Understanding Dog Behaviour Through an Ethological Approach

Jim Gillies CAB | CDBC( Certified Dog Behaviour Consultant )

Jim Gillies CAB, CDBC is a Clinical Animal Behaviourist based in Glasgow with over a decade of experience across a wide range of canine behaviour issues. He is an APBC Full Member, ABTC Registered, and IAABC Certified Dog Behaviour Consultant — and works across clinical consultations, veterinary collaboration, and expert witness instruction. His practice is welfare-led and evidence-based throughout. Jim runs CBT Dog Behaviour & Training and shares behaviour insights through his blog and podcast.

Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour in natural contexts — examining not just what an animal does, but why, given its biology, its history, and the environment it finds itself in. For those working with dogs, an ethological approach offers something that a purely operant framework cannot: a way of understanding behaviour that starts with the animal as a whole rather than with the behaviour in isolation. This article explains what that means in practice, why it matters clinically, and how it shapes the way I assess and work with behaviour cases.

Last updated: April 2026

What Is Ethology?

Ethology emerged as a formal discipline in the mid-twentieth century through the work of researchers including Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch — collectively recognised with a Nobel Prize in 1973. What distinguished ethology from the behaviourism dominant at the time was its insistence on studying animals in their natural environments, and its interest in the evolutionary and biological basis of behaviour rather than just its observable expression.

Applied ethology takes those principles into practical contexts — animal welfare, conservation, and companion animal behaviour. An applied ethologist is not simply asking "what is the dog doing?" but "what is this behaviour for, given what this animal is, where it came from, and what conditions it is currently living in?" That is a fundamentally different question, and it tends to produce fundamentally different answers.

Why Behaviour Problems Cannot Be Understood Through ABC Alone

Antecedent-Behaviour-Consequence (ABC) analysis is the foundation of applied behaviour analysis and remains a useful tool for understanding what triggers a behaviour and what maintains it. The problem is not that ABC is wrong — it is that in practice, the antecedent tends to be treated as the immediately preceding event rather than as the full history of factors that set the stage for the behaviour.

The Antecedent Iceberg

In a conversation on Barking from the Wooftops, applied ethologist Kim Brophey described this as the "antecedent iceberg" — the idea that what we observe immediately before a behaviour is only the visible tip of a much larger set of contributing factors. Below the surface sit the animal's genetics, its full learning history, the cumulative effects of its environment over time, and its individual emotional and physiological state. A dog that lunges at strangers on lead may be responding to the immediate trigger, but that trigger is operating against a background of breed-specific predispositions, early socialisation history, prior aversive experiences, current arousal levels, and the accumulated stress of its daily environment. Address only the immediate trigger and you are working on the tip of the iceberg.

What Gets Missed in Practice

The cases where behaviour programmes repeatedly fail are almost always cases where those deeper antecedents have not been properly assessed. Identifying them is not optional — it is the foundation of an effective formulation.

A practical example: a dog referred for on-lead reactivity toward other dogs may have a clear immediate trigger — the sight of another dog at close range — but the formulation is incomplete without knowing the breed and its predisposition toward conspecific reactivity, whether the dog had adequate early socialisation, the current arousal baseline going into each walk, and whether the environment provides any outlet for the dog's natural behavioural needs outside of lead walks. Two dogs presenting with identical surface behaviour can require entirely different approaches once those factors are considered.

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The LEGS Framework

Kim Brophey developed the LEGS framework — Learning, Environment, Genetics, and Self — as a structured way of accounting for all four major contributors to a dog's behaviour. It is not a replacement for ABC analysis but an expansion of what belongs in the antecedent category.

Learning

Learning covers the dog's individual experience — what it has been exposed to, what strategies it has developed, what meanings it has attached to specific stimuli, and whether there is any trauma or significant absence of early learning in its history.

Environment

Environment refers not just to what is happening in the dog's immediate surroundings, but to the cumulative environmental picture — the schedule, the stimulation levels, the available outlets for natural behaviour, and the broader conditions the dog has lived in across its life. Environment and genetics have an intensive relationship: the environments a breed was developed for historically created the genetic pressures that shaped it, and those pressures do not disappear simply because the dog is now living in a modern household.

