Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [24]
Still, to many, the analogy to a dominance-pack organization is terribly appealing—especially with us as dominant and the dog submissive. Once applied, the popular conception of a pack works itself into all sorts of interactions with our dogs: we eat first, the dog second; we command, the dog obeys; we walk the dog, the dog doesn't walk us. Unsure how to deal with an animal in our midst, the "pack" notion gives us a structure.
Unfortunately, it not only limits the kind of understanding and interaction we can have with our dogs, it also relies on a faulty premise. The "pack" evoked in this way bears little resemblance to actual wolf packs. The traditional model of the pack was that of a linear hierarchy, with a ruling alpha pair and various "beta" and even "gamma" or "omega" wolves below them, but contemporary wolf biologists find this model far too simplistic. It was formed from observations of captive wolves. With limited space and resources in small, enclosed pens, unrelated wolves self-organize, and a hierarchy of power results. The same might happen in any social species confined with little room.
In the wild, wolf packs consist almost entirely of related or mated animals. They are families, not groups of peers vying for the top spot. A typical pack includes a breeding pair and one or many generations of their offspring. The pack unit organizes social behavior and hunting behavior. Only one pair mates, while other adult or adolescent pack members participate in raising the pups. Different individuals hunt and share food; at times, many members together hunt large prey which may be too large to tackle individually. Unrelated animals do occasionally join together to form packs with multiple breeding partners, but this is an exception, probably an accommodation to environmental pressures. Some wolves never join a pack.
The one breeding pair—parents to all or most of the other pack members—guides the group's course and behaviors, but to call them "alphas" implies a vying for the top that is not quite accurate. They are not alpha dominants any more than a human parent is the alpha in the family. Similarly, the subordinate status of a young wolf has more to do with his age than with a strictly enforced hierarchy. Behaviors seen as "dominant" or "submissive" are used not in a scramble for power, they are used to maintain social unity. Rather than being a pecking order, rank is a mark of age. It is regularly on display in the animals' expressive postures in greeting and in interaction. Approaching an older wolf with a low wagging tail and a body close to the ground, a younger wolf is acknowledging the older's biological priority. Young pups are naturally at a subordinate level; in mixed-family packs pups may inherit some of the status of their parents. While rank may be reinforced by charged and sometimes dangerous encounters between pack members, this is rarer than aggression against an intruder. Pups learn their place by interacting with and observing their packmates more than by being put in their place.
The reality of wolf pack behavior contrasts starkly with dog behavior in other ways. Domestic dogs do not generally hunt. Most are not born into the family unit in which they will live: with humans the predominant members. Pet dogs' attempts to mate are (happily) unrelated to their adopted humans'—supposedly the alpha pair's—mating schedules. Even feral dogs—those who may never have lived in a human family—usually do not form traditional social packs, although they may travel in parallel.
Neither are we the dog's pack. Our lives are so much more stable than that of a wolf pack: the size and membership of a wolf pack is always in flux, changing with the seasons, with the rates