Why Loving Dogs Is How This Industry Starts, And Why It Has to Be More Than That.
Loving dogs is how most people open a dog care facility. It's how we started too.
There's nothing wrong with that as a starting point. Passion matters. Care matters. But at some point, if you're serious about what you're doing, you have to reckon with the fact that love isn't a skill set. It doesn't tell you what a stress response looks like. It doesn't help you read a group dynamic before it tips. It doesn't protect a dog from an environment that means well but delivers poorly.
The moment we realised that wasn't enough, everything changed at Fetch Dubai. We started surrounding ourselves with people who actually knew things. Sought out support forums, educational institutions, and certifications that challenged how we thought about dog care entirely.
And even then we had to become discerning about what we were receiving, because a lot of what gets taught, even by professionals, is built on theories that have since been challenged, revised, or outright debunked.
Common practice isn't always best practice. In the dog care industry in Dubai, that distinction matters more than most guardians realise.
The Pack Theory Problem — And Why It Still Hasn't Gone Away
The clearest example of this is pack theory. The idea that dogs operate in rigid dominance hierarchies, that they're constantly vying for alpha status, and that humans need to establish themselves as "pack leader" to get compliance has shaped dog training and dog care globally for decades.
The problem is that it was wrong from the beginning, and the scientist who popularised it said so himself.
Dr. David Mech popularised the concept of the alpha wolf in his 1970 book, based on research conducted on wolves in captivity. Captive wolves, unrelated animals forced together in an enclosure, behaved very differently from wolves in the wild. After years of field research, Mech concluded that the hierarchical dominance model was an artefact of the captive environment, not natural wolf behaviour.
In 1999, Mech published a paper formally retracting the alpha concept. In his own words: "Attempting to apply information about the behaviour of assemblages of unrelated captive wolves to the familial structure of natural packs has resulted in considerable confusion. Such an approach is analogous to trying to draw inferences about human family dynamics by studying humans in refugee camps."¹
He also made a specific request that his original 1970 book be taken out of print. The publisher declined. The debunked theory kept circulating, and kept influencing trainers and facilities long after the science had moved on.
The consequence for dogs has been significant. A 2009 study by Herron, Shofer and Reisner found that dogs exposed to confrontational, dominance-based training methods were significantly more likely to respond with aggression compared to dogs trained using reward-based methods.² Specifically, 31% of guardians who performed an alpha roll, 39% who forced a dog to release something from their mouth, and 43% who hit or kicked their dog reported an aggressive response.³
Bradshaw, Blackwell and Casey published a formal review in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior in 2009 concluding that dominance as applied to dog training is not a useful construct and reflects a misunderstanding of both wolf and dog social behaviour.⁴
The science moved on. Much of the industry did not.
Why Dubai's Dog Care Market Is Particularly Vulnerable to This
Dubai's pet care industry has grown rapidly. That growth has brought in a lot of people who love dogs, which is genuinely a good thing. But love as the primary qualification, in a market still finding its standards, creates a gap between what's being offered and what dogs actually need.
The idea that humans must be hierarchically dominant over dogs, and that the way to do that is through confrontational and coercive methods, has been widespread in popular culture and in parts of the professional literature. That makes it one of the harder myths to displace even as the scientific consensus has moved decisively against it.⁵
When facilities train their staff using outdated frameworks, the dogs in their care pay the cost. Not dramatically or visibly. Quietly, in elevated stress responses, in avoidance behaviours, in a dog that comes home a little more shut down than they left.
Guardians rarely have the context to recognise this. Why would they? Nobody's telling them what to look for, and the facilities getting it wrong are rarely aware of it themselves.
What Discerning Actually Looks Like
When we started seeking out education beyond our initial passion, we didn't find a neat consensus. We found an industry in transition. Some practitioners working from excellent, evidence-based frameworks, others still teaching methods that haven't reflected current science for twenty years.
That meant we had to develop the capacity to evaluate what we were receiving, not just absorb it. To ask where a method came from. To check whether its foundations held up. To be willing to abandon something that felt intuitive if the evidence pointed elsewhere.
Fear Free certification gave us a framework grounded in reducing fear, anxiety and stress at every touchpoint. The Professional United Pet Group's Do No Harm standards gave us a clear ethical boundary. These aren't marketing badges. They're the result of choosing frameworks that reflect where the science actually is, not where it was in 1970.
The saying we keep coming back to is this: common practice isn't always best practice. In this industry, what's common is often what's simply been repeated long enough that nobody questions it anymore.
We question it. Every day. Not because we have all the answers, but because the dogs in our care deserve people who keep asking.
If you want to understand more about how we approach the handler relationship and why it turns out to be the single most important variable in your dog's experience, you can read about it here.
And if you want to understand who we are and how Fetch came to exist, our story is here.
References
Mech, L.D. (1999). Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 77(8), 1196–1203. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/usgsnpwrc/353/
Herron, M.E., Shofer, F.S., & Reisner, I.R. (2009). Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviors. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 117(1–2), 47–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2008.12.011
Herron et al. (2009), ibid.
Bradshaw, J.W.S., Blackwell, E.J., & Casey, R.A. (2009). Dominance in domestic dogs — useful construct or bad habit? Journal of Veterinary Behavior, 4(3), 135–144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2008.08.004
Ziv, G. (2017). The effects of using aversive training methods in dogs — a review. Journal of Veterinary Behavior, 19, 50–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2017.02.004