Alpha Dogs, Wolf Packs & the Wandering Free Families
by Jason GodeskyCesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer,” has enjoyed tremendous commercial success and a rabid following. The format of Millan’s show puts him into homes with “troubled” dogs, and chronicles Millan’s attempts to end the disruptive behavior. Millan fancies himself a “dog psychologist,” but his model of dog psychology is grounded firmly in the notion that dogs have the same psychology as their wild lupine ancestors—and that means a life preoccupied with dominance behavior, power displays, and the quest to become the “alpha.” We’ve recently been exploring the relationship between canids and hominids—how humans and canines closely co-evolved, and in particular, how the cooperative, egalitarian human band and tribe was something we learned from the pack structure of wolves. Doesn’t the rigid hierarchy of wolf packs suggest that dominance, too, must be a normal part of human society? Aren’t wolf packs—and, if human society is patterned on the wolf pack, our own societies, too—rigid dominance hierarchies?
Millan urges dog owners to become the “alpha”—this is the essence of dog domestication, in his view, the replacement of a canine alpha with a human being, leaving the rest of the social structure in place (European empires did similar things by turning various princes and potentates into their own government officials). Millan does this through some grueling physical demands and punishments.
Essentially, National Geographic and Cesar Millan have cleverly repackaged and promoted a simplistic view of the dog’s social structure and constructed around it a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach to dog training. In Mr. Millan’s world, dog behavioral problems result from a failure of the human to be the “pack leader,” to dominate the dog (a wolf by any other name) completely.
While Mr. Millan rejects hitting and yelling at dogs during training, his confrontational methods include physical and psychological intimidation, like finger jabs, choke collars, extended sessions on a treadmill and what is called flooding, or overwhelming the animal with the thing it fears. Compared with some training devices still in use—whips and cattle prods, for example—these are mild, but combined with a lack of positive reinforcement or rewards, they place Mr. Millan firmly in a long tradition of punitive dog trainers.1
Of course, as the show clearly documents, these techniques do work—they create the desired behavior. The dog becomes compliant. But why?
On his TV show, the main method Millan uses for aggression is aversives (leash jerks, kicks, snaps of the hand against the neck, and restraint, among others) applied non contingently. The aversives are non contingent because they are so frequent that they’re not connected to any particular behavior on the part of the dog—the dog gets popped pretty much constantly. This results in a state called learned helplessness, which means the animal hunkers down and tries to do as little as possible. This is what Millan calls “calm submission.”2
In other words, Millan succeeds in so traumatizing the dog that it “calmly submits.” Learned helplessness is a subject we often encounter in humans placed in hierarchical situations, and it is one of the primary reasons we submit to intolerable power structures.3, 4 One popular technique the Millan uses is called the “alpha roll,” in which a dog is rolled onto his back, exposing his belly, and held there by the throat. Early researchers noted this roll as a means by which alpha wolves established dominance, and the Monks of New Skete suggested it in their famous book, How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend.
Later researchers discovered, however, that this was woefully misleading. The early researchers saw the “alpha” nearby and the “subordinate” wolf flipped on his back, and assumed this was an act of force on the part of the “alpha.” In fact, it was an appeasing gesture on the part of the “subordinate”—it was done willingly by the “subordinate,” and never by force. In fact, a wolf would only be flipped on its back by force by an animal intent on killing it. Suddenly, the violent struggles and the life-long psychological trauma from dogs that had been flipped made perfect sense—this was not the behavior of an “alpha” wolf establishing dominance, but of someone intent on murder.
Across the board, our “recieved wisdom” about dominance behavior in wolf packs has been terribly, terribly skewed and misleading. The so-called “alpha roll” is but one example. We have fundamentally projected our own civilized hierarchies onto the wolf pack.
The first studies of social relationships within a wolf pack were based on unrelated captive wolves, because wolves in an enclosure are far easier to observe than wild free-living wolves.
In a captive group of unrelated wolves there is a tendency for a social—or ‘dominance’—hierarchy to emerge. The idea of a hierarchy was first described for captive wolves in 1947 and tended to overshadow other attempts to understand the social interactions within a pack. This early view of a wolf pack is that the wolves are forever struggling to get further up the social hierarchy, ultimately to the alpha position, while holding in check everyone else.
The problem with this early view of wolf pack society is that it is based almost entirely on observations of captive wolves. … It is a bit like observing only the inmates of prisons when you are trying to understand human society, then extrapolating your findings to free-living people.5
Dr. David Mech is one of the most respected wolf researchers in the world. He has a very different view of what makes wolf packs work. In the wild, wolf packs are generally made up of a single monogamous breeding pair, and their offspring. Very rarely, large wolf packs may include more than one breeding pair. When the children become old enough, they go off to start their own pack, with their own territory. In other words, a wolf pack is not a rigid hierarchy, but a family.
Labeling a high-ranking wolf alpha emphasizes its rank in a dominance hierarchy. However, in natural wolf packs, the alpha male or female are merely the breeding animals, the parents of the pack, and dominance contests with other wolves are rare, if they exist at all. During my 13 summers observing the Ellesmere Island pack, I saw none.
Thus, calling a wolf an alpha is usually no more appropriate than referring to a human parent or a doe deer as an alpha. Any parent is dominant to its young offspring, so “alpha” adds no information. Why not refer to an alpha female as the female parent, the breeding female, the matriarch, or simply the mother? Such a designation emphasizes not the animal’s dominant status, which is trivial information, but its role as pack progenitor, which is critical information.
The one use we may still want to reserve for “alpha” is in the relatively few large wolf packs comprised of multiple litters. Although the genetic relationships of the mothers in such packs remain unknown, probably the mothers include the original matriarch and one or more daughters, and the fathers are probably the patriarch and unrelated adoptees. In such cases the older breeders are probably dominant to the younger breeders and perhaps can more appropriately be called the alphas. Evidence for such a contention would be an older breeder consistently dominating food disposition or the travels of the pack.
The point here is not so much the terminology but what the terminology falsely implies: a rigid, force-based dominance hierarchy.6
“Thomas,” who learned of tribal cultures from his grandparents who once lived in one, wrote to Ran Prieur about his experience. Part of the email that Ran edited out underlines the importance of family in tribal life.
The difference between tribal and civilized is human ownership. In true tribal life, human beings are owned by their nuclear family and by extension a land base. To have one’s own family is everyone’s ambition and it (marriage and hopefully kids) is what makes everyone an equal and participating tribe member. A tribe is really just a group of people who are owned and provided for by an identified (or similar) land base.
The connection of family and land—pack and territory—brings to mind what Willem Larson wrote at the College of Mythic Cartography:
Imagine this: you, your parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, mothers and fathers, children, cousins, second cousins, your whole extended family, has lived the life of a year-round summer camp for as long as you remember. You live together, resolve conflicts, and support one another as best you can, as a family. Your in-jokes have become the stuff of legend, your artistic styles have inspired each other, for countless generations you have collaborated on a vital and celebratory family culture that you enjoy. You make decisions as a community, relying on the wisdom of those you trust. The smallest child contributes to voice of the community as a whole. No police, no bureaucracy, no institutions … instead you have taboos, family consensus processes, and traditions. A Free Family, living your life on the land. …
So often I’ve read and heard Native elders say what matters most to them: family and land. The Lakota say: “All my relations,” and when you call the earth your mother, the sky your father, the animals brothers and sisters, your sense of family does extend to the land your people walk on. Native Hawai’ians have a well-known word “ohana” that describes the importance and closeness of family.
In the modern world, we have some expressions that honor family connection … “blood is thicker than water,” for example. I know of none that get to the heart of the fundamental indigenous belief, that family holds all the roots of wealth (referring to its etymology): wholeness, wellness, health, and holiness.7
In “Dysfunctional Culture,” we wrote about how even the most complex societies have traditionally constructed themselves as a huge family. We wrote there:
Of course, it’s natural to use the family as a metaphor for society. The Roman emperor predicated his power on his position as the Pater Patriae of the Roman people, a Pater familias on the imperial scale. Even today, we speak of George Washington as the “father of our country,” and describe our Civil War as a conflict “of brother against brother.” We speak of a “motherland” (or, in German-speaking countries, “Fatherland”). We seem to naturally gravitate towards metaphors of family whenever we try to describe the body politic.
But if the state is a family, then it is a deeply dysfunctional one. Derrick Jensen, himself a survivor of his father’s abuse, has been using that metaphor for years now. In his writings, he often compares the crimes of civilization against humanity to the crimes his father committed against him.8
Thomas puts an even finer point on it.
In this social perspective, Civilization is weird because the permanent division of labor (with no barriers between unrelated people) makes all of us one family. Our family takes on the name that is given to the state and each of us must honor it religiously. Like the family in a tribe, this very abstract family also claims and owns every of us in everyway. No other entity can interact with one of ours without drawing the rest of us in—hence our self-righteous murder of tribal people. Every human being in my state owns a little piece of me and vice versa. But unlike a tribal family, it is obvious that we are not all kin, and we are not being trained to be independent, to one day grow and be equal by establishing our own families. We are essentially a confused unit whose humans try to follow old socialization patterns, but cannot stop repeatedly getting infringed on by “outsiders” who are involved in our lives more intimately than we care to admit. We are permanent children of the state (the abstract family), we only exist to keep the family going and growing!!
“The State”—an undying, immortal abstraction—is our eternal alpha. It will never grow old, it will never step aside and allow the young to have their day. Even the most revered elder is still a child, a ward of the state. We never have a family of our own. Civilization takes a Hobbesian view of human nature that is at all odds with reality, and treats us as if it were true. It makes us calmly submissive with learned helplessness. Civilization does to us, and for much the same reason, as Cesar Millano does to dogs.
Humans learned to live from wolves. The dominance behavior, the rigid hierarchies, the “alpha” males, these are all projections of our own dominance behavior and rigid hierarchies onto captive wolf populations—”like observing only the inmates of prisons when you are trying to understand human society, then extrapolating your findings to free-living people.” What you see in a natural wolf pack is a family, and that was the model of human society, too—what Willem Larsen so poetically and insightfully called “the Wandering Free Families.”
Of course, even our own civilization is ultimately based in the tribal form, and our own civilization is a kind of “family,” as well—as we discussed in the aforementioned article, a deeply dysfunctional one. Wolves leave their packs—their families—to create their own. They get to become the alpgas of their own packs, just as human children grow up to become respected elders in their old age in human bands and tribes.
Many people ask, how could I possibly form a tribe? Where would I start? But of course, a tribe is just a family—to start one is simply to defy civlization, leave this dysfunctional pack, and start your own family.
Thank you for writing this.
Comment by jhereg — 15 November 2006 @ 4:05 PM
Yeah, I had suspected there was some projection going on with wolf packs since its really just the Mommy and Daddy Wolf in the alpha positions.
As far as Cesar Milan, I don’t consider him a dog abuser though. I think a lot of people don’t know how to control their animals and then they do things like bite children. I think people need to take more leadership with their pets.
I don’t think dogs are traumetized by strong leadership.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 15 November 2006 @ 5:59 PM
There’s a big difference between socialization and domination. Tribes are very big on their traditions, taboos and social guidelines, but they’re not very big at all on domination. We’re the primates—we’re the ones related to chimpanzees. I think of the two of us, it’s probably us that are less traumatized by “strong leadership,” since what we know about egalitarianism, we mostly learned from them. Now, think of how “strong leadership” traumatizes a human. Now consider what that must do to a dog. As mentioned above, Millan’s “alpha roll” is essentially the same as pressing a knife against a misbehaving child’s neck and telling him you’re going to slit his throat, right here, right now. Do you think that might have future implications? Because that’s what the “alpha roll” tells your dog.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 15 November 2006 @ 6:05 PM
Well some dogs are naturally shy and submissive. There are hard dogs and soft dogs. Strong dominant dogs need a firmer hand than just clicker training and positive reinforcement only.
Just to give you en example Cesar Milan is no where near as rough as the inuits are on their dogs.
Watch Nanook of the North and see Nanook break up a dog fight between two hundred lb. dogs with big wolf fangs.
He isn’t standing there whistling. He isn’t withholding positive reinforcment.
A lot of the natural agression has been bred out of dogs. But people in the police force that work with tough dominant dogs know it requires the techniques more like Cesar uses.
A perfect example is how he can have a bunch of pitbulls are running together getting along.
After a certian point the analogy between dogs and people and wolves breaks down but, personally I don’t think dogs suffer from existentuial depression or things like that due to not being in charge.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 15 November 2006 @ 8:21 PM
Even though I admire inuit dogs, When I got my sled team, one reason I got little 50 lb iditarod huskies instead is because thay are easier to handle. I didn’t want to have to worry about breaking up dog fights all the time.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 15 November 2006 @ 8:24 PM
If you do have a dominant dog alpha rolling is a bad idea, because you can get bit in the face. The thing I am most impressed with is Cesar’s talking about the kind of energy people project and how dog’s queue on that.
It makes them feel confident to know you are in charge, most of the work cesar does is when the owners have not taken this leadership to begin with and need to establish it. That is harder than having it from the beginning.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 15 November 2006 @ 8:30 PM
When I was i the service, my neighbor was a police officer with the K-9 unit. The dogs they used became their dogs. They needed to bond so strongly with their handler that the only way it would work was to give the dog to the handler so he could form a permanent, trusting relationship with the dog. When the handler was reassigned, the dog was reassigned. I don’t know anything about the training techniques used for the dogs, but I do know they obeyed completely. I’m glad they did, because they were all large German Shepherds. They scared the piss out of me. But when the handler spoke, they instantly obeyed without hesitation. You don’t see that too often in an family with which I have any familiarity.
On the other side of the coin was my co-worker’s dogs: one a Siberian Husky and the other an Alaskan Malamute. They were large, intimidating and very protective of their family. One day a neighbor’s little dog made the mistake of trying to come on to their property in that uppity way that little dogs seem to have. Per my friend, it was “chewed in half”… literally. Not the sort of dog I’d want in my home.
I do know this… my dog is a sweet, submissive, loving, yet nervous dog. He is constantly prowling from room to room to ensure that everyone is here. The animal’s (dog and three cates) favorite time of year is the winter because everyone ends up in the living room in front of the wood stove to stay warm. It is really the only time everyone is pretty much in the same room for extended periods of time. It is the only time he doesn’t pace around. There we are, one large pack piled together. They are all very, very happy that winter is so close.
Comment by Frank Black — 15 November 2006 @ 10:42 PM
It’s interesting to see the term ‘learned helplessness’ used here. The first time I came across it was as a description of the mental state of babies who are made to sleep alone with their crying being ignored until they give up asking for help and start sleeping through the night at an unusually early age. This behaviour is commonly referred to being that of a ‘good baby’. Presumably this is the same as a good citizen who keeps their head down and doesn’t cause trouble for their superiors
Comment by Aaron — 16 November 2006 @ 3:10 AM
I have several dogs and have fostered quite a few as well.
One foster dog that we ended up adopting is a 60 lb basset/lab mix. I think he’s a good example of the kind of dog I’d want around in a tribe. He’s very pack oriented, meaning that if you’re in the pack, or explicitly approved by the pack, he’s your best friend. Otherwise, you best not be making any threats (intentional or otherwise) to pack members or pack territory.
I don’t see constant dominance battles among my dogs. The only time those crop up are when a new dog arrives on the scene, and when they do happen they’re generally sorted out quickly and without much fuss.
Comment by jhereg — 16 November 2006 @ 9:26 AM
Watch Nanook of the North and see Nanook break up a dog fight between two hundred lb. dogs with big wolf fangs.
As I understand it, Nanook of the North can hardly be taken of representative of Inuit culture. While it is a cinematic milestone as the first feature-length documentary, the director caught some justifiable flack for editting the details to match the savagery of pre-European, pre-civilised life.
Of course, he might very well have stepped into the dog fight–whether this is because it was ‘necessary for the action’ or the way they did things, it’s not quite the same as systematically traumatising a dog by threatening him constantly and irrationally with death until he is too terrorised to be an independent agent.
Comment by SBG — 16 November 2006 @ 10:21 AM
SBG is right—in “Exceptions that Prove the Rule #4: The Inuit,” I included a sidebar with embedded video of the whole Nanook of the North film—but I also included with it this link, in which director Robert J. Flaherty admits that most of the “documentary” was scripted and staged.
But more importantly, as I mentioned before, “there’s a big difference between socialization and domination.” Socialization is not an easy or gentle thing, but there’s a world of difference between breaking up a fight and using an “alpha roll.” I’m not down on Millan for using force; I’m criticizing him for his use of domination. That’s a very different thing. Actually, one of the first links I found in researching this article was this one, which mentions, “The vast majority of alpha dogs rule benevolently. They are confident in their position. They do not stoop to squabbling to prove their point. To do so would lower their status because… Middle-ranked animals squabble. They are insecure in their positions and want to advance over other middle-ranked animals.”
A lot of the natural aggression has been bred out of dogs. I’m not a pacifist. But that’s not what Cesar uses. Being rough-and-tumble is one thing. Putting a knife to a child’s throat and telling him you’re going to kill him is another thing entirely. You talk about breeding the aggression out of dogs, but the stuff Cesar does is far more effective than breeding—what Cesar does is trauma, plain and simple. His techniques create dogs that are so traumatized that they are calm, submissive, and docile. Learned helplessness. He makes dogs “domesticated.” In short, what Cesar does is precisely the kind of breaking that you’re talking about.
Nor I, but I do think they suffer trauma from having their life threatened, and that they do suffer psychologically just like any human person when they’re always at the bottom of the social order.
That’s the root of the problem right there—the illusion that “leadership” has anything at all to do with it. It starts from this projected fantasy that wolf packs have “alphas.” They don’t. They have families. A misbehaving dog is one that lacks proper socialization, and that isn’t necessarily a gentle process, but Cesar doesn’t produce a well-adjusted, well-behaved dog. He gets a dog to be docile and compliant, but only because he subjects the pure thing to such unrelenting trauma that it’s completely broken.
With so much social isolation from all the hours we need to devote to the maintenance of hierarchy, I’m not too surprised that you’ve never had the chance to meet a truly close-knit family. It’s just not plausible in our society. Those officers probably spend more time with their dogs than their wives and children; after all, the dog’s with them at both home and work. Their human families are only there for one of them.
Indeed, Aaron. We’ve used it a few times before, and I think it’s one of the principle psychological effects of civilization.
More accurately, scripting and staging scenes to match his fantasies about the savagery of pre-European, pre-civilized life.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 November 2006 @ 12:42 PM
As anyone here besides me actually seen inuit dogs in real life?
You don’t have to stage anything to get them to fight. It’s their nature. The really hard work and behavior modification is to get them socialized enough so that they don’t fight all the time. So I admired them, I knew people that had them, but I got more domesticated sled dogs instead, I chose kind of husky looking ones, a little bigger, a little furrier than some racing sled dogs, but still pretty tame.
I don’t really know what the value is in me debating these points on the internet. I actually am not simply obsessed with the dark side of rewilding compared to other aspects of it, but there is a dark side to rewilding and getting in touch with raw wild social behavior.
But I do think there is projection going on with the wolf pack and the idea of alphas fighting their way to the top, it is usually a family, the parents are usually assume the dominant position, but there is fighting and sparring there is a sorting out of status.
But really though, like domesticated dogs, that have inhibitions against biting humans that have been both socialized and bred into them, many inhibitions civilized humans have against violence are positive too.
Many of them spring from religion, like Christianity and philosophies of humanism that are very civilized.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 16 November 2006 @ 1:40 PM
I don’t see anyone debating that they fight, Ted, or that socializing a dog is going to involve some force. That’s not the issue. The issue is domination, like using “flooding” or an “alpha roll” to traumatize a dog so that it develops enough learned helplessness to be passive, docile, and broken as you say.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 November 2006 @ 1:46 PM
Well, if a dog becomes hand shy, and skittish and submissively weting himself all the time, fear biting etc. I would say its been traumetized. I haven’t observed that on the Show, but I admit I haven’t seen every episode.
As far as what you mean by “domination” I don’t get it. Of course dominant animals dominate.
To be dominant you have to dominate.
I think dogs don’t really have a problem with that.
I think just as people can project dominant behaviore in an anthropomorphic way, people can also project in an “over sensitive way.”
Empathizing a little too much with dogs, thinking they are psychologically a lot more complex than they really are.
Dogs don’t speak english, they are fine with communication by demonstrations of superiority. I really don’t think there are any existentuial dillemmas associated with it on their part.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 16 November 2006 @ 2:03 PM
Jason, this is a great essay!
when i lived in Madison WIS i worked as a vet tech with two very different vets:
the first, an old-school, physically large, middle-aged white man who basically considered animals to be possessions. when people brought in what he considered to be “problem” dogs (in other words, any dog that didn’t completely submit to either him or to their person,) he would insist on sedating them before he’d even *see* them. his approach was all bluster and noise, but totally ineffective. i watched him get bit more than once.
the second vet was a new graduate, and was a *tiny* woman–about 5 feet tall, and 95 pounds, 100 tops. when she took over the clinic, we stopped having to sedate 90% of those dogs. she did not need to hit them or “roll” them or yell at them to handle them–she was simply firm and confident and somehow they could tell she had no evil intentions toward them. it was great to watch!
she also offered “puppy” classes, which i can see now were based much more on the normal socialization of canids.
for example, when the puppies nipped her, she made the same kind of high-pitched yelp that *they* made when they nipped at each other, and it worked. no hitting, no yelling, no threats. puppies are *children* after all, they don’t know any better until they learn from being with others how best to act.
as for aggression in modern western domestic dogs, i’d suggest we’ve bred as much of it IN to some, as we may have bred OUT of others. in that same job i saw more than a few victims of dog-fighting rings…and those dogs are NOT violent because they are somehow more “wild” or more “natural”, they are violent because humans have bred it into them as breeds, and then abused the hell out of them as individuals to “train” them for the ring, made them insane.
if you look at all the various breeds of domestic dogs, there are many in which humans have chosen one or two traits to amplify, at the expense of others. so, to choose any one breed as somehow more of an example of wild canids just isn’t possible.
Comment by patricia — 16 November 2006 @ 2:05 PM
Yeah, see, there’s the problem. Dogs are no more dominant animals than people are, and they react to being dominated the same way we do. That listless, placid conformity that you’ve so often written about in people? That’s what Cesar Millan classifies as success: “calm submission.” He accomplishes it through methods that are not just about force, but more importantly, about domination. And dogs react to it the same way humans do: traumatized, learned helplessness that makes them broken, obedient, complacent, docile, and above all, domesticated. This is no way to treat a dog, just as it’s no way to treat a person. This is also an entirely different question from socializing your dog, or being willing to use force with your dog.
Except they don’t communicate in demonstrations of superiority. That was one of the main points of the essay—what we mistook for “demonstrations of superiority” were nothing of the kind. It had more to do with our projection than anything the dogs were doing. The notion of “domination” or “superiority” is even more alien to them than it is to us; their very evolution is premised on the rejection of such an idea. It’s kind of like the example of elephant trauma. This is no existential depression—this is trauma, and I think that’s in the capacity of any animal to experience. Particularly when the resulting behavior in dogs is exactly the same as what happens when you do the same thing to humans. In other words, we’re well beyond a discussion of what we “think”—we have evidence here on the table, we don’t need to fall back to opinions and thought experiments. The evidence clearly shows that your opinion is incorrect. So what do we do with that evidence next?
That’s a very good point, and something I’ve sadly seen myself.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 November 2006 @ 2:15 PM
Well I am glad you are so convinced my opinion is incorrect. I’m not.
You haven’t convinced me that life is possible without any living thing ever having to be traumetized or get the short end of the stick in any way. So wolves never traumetize other wolves in order to function as a pack? You are willing to say that categorically?
I think we can close our eyes to violence, but its still there.
I think everything is in competition for existence with everything else. Right now you and I disagree on a philosophical point. Possibly one of us will be traumetized by being proven wrong.
See the moral trap I don’t want to get into is that the loser in every competition always has the moral high ground for the simple fact that he is a victim.
We lament all these tribes that die out, but the fact is they lost. If we want to change the world it will take a certian amount of will and violent action.
I think one thing civilization does is gives us myths to kind of put a better spin on a lot of the violence of existence.
I think it leads to a certian naivety in some cases. I think as you strip away layers of civilization you will confront this basic fact of the savagery of existence.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 16 November 2006 @ 2:45 PM
Not to overstate my case of “dominate” the discussion. But have you looked into the role of the omega wolf? They seem to ease tensions among the pack by being a magnet for abuse. That is to me a very disturbing aspect of wlf behavior, though I have seen it in public school.
About pitbulls: Yeah, they have been bred to fight, because of that, they are very courageous intelligent resilliant animals, none of the qualities people admire in pitbulls would be there if not for bloodsports.
Nor would racing greyhounds be what they are if they weren’t subjected to ruthless culling.
And the fact is, inuit dogs are among the toughest most resilient dogs in the world because they have a harsh life. Its a known fact in alaska that the natives don’t treat their dogs the way white people do.
Its a sensitive subject, but the dog care is quite poor. The reason these dogs can survive the harsh elements and pull heavy loads with little food is because they don’t get fed a lot. In greenland They get a lb of frozen walrus meat every other day in the winter with no water and nothing in the summer. They are not fed in the summer.
They are whipped, and when they are five years old they are all shot.
This is why these dogs are so tough.
You are an excellent researcher look it up.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 16 November 2006 @ 3:08 PM
[quote]the role of the omega wolf? They seem to ease tensions among the pack by being a magnet for abuse. That is to me a very disturbing aspect of wlf behavior, though I have seen it in public school.
[/quote]
If it’s true that that wolf behaviour is only seen when un-associated captive wolves are mixed together, then that might be very telling about what is civilized behaviour vs what is not civilized behaviour. And I’ve long said that public schools do nothing but encourage civilized behaviour…..
Comment by jhereg — 16 November 2006 @ 4:05 PM
No, that’s why I didn’t say it. I said that wolves don’t try to dominate each other. That’s what I showed in the original article. Once upon a time, people thought wolf behavior was primarily preoccupied with the creation and maintenance of dominance hierarchies. This proved to be a projection, based on misinterpretation of pack behavior in captivity. In the wild, domination simply doesn’t play into it. The pack is a family. The behaviors we mistook for “dominance behaviors” were nothing of the kind. There is no “communication by demonstrations of superiority” among wolves (or, by extension, dogs). What you do get is complacency and the “calm submission” that Cesar Millan defines as success—which are well-established among humans as the result of similar treatment, and called things like “learned helplessness,” “trauma,” and “abuse.”
These things happen, in the wild as much as in civilization. The problem is that in civilization it’s systemic. It’s a way of life. This isn’t a case of just one poor, mistreated wolf; this is a matter of a whole society that thinks Cesar Millan offers a good example of how to train dogs. This is a matter of a whole social system premised on the infliction of trauma and “learned helplessness” on both dogs and humans, and plenty of other animals we’re leaving out of the picture right now besides.
In your responses, you keep blurring the lines between violence and domination. That is the essential problem. Not all violence is domination. There’s a healthy place for violence; domination isn’t it. Dogs fight. They don’t fight for dominance. Dominance is alien to them. We can’t even teach them dominance; all we can do is break them to produce the effect of dominance.
No, we don’t disagree. Everything is in competition. But cooperation is a highly effective strategy to win that competitive game. That’s how C. lupus became the top mammalian competitor ever—by cooperating. But domination is not the same as competition. Competition is normal. Domination is not.
Whoever said that? Certainly not I. You’re projecting a lot into this that isn’t there. You’re equating competition with domination, and when I take a stance against domination, you jump to the idea that I must be against competition, too. I’m not. I turn everything into a competition. Drives Giuli nuts, hippie that she is. But competition is not the same as domination.
I think you’re right that we get others to handle our violence for us—the Monopoly of Force allows soldiers and police to do all of it for us. We don’t have to get our hands dirty. In a tribe, we need to be ready to take care of our own violence. But by the same token, I think the evidence pretty clearly demonstates that when people handle their own violence, violence goes down. The 101st Fighting Keyboarders show an enthusiasm for violence that few who have been in a good scrap would share. The !Kung are very peaceful—and as you point out, they all walk around with bows, a quiver of poisoned arrows, and they’re all extremely skilled in their use. Tribal society is not typically a violent society (at least, not for foragers), but what little violence does occur, you have to be ready to handle yourself. “The savagery of existence” is, for the most part, Hobbesian nonsense—existence, at least among foragers, is more often marked by peace and prosperity than anything that could rightfully be called “savagery.” But there are certainly savage moments, and in those moments, there are no professional killers to hide behind.
But again, this is an entirely different subject than whether it’s normal, natural, right or good to dominate someone and traumatize them so that their learned helplessness will make them complacent and placid.
Like the alpha, the omega is largely a product of cultural projection onto skewed results from purely captive observations. There is no actual wolf hierarchy. There is no alpha, and there is no omega. These might emerge in captivity, but it’s about as natural to wolf behavior as being somebody’s bitch in prison is natural to human behavior.
I have no reason not to take your word on it—but don’t you think that explains their violent behavior much more than their breeding? Isn’t it reasonable to assume that their violence has less to do with them being more “natural,” and more to do with the fact that they’re abused?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 November 2006 @ 4:11 PM
About, the inuit dogs:
No they are still pack oriented and dog aggressive when they live in civilization and have plenty of food and more humane care. People agression and dog agression are not the same thing. In Greenland all loose dogs are shot on sight because they can be dangerous to children, but when they are given more humane care and better fed they are very friendly like malamutes or siberian huskies. But they are still agressive with other dogs.
May argument is not that you are 100% wrong in your thesis that there has been some projection on the part of dominance hierarchies in wolf packs. I think there has been some of that, but I don’t think you can categorically say the urge to dominate and improve status is absent in wolves and that this is not in effect in people as well.
There is nurturing and co-opertion also. its not an either or proposition. Also the alpha wolf hopefully leads and eats first for the good of the pack.
But I really think wolves have only a spark of consciousness about what they are doing. I think it is all unconscious. I think dominance battles with people is usually unconscious also but people can become conscious to it. I observe stuff going on like this all the time with people. Little gestures and things people say to sort out rank and so forth.
Because we are conscious we look at the moral implications of our actions, with animals its whatever works. Things arrange themselves over time.
On some levels they are going through ther same things as humans and on another level its different.
But if you want to make the case that animals don’t form hierarchies in an attempt to make a moral justification that in turn its therefore wrong for humans and “against nature” I don’t think you can.
I’ve been making a lot of these analogies myself,a nd we have obviously stimulated each others thinking but I think these analogies only go so far.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 16 November 2006 @ 8:09 PM
Hey –
Interesting article… interesting discussion:-)
I’m curious where you hit on this, Jason… did you pull together the correlations yourself, did someone say something banal that kicked it off, or is there some quote, unquote accepted theory behind this? Its a brilliant possibility, at least, that our symbiosis with canines has had such a profound effect on human society.
Ted: You can’t really draw the conclusion from all this that Jason is trying to prove hierarchy ‘unnatural’ — not when part of the argument involves most Great Apes being socially hierarchal…
Somewhere, in there, it seems like you are unable to separate violence which is part of all life, and dominance/hierarchy/ so-called survival of the fittest hobbesian world view and all ‘dat. I’m not sure where the lines are bleeding together, however, so all I can do is note that it seems that they are…
Janene
Comment by janene — 16 November 2006 @ 8:33 PM
This is no metaphor or analogy, Ted. Wolves behave as they have evolved to behave, regardless of the implications for our politics. Of course, we all too often project our politics onto them. That’s how we ended up with this notion of wolf hierarchies and alphas and omegas. But I’ve presented the revised evidence. This isn’t a question of the political pendulum swinging the other way; Mech has no vested interest in what the results should be. When we reduce our political presumptions, we find out that wolves do not have hierarchies.
In other words, you’ve got a lot of projections going on. You’re projecting your beliefs about people onto dogs to see hierarchies where there are none, and you’re projecting your own need to see the world through your political lens onto others.
Of course, as Janene pointed out, I’ve made no argument that hierarchy is unnatural. That would be ludicrous, first because I don’t even know how the word “unnatural” could possibly even be meaningful, but more immediately, because there are plenty of animals that are obviously hierarchical. In another fine example of political projection, we once thought of chimpanzees as egalitarian, until Jane Goodall went to study them in the wild and discovered that they had strict, violent hierarchies. As I pointed out in “Our Closest Relative,” the current thinking about bonobos as peaceful “hippies of the forest” is likewise based on captive behavior, and that’s being overturned by studies of wild populations. So there’s an example of the political projections going the other way, but still underlining the fact that observations of captive populations tell you more about captivity than the animal you’re studying.
And where’s the only place we’ve ever observed real wolf hierarchy? In captivity.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Ted, but it’s time to “put up or shut up.” What I’ve presented above isn’t opinion or metaphor or analogy—it’s evidence. Actual observations of wolves in the wild. If you want to contend that those observations are wrong and that wild wolves actually do compete for domination over one another, then your opinion will not suffice. You will need to present evidence to back up that opinion, that refutes the evidence I’ve presented above. Without evidence to back it up, opinions are like assholes….
That’s what I’m saying, because that’s what the evidence indicates. If you don’t think you can say that, why? What evidence do you have that refutes the evidence I’ve presented that this is the case? What observations can you present of domination behavior in wild wolf packs, or the existence of “alphas” in some more meaningful sense than simply “elder”?
I’m not sure humans are conscious in any meaningful way. We’re less rational creatures than rationalizing creatures. My argument has nothing to do with consciousness or not, so I’m confused as to why you keep introducing that element.
On the other hand, the animal kingdom is absolutely bursting with intelligence far beyond what we give it credit for. Most animals have a significant degree of intelligence. Humanity’s intellectual superiority is a matter of degree, not kind (if it’s even that). Wolves in particular are highly intelligent creatures, with sophisticated communicaton and even the ability to use symbols. The Schleidt & Shalter paper I’ve been referencing (PDF) includes this:
So I’ll agree that this is largely unconscious, on the understanding that this is precisely the same as with human behavior, and that canid intelligence is easily comparable in kind, if not degree, to human intelligence. After all, why would we expect human intelligence to be so special in the first place?
Observations of civilized people, like observations of captive wolf packs, tells you more about civilization (a.k.a., captivity) than it does about humans (or wolves). Have you had a chance to read E. Richard Sorenson’s “Preconquest Consciousness“?
I’m making the argument that humans, like wolves, are not hierarchical aimals. That’s not based on my political beliefs, that’s a political belief based on the evidence. I’m not molding wolf behavior to fit my opinion, I’m moldng my opinion to fit wolf (and human) behavior. Of course, most primates are hierarchical animals, but we’re the only primate that co-evolved so closely with canids, and we became non-hierarchical due to their influence. Today, forcing a human (or a wolf) to live under another’s domination is an extremely distressing state of affairs because it defies their evolved nature, just as much as it would be to force chimpanzees to live in an egalitarian fashion.
Why thank you … it was really just bringing together a bunch of unrelated strands. I owe Ted a good deal for getting me thinking about dogs and wolves over on Free Range Organic Human, but I can’t say I’m aware of anyone making these particular connections before. Of course, if you really take what David Abram has to say in Spell of the Sensuous seriously, this is precisely the kind of thing you’d expect to find, isn’t it? So I think a lot of it might have been Abram’s work priming me, so that I expected to find these kind of relationships and actually looked for them.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 November 2006 @ 10:49 AM
Nice.
Jim and I were talking about these articles a bit last night — and I’m probably not going to do justice to his thoughts, but I’ll try. He wondered aloud, so to speak, whether it might be that some of the ‘dominance’ behaviros that we do see in domesticated dogs, might be another one of those neotenous traits.
When you put together a group of dogs might it trigger an instinctive reactions to being ‘amongst ones siblings as a pup’ and therefore generate more competitive behaviors than you would normally find in an adult group.
I think he took it another step further, but I’m drawing a blank at the moment… any thoughts?
Janene
Comment by janene — 17 November 2006 @ 12:25 PM
I read it again and I can’t find your irrefutable evidence.
I see Mech giving his opinion. It doesn’t strike me as being on the same level as proof. Is what Mech says law? He’s not a bleeding heart liberal you know. He suggested wolf hunting would be a good idea to open up in Minnesota again. He said it would be a good way to manage the ecosystem.
Can you disagree with him?
I already knew a wolf pack was basically a family. Probably from reading David Mech.
I still think they have dominat animals and there is competition for rank and that this explains behavior in dogs. Wolves do kill each other for various reasons, These has been documented by other biologists in other populations of wolves in other areas. But yeah the basic structure is that of a family. I think a lot of these problem dogs live in a leadership vacuum, so they take charge.
This happens with parents and kids too.
I think its right to reestablish a pecking order and using cannine body language might be a good thing. It is a good thing in my experience. I have used a ruff shake on particularly disruptive sled dogs.
It didn’t cause skittishness or trauma in my dogs. Also one thing you miss is what Cesar talks about energy people project. Calm assertive energy.
My dogs picked up on that too. When I was first starting out mushing and noit in control my dogs sensed it, after I got more confidence and calmed down they picked up on that too.
They like leadership.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 17 November 2006 @ 2:21 PM
I’m really sorry, I’m having computer problems.
I would just like to add though, the relationship between dogs and humand has changed over time. It started out more or less like the relationship between primitive dogs and people today with loose dogs just hanging around camp scavenging.
In Europe people were like God’s to dogs, creating breeds, deciding which animals had the right to live as representatives of the breed. There was a lot of culling of inferior animals. They were all working animals with jobs.
The concept of a pet, having a dog be a surrogate child really, is pretty recent. This has caused all sorts of irrational behavior in my opinion.
No one wants to put dogs down because they see them as people, So shelters fill up with unwanted dogs, they often rule to house. They are accumulating genetic disorders because inferior animals are bred.
There are all kinds of complex issues invloved. To me you can’t really say that you should raise a dog just like you would raise a child because that is what wolves do with their children.
Comment by Ted Heistman — 17 November 2006 @ 2:34 PM
Hey –
I think there is an extraordinary difference between an ‘opinion’ and the (relatively) objective data accumulation of a 13 year study…
If you are not going to take such a study as evidence, then, pray tell, what would you accept?
Leadership… Yes. Not the same thing as domination and trauma.
Janene
Comment by janene — 17 November 2006 @ 2:50 PM
I don’t refute Mech. I have have been reading his stuff for 20 years.
I refute Jason’s extrapolation of it to dog training.
Maybe I should just shut up, because there is no rational way to discuss anything with bleeding hearts. Anyone using strength is bad, everything must be nurture nurture nurture.
I think the wolf parents make it pretty clear who the boss is and they do it through dominat body language. They keep establishing it.
A lot of the people on the show have wimpy body language and dominant dogs. Like I said it would be better to establish leadership early on and keep it up, but once its lost its harder to take it back and that calls for more than just clicker training.
Of course I am not averse to putting problem dogs down, no matter whose fault the bad behavior is (usually the humans).
Is euthenasia better than getting a little rough with a dog to prove a point?
Comment by Ted Heistman — 17 November 2006 @ 3:01 PM
Sure. But Mech’s not giving his opinion, he’s giving his conclusions from actual observations. There’s a big difference there. What you’re giving us is an opinion. So, all I’m asking is that you do the same thing Mech did—back it up.
That’s a fine hypothesis, but right now it’s nothing but your opinion. Do like Mech did. Back it up. Where’s your observations? All you have now is conjecture. Go out there and find some evidence for this. Hell, you could even just do like I’ve done, and find a wolf expert reporting on his observations, adn how he observed wolves kill each other to obtain rank in a leadership vaccuum. Either way would work. But back it up.
To “reestablish a pecking order” implies that a pecking order previously existed. Which, the evidence indicates, it didn’t. So first you need to show that that evidence is wrong, by providing evidence of your own. Back it up.
Skittishness is a very different thing from trauma. You can’t gauge trauma by skittishness.