(08-15-2016, 06:47 AM)Mav link Wrote:All this stuff about pecking order, alphas, and pack hierarchy is a bit passé.  It emanated from the 70s when a biologist observed wolves which were in captivity in a wildlife refuge.  As wolves made themselves scarce when humans went into the wild, this was a rare opportunity.  What this guy saw was that the wolves acted like hardened prisoners.  They fought each other to be boss and the boss had to withstand constant challenges.  This researcher then theorised that dogs operated in the same way as they were, after all, descended from wolves.  Back then, domestic animals such as dogs and cats weren't considered to be worthy of study, so this theory wasn't challenged.  Dog trainers were happy with this 'pack leader' theory as it merely validated their way of doing their thing - using harsh discipline to show the dogs who is boss.

In fact, the behaviour of the wolves wasn't reflective of their behaviour in the wild let alone how dogs behave.  In the wild, wolves live in family units.  Neither the father nor the mother is the 'alpha'.  They lead most of the time because they have the experience but the young wolves will take the lead on occasions if they're the best hunters, etc.. There was no 'alpha' in the sense of dominating access to resources (food, shelter, sex) with the others taking turns after the alpha was finished according to the hierarchy.  Quite the contrary - the parents provided for their progeny.  The wolves in the refuge were males who weren't related but were forced to share limited space and resources.

Researchers have noted that packs of stray dogs just don't form stable hierarchies and there is no domination of resources.

Dogs have been domesticated for millenia.  The process of domestication has changed dogs massively.  Selective breeding took wolves that were unusually friendly towards humans and reinforced this quality.  A Russian researcher showed how this process would have worked by running a breeding program with Silver Foxes over 40 generations.  Silver Foxes are extremely avoidant of contact with humans in the wild but he ended up with foxes which had radically changed in looks and behaviour.  Not only did the foxes end up craving contact with humans but also they changed physically to appear much cuter and cuddlier while their brains grew smaller.

Dogs love eye contact with humans.  Both the dog and it's master experience a release of oxytocin, the bonding drug, when their eyes meet.  On the other hand, a wolf, even a pup, will not experience any positive feelings from eye contact.  However much a handler tries to habituate a pup to eye contact, it won't improve the situation. 

In other words, dogs bond with humans in a way that wolves simply can't.  Dogs don't become part of the family because they simply slot into a hierarchical structure that mimics their "natural" structure.  They bond with us as they would their own family.

Please ignore dimwits like the self-styled "Dog Whisperer", César Milan, who run with this nonsense about being the alpha or pack leader.

Of course, selective breeding has had a massive impact upon how various breeds act.  Breeders have heightened territoriality in some breeds but suppressed it in others.  And of course dogs will have different levels of dominance or submission even in the same litter.

My dog is large but breeders have strived for over 2000 years to ensure the breed has little territoriality and is kind to all mankind.  In its area of origin, it is commonly used as a living blanket by young children.  He's a good watchdog in the sense that he barks loudly if strangers approach and he appears very excited, so couriers and meter-readers refuse to come in.  But he's a bad guard dog as he just wants a stroke from them if they do come in.  If you want a guard dog, you need a breed with more territoriality.  But that trait means they'll jealously guard humans, bones and toys as much as real estate and unwanted attacks are an unfortunate side-effect.

Quote:Just as, more than six decades ago, Schenkel extrapolated his wolf studies and applied them to domestic dogs, so too have many carried the notion of the "alpha wolf" over to dog training. Certainly, just as parent wolves hold dominance over their cubs and human parents hold dominance over their children, owners hold dominance over their dogs. Until my pup gets himself a credit card and a pair of opposable thumbs (and stops dissolving into delighted wiggles every time I tell him what a good little man he is), I'm pretty much the boss in our relationship. But some trainers take the idea of pack rank to the extreme; dog owners are given a laundry list of rules of how to maintain alpha status in all aspects of their relationship: Don't let your dog walk through the door before you do. Don't let her win a game of tug. Don't let him eat before you do. Some (famous) trainers even encourage acts of physical dominance that can be dangerous for lay people to execute. Much of this is a legacy of those old wolf studies, suggesting that we're in constant competition with our dogs for that pack leader position.

But, you might ask, mightn't domestic dogs behave much like wolves in captivity? Despite being members of the same species, wolves (even human-reared wolves) are behaviorally distinct from domestic dogs, especially when it comes to human beings. Take the famous experiment in which human-socialized wolves and domestic dogs are both presented with a cage with food inside. The food is placed inside a cage in a way that makes it impossible for either wolf or dog to retrieve it. The wolves will inevitably keep working at the cage, trying to puzzle out a way to remove the food. The dogs, after a few seconds of struggle, will look to a human as if to say, "Hey, buddy, a little help here?" Even if the hierarchical ranks were some innate part of lupine psychology, dogs have behaviors all their own.

Quote:This doesn't mean that wolves don't display social dominance, however. When a recent piece purporting to dispel the "myth" of canine dominance appeared on Psychology Today, ethologist Marc Bekoff quickly stepped in. Wolves (and other animals, including humans), display social dominance, he notes; it just isn't always easy to boil dominant behavior down to simple explanations. Dominant behavior and dominance relationships can be highly situational, and can vary greatly from individual to individual even within the same species. It's not the entire concept of wolves displaying social dominance that was dispelled, just the simple hierarchical pack structure. In response to the same piece, Mech pointed to a 2010 article he published detailing his observance of an adult gray wolf repeatedly pinning and straddling a male pack mate over the course of six and a half minutes. "We interpreted this behavior as an extreme example of an adult wolf harassing a maturing offspring, perhaps in prelude to the offspring's dispersal."

(08-15-2016, 12:01 PM)Mav link Wrote:Did you read the article I linked, DJC?  You would have noted that social dominance was covered:

Quote:Similarly, although it is clear that dogs have retained many of the individual patterns of intraspecific communicative behavior from the wolf, we urge caution in extrapolating the function of these behaviors from free-ranging dogs, or indeed wolves, to the behavior of companion dogs, for 2 reasons. Not only has the significance of the various displays almost certainly been altered during the pro- cess of domestication, but also the lifetime experiences of companion dogs are very different from those of their free-ranging counterparts. We particularly urge against the extrapolation of conclusions drawn from the intraspecific behavior of free-ranging dogs to the interpretation of interspecific behavior directed by companion dogs toward humans. Put simply, we do not believe that the fact that human observers can measure consistent relationships between some pairs of dogs, and can define these as dominance relationships, should be interpreted as providing evidence for the hypothesis that “dominance” is an inherent (“personality”) characteristic of dogs, nor that their behaviors are driven by the motivation to enhance their relative “status.” Indeed, we argue that at our current state of knowledge of cognitive processes in the Carnivora, it is misleading to presume that domestic dogs have the mental capacity to conceptualize “status.”

We also consider it dangerous to use such extrapolations to support techniques used to alter the behavior of companion dogs, whether that be basic training or the resolution of behavioral disorders. The “dominance” concept has long been used to justify the application of pain and fear in dog training, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that not only are such methods potentially dangerous for the person using them, they are counterproductive in terms of behavioral outcomes, owner-pet bonds, and canine welfare (Rooney and Bradshaw, 2014; Schalke et al., 2007; Schilder and van der Borg, 2004).