29/08/2026
Thereās an influx of dog trainers currently talking about ādecision makers ā and āprotectorsā
A few years ago I had the privilege of studying with Shaun & Kim at The Wolf and Dog Development Centre and learning about social identities in wolves & dogs. (Decision makers, protectors and many more identities)
I highly recommend looking them up š¤
Iām hearing this more and moreā¦ and seeing it onlineā¦
āIāve heard about social identities, I didnāt realise it was your work.ā
Annoying? Yes.
Because once again, Iām seeing a piece of Shaunās work taken out of context and dropped into approaches that have very little to do with what the research actually means. š¤·š»āāļø
Social identities are ONE of the unique parts of our work.
They didnāt come from a dog training course, a paper, or somebody repackaging someone elseās ideas.
They came from decades of Shaun living with and observing wolves, both wild and captive, and from years of us developing that work further.
The people we licence to teach it spend years learning it properly too. They stay connected to us and bring their client work back for guidance and support.
They donāt learn a few character names and stick them onto whatever they were already doing. š
Because that is where this goes badly wrong.
You cannot take social identity, then carry on talking about dominance, leadership, forcing behaviour, more exercise, control, and pretend you are still working with our research.
Youāre not.
Youāve taken one piece, completely missed the point and removed the context that gives it meaning.
And yes, that matters because of the years of work behind it.
It matters because of our amazing students that invest time and money into learning it deeply.
But more than anything, it matters because of the wolves. šŗ
Their lives are where this work came from, and we are fiercely protective of that.
Once their world gets dragged back into the same old dominance language and dog training logic, their reputation gets distorted all over again.
And theyāve had enough of that alreadyā¦.donāt you think?
If somebody is talking about our social identities, using our character names, and they are not one of our licensed instructors, please understand that they are not teaching the work as we teach it.
They may know a fragment.
We canāt stop people repeating pieces of what weāve shared.
But we can make sure people know the difference between somebody borrowing the language and somebody who has actually done the work. š