Genetics

Genetics shapes how a dog perceives and responds to its world in ways that largely bypass conscious processing. A dog bred for sustained predatory pursuit, close-contact guarding, or high-intensity reactive work brings that wiring to every interaction, regardless of training history. Genetics creates likelihoods, not certainties — but ignoring it produces a systematic blind spot in assessment.

Self

Self acknowledges that each dog is an individual with its own emotional experience, arousal baseline, sensory sensitivities, and behavioural tendencies that cannot be fully explained by breed or history alone. Accounting for selfhood is not anthropomorphism — it is clinical accuracy.

What an Ethological Approach Tells Us About Dog Behaviour Problems

One of the most useful shifts from an ethological perspective is moving away from the idea that behaviour problems are aberrations to be corrected and towards the idea that they are functional responses to the conditions the dog finds itself in. Aggression communicates something. Persistent barking communicates something. Destructive behaviour during absences communicates something. The question is not how to stop the behaviour — it is what the behaviour is telling us about the dog's experience of its environment.

A concept closely related to this is the dog-environment mismatch. When a dog's genetic design does not fit the conditions it is living in, friction and dysfunction are the predictable outcome. A herding breed in a low-stimulation urban apartment without the physical and cognitive outlets its wiring demands is not a badly trained dog. It is an animal in the wrong niche. This does not make the situation unfixable, but it does mean the intervention needs to start with an honest assessment of the mismatch rather than a behaviour modification plan aimed purely at symptoms.

Behaviour labelled as problematic is usually functional for the dog — it works, or at some point worked, to meet a need or resolve a tension. Understanding that does not mean tolerating it. It means understanding what the dog is getting from the behaviour so that the management plan can address that need directly.

Applying an Ethological Approach in Clinical Practice

In my own assessments, an ethological approach means that history-taking goes considerably deeper than what immediately preceded the presenting behaviour. I am interested in the dog's full learning history, any gaps in early socialisation, the breed or genetic mix and what functional behaviours that is likely to bring, the dog's daily environment and how much opportunity it has to express natural behaviour, and the individual dog's arousal baseline and emotional reactivity. None of that information appears in a simple ABC analysis.

The LEGS framework has become a useful clinical organiser — not as a rigid checklist but as a way of ensuring that all four dimensions are considered before a formulation is reached. A dog referred for aggression whose genetics, environment, learning history, and individual emotional state have all been accounted for produces a much more coherent formulation than one assessed purely on the basis of what triggers the behaviour in the moment.

It also changes how I work with owners. Much of what owners experience as wilfulness, stubbornness, or disobedience makes immediate sense when the genetic and environmental context is understood. Helping an owner see that is not an excuse — it is the foundation of a management plan that will actually work. In many cases, the most significant shift is not in the training programme at all — it is in the owner's understanding of what their dog is and what it needs in order to function well.

Further Reading

For clinical guides to specific behaviour presentations, see our posts on fear aggression in dogs, trigger stacking in dogs, redirected aggression in dogs, and separation anxiety in dogs. Kim Brophey's book Meet Your Dog is an excellent introduction to the LEGS framework for both dog owners and professionals, and her Barking from the Wooftops podcast episode is available on our podcast page.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between ethology and behaviourism?

Behaviourism focuses on observable behaviour and the conditions that produce it. Ethology takes a broader view, examining behaviour in the context of the animal's biology, evolution, genetics, and natural environment. The two are complementary: ethology expands the antecedent category to include factors that behaviourism in practice tends to overlook.

What is the LEGS framework?

LEGS stands for Learning, Environment, Genetics, and Self. Developed by applied ethologist Kim Brophey, it is a structured framework for accounting for all four major contributors to a dog's behaviour rather than focusing narrowly on the immediate trigger. It is designed to complement, not replace, ABC analysis.

Does breed really affect behaviour?

Yes — significantly, though not deterministically. Dogs were selectively bred for specific functional behaviours over generations, and those genetic predispositions influence how dogs perceive and respond to their environment in ways that largely bypass training. Ignoring breed when assessing behaviour is a systematic error, not a neutral choice.

What does an ethological approach change about how behaviour problems are assessed?

It shifts the question from "what triggers this behaviour and what reinforces it?" to "what does this behaviour tell us about this dog's experience of its environment, given its genetics and history?" That typically produces a different formulation — and an intervention that addresses underlying needs rather than just surface behaviour.