, perhaps because it was faster/more active, as well as showed higher aggression and impulsivity in comparison to the older dog. Possibly, these younger individuals may have started to test the older dog to establish boundaries. Regardless, there is still a lot to learn about how age differences influence relationships in pet dogs.

What are some practical aspects of your results?

Owners are responsible for choosing the social partners of their dogs, so they have a duty to try to ensure that relationships are as amicable as possible. For example, owners could reinforce the position of older individuals in order to reduce competition and avoid keeping multiple dogs of the same sex and age. We found great individual differences in dogs’ relationships and hope in the future to examine these more closely and include affiliative aspects as well as long-term changes. It’s important to note that our study represents a snapshot in time in the lives of the dogs, and that dog relationships are dynamic and may change according to context and learning.

What are some of your current projects?

Both of us work in the Senior Family Dog Project in Budapest. We explore the cognitive aging of family dogs with not only behavioral, but also neuroscientific and genetic testing methods. The results are expected to provide guidelines for a healthy lifestyle to promote successful aging and to aid our understanding of the biological background of human cognitive aging through the non-invasive use of the pet dog as an animal model. The “dominance study” was a side project, and originated from Eniko’s previous study on the collective motion of a dog pack. At that time, it was not clear what questionnaire items should be used to map dominance hierarchies between dogs, and we aimed to fill the gap.

Is there anything else you’d like to tell readers?

We would like to emphasize that the current study examined owners’ ratings of their dogs and did not attempt to validate these ratings with the dogs’ behavior in real-life situations. Another topic for future research is the relationship of owners with the dogs within their household, and how this might influence the intraspecific relationships between their dogs, a topic that is currently hotly debated. Since some dog owners describe dogs that often show dominant behavior towards other dogs as having a “dominant personality,” studies linking personality traits to owner-perceived dominance status would be especially useful to help clarify the correct terminology to the public. We hope to publish a paper on this topic in the near future. So watch this space!