A New Way to Live with your Dog:
Behavioral Diversity
By Jeff Stallings, CPDT-KA
Dog ethologist Kim Brophey’s seminar at a recent international conference was, for the dog trainers and behaviorists in attendance, downright cathartic. Brophey’s research at the Family Dog Mediation Center examines how our pet dogs’ increasingly constrained environments suppress and divert them from rich, instinctive behaviors shaped by millions of years of natural selection.
Beyond natural selection, for roughly the past 30,000 years humans selectively amplified useful canine behaviors, cultivating traits that served our needs at the time—strong social bonding in herding breeds, exceptional tracking skills in hunting breeds, and digging in ratting breeds. But in today’s crowded urban environments, opportunities to fulfill these deep-rooted instincts are scarce.
Problems arise when dogs are unable to express these important innate behaviors—although from the dog’s point of view, these “problems” are simply natural attempts to be the animals they evolved to be.
Behavioral Diversity
The field of canine ethology is experiencing a meaningful shift, moving away from simply managing or suppressing unwanted behaviors in pet dogs and instead looking to build behavioral diversity by ensuring that our companion animals are afforded rich, varied, species-appropriate behavioral lives.
The most shocking idea in this new ethology—but one that must be accepted as a starting point—is that dogs are captive animals. Our pet dogs are no less captive than the cows in our pastures or the chickens in our coops. Of course, dogs and humans have coevolved socially in a way unparalleled by other domesticated animals, but we must acknowledge that for 30,000 years dogs worked beside us while having far more agency than allowed in our modern world.
Once one accepts that dogs are captive and that the modern world—perplexing enough for humans and even more so for our dogs—is far different from the one in which they evolved, we can start thinking more in terms of honoring and providing for their behavioral repertoire.
Why Behavioral Diversity Matters in our Dogs
Our traditional approach to keeping dogs, at least since they moved out of the fields and into our bedrooms, emphasizes basic survival needs: food, water, shelter and safety. Then we train them the best we can, usually to NOT behave as they evolved but as we desire them to be. However, the new ethology reminds us that dogs descend from ancestors for whom behavioral variety—exploring, foraging, seeking, hunting—was key to survival and fulfilled lives. Modern domestic dogs are well-fed and physically sheltered but often behaviorally constrained.
New enrichment frameworks emphasize not just preventing negative states (stress, pain and fear) but promoting positive behaviors. The more behavioral variety we offer, the more likely a dog will be engaged, interested and able to express natural behaviors rather than be stuck in a limited behavioral loop.
Implementing behavioral diversity requires that we deliberately provide opportunities for dogs to perform many kinds of behaviors that tap into their evolutionary legacy. Why does that matter? First and foremost, behavioral diversity supports healthy mental stimulation: A dog only walked on a leash in straight lines around the block (or worse, tethered to an e-bike) lacks outlets for curiosity, investigative behavior, play-solving, scent discrimination and normal social interactions. Unable to perform behaviors that evolved over eons, dogs can grow bored, frustrated and anxious.
Give Your Dog Agency
Behavioral diversity provides “agency”, giving animals latitude to make choices, to explore, to initiate behaviors rather than always react to our commands. Even though our companion dogs are captive in the sense of being wholly dependent on human beings, we can still allow meaningful freedom of behavior within the environment. Most dogs don’t thrive purely under fixed routine but instead need freedom for exploration, choice and behavioral variation.
Behavioral diversity contributes to better welfare and to richer, more resilient dogs. To understand how behavioral diversity connects with the well-being of our dogs, it helps to reference the concept of a “good life” for animals—originally developed for farm animal welfare but increasingly used for companion animals too.
The Good Life
The “good life” is defined not merely as a life free from suffering, but a life where positive experiences (comfort, pleasure, interest, confidence) predominate. As with free-range chickens and grass-fed cows, the framework encourages our dogs to engage in and choose behaviors that matter to them, leading to mental states that lean positive rather than simply neutral.
For pet dogs—a species living wholly in human-mediated environments—the good life means we should move beyond “Was the dog walked today?” to “Was the dog given varied, meaningful behavioral experiences today?” The good life is not necessarily the “easy life”, all needs met with zero effort.
Giving your dog everything he wants without incorporating facets that draw on natural behaviors are doing him a disservice by keeping him from acting on deeply instinctual, highly pleasurable behaviors. Simple example: At least sometimes put your dog’s food in a Kong, hide it, and have him run around your home or yard to find it. Eating the “hunted” food will be far more interesting and, in a sense natural, than simply eating out of a boring, stationary bowl.
I will expand on the types of activities that fill out this framework in a future post. In the meantime, check out the Family Dog Mediation Center website and all the wonderful work Kim Brophey and her team are doing.
