In this part, I said I was going to explore the
other kind of leading—the kind that
we really do want to use to reach success with our dogs—and… well, whoops, I
lied. That’ll be in Part 3.. or maybe
Part 4. Because before I go there,
there’s some of that murky bathwater that I’d like to clear up first. It saturates Pop Culture notions of dog
behavior and dog training to the point that it’s like trying to swim in soggy,
heavy clothes—it just drags us (and our dogs) down.
Here’s the sound bite version: Dogs descended from wolves. Wolves form packs. Ergo, dogs form packs. Ergo, the “natural” way to train a dog is to
model ourselves after wolves.
Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Yes, and the earth is flat, if I sail far enough,
I will fall off the edge, unless a dragon eats me first. Shockingly, nothing about the sound bite version turns out to be accurate,
correct or true according to the best science we currently have available.
Dogs and wolves—wolves specifically meaning the Gray
Wolf, Canis lupus—are indeed closely
related--they can and do interbreed and produce fertile offspring. But according to the latest in genome
studies, domestic dogs didn’t “descend” from any modern Gray Wolf subspecies alive on the planet today. What it looks like now is that our living
Gray Wolves (roughly 35 subspecies) and our domestic dogs shared a common ancestor somewhere around
10-15,000 years ago. The ancestor of
both our modern dogs and our modern wolves hasn’t been precisely identified and
is probably now extinct. But it looks
like, statistically and genetically, our modern dogs are no more closely
related to any modern wolf than they are to modern coyotes or jackals. So from a strictly genetic standpoint, we
could just as well claim that the “natural” way to train a dog is to model
ourselves after coyotes—not nearly as glamourous, but just as close in the
family tree of canids.
As a group, canids are flexible opportunists that
can adapt very quickly and very strongly to different environments, and if ever
there was a canine champ in the adaptation game, it’s been domestic dogs. The process of domestication has been
thousands of years long with some very powerful selection pressures applied. In modern times, the pressures of the Dog
Fancy have given rise to what we typically think of when we hear the word “dog”—our
beloved pure-bred dogs like Labradors, Poodles, Border collies and Cocker
Spaniels or mixes of them. But in truth,
most dogs never funneled through a Fancy stage, and the vast majority of
domestic dogs on the planet today aren’t even family pet dogs. Something like 80% of the planet’s billions
of dogs are only loosely associated or controlled by us—they’re street, village
or pariah dogs, living on the fringes of our settlements and scavenging off our
various forms of garbage. These
free-roaming dogs, more than modern wolves, are probably the best models we
have of how “natural” domestic dogs behave.
And it’s nothing at all like wolves.
The core of wolf society isn’t The Pack. The core stable unit in wolf social
relationships is a monogamous pair
that mate, typically, for life. Calling
them the Alpha Male and the Alpha Female has fallen out of favor amongst some
ethologists, who simply prefer Breeding Male and Breeding Female. But the clearest and most direct term for
them is probably Mom and Dad. As predators
that hunt large game, wolf pups take time, maturity and practice to become big
enough and skilled enough to thrive as hunters.
Full maturity is usually reached around 2-3 years of age. So, a wolf pack in the wild is typically Mom,
Dad, the sub-adults born 2-3 years ago, the adolescents born 1 year ago and the
current litter of pups. Otherwise known
as a Family. And there would be no point
for Junior to battle Dad for the Alpha status or Sissy to over-throw her Mum,
because if they won, whom would they have to mate with? Their own siblings? Nope.
When Junior and Sissy reach sexual and social maturity around 2-3 years
of age, they disperse to find their own (unrelated) mates and start their own
families. In wild wolves, all healthy normal
animals that reach adult age go on to become Moms and Dads, or Alphas, or
Leaders of the Pack, or whatever we want to call them. It has nothing to do with personality and
everything to do with staying alive long enough to reproduce.
In contrast, the social life of free-living domestic
dogs is missing virtually all of these characteristics. Far from mating for life, Mum and Pop have
fleeting “ties” with various reproductive partners, depending on their preferences
and opportunities. Dad is usually out of
the picture well before the pups are even born and contributes little or
nothing to the care of his offspring.
Since these dogs are essentially scavengers (very little hunting is
reported), there’s no need for the pups to stay with Mom for years of life-skills
schooling: puppies of free-living street
dogs typically disperse not long after weaning—as soon as they can scavenge on
their own. Sexual maturity can be
reached as early as 6-9 months. And far
from forming packs, free-living dogs tend to congregate around food resources
but don’t organize or form lasting bonds—for good reasons. If you’re a wolf trying to drag down a prey
animal larger than you, you want and need help from the family and you have
plenty of meat to share in return for it.
If you’re a street dog trying to score a few crumbs, you don’t want or
need help and sharing is the last thing on your mind. The selection pressure of large-game hunting
is gone, the need for long-term care of pups is gone, the monogamous pair bond
is gone, and with it goes the “pack” of pups, juveniles and sub-adult offspring
orbiting the stable suns of their bonded Mom and Dad.
What does all of this mean when it comes to our
beloved pet dogs? Probably not very
much. What wolves would do or even what
street dogs would do may be entirely irrelevant: our pet dogs, like street dogs, or coyotes or
jackals or wolves, are bright-minded, flexible creatures that adapt their
behaviors to get the maximum benefits out of the environments they find themselves in. When it comes to our pets, a core feature of
their environment is dependency on us. And, dare I say it, a form of captivity. We, to a greater or lesser extent, restrict
their choices. We confine them in our
homes, in fenced yards, on leashes, for their own safety and with nothing but
love and kind intentions—and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. It’s just, from a biological/ethological
standpoint, putting a group of animals together in the fenced yard and then waxing
poetic about their innate social sensibilities is, well, weird. If the dogs can’t
escape, avoid or get away from each other, their behavior is just as likely to
be an artifact of circumstances (confinement) as Nature.
Of course intelligent social animals can find ways
to make just about anything work—dogs are amazing at reaching all kinds of
accommodations. But we’ll never know how
many individuals would have chosen to form lasting bonds of true friendship, enjoy
fleeting superficial ties or avoid each other entirely if they weren’t stuck in
the same no-escape scenario together. Given
a human-arranged confinement situation or a centrally-located food supply, dogs
certainly will hang out together, and they may even form social hierarchies to
smooth the