Wolf Packs

And debunking dominance theory

I’m sticking with the subject of wolves again for this mid-week post as the more research I do on them the more fascinated I become. The fact that wolves live in social groups I believe is one of the reasons why many humans are drawn to them as the idea of the pack being like “family” gives us something in common.  I thought I would do some research to find out more on the subject, not least because we are often presented with the idea of the wolf pack through film and TV, and I wanted to check how close this fiction was to reality.

Many of us who sought help with dog training fifteen to twenty years ago will remember the wolf pack model. We were told that we needed to be the alphas of our household to ensure that a suitable hierarchy was established, and our four-legged family members could integrate into our lives i.e. do what we wanted them to do, in a relaxed and stress-free way. I remember being told by a trainer that my husband and I needed to eat something immediately before feeding our dogs and that we should ignore them when returning to the house or a room after any period of being away. These were considered to be alpha behaviours and, amongst others, would prevent our dogs challenging our authority.

This training was based on pack theory, also called dominance theory, and was developed by a group of scientists studying wolf behaviour in captivity. The underlying idea was that the Alpha Dog used dominance to control the rest of the pack where dominance was defined as establishing priority to resources using force and aggression and submission behaviours.

I have to admit that after following the advice for a while, we quickly fell back into our previous ways, particularly when the onset of canine maturity allowed for a more relaxed existence in our household anyway. The idea of ignoring a happy dance from the one family member who is always pleased to see me felt like a removal of one of the fundamental joys of dog ownership. And trying to time our meals with feeding the dogs was never as easy as it should have been.  

So, how happy was I when this wolf pack model of human-dog co-existence fell out of favour and the much more rewarding, literally from Ollie’s point of view, games-based training and ditch the bowl feeding dynamics took over. At least in our household anyway.

The scientist largely responsible for the Pack Theory, Dr David Mech, renounced his previous results after further study showed that there was a huge difference between wolf packs in captivity and those in the wild.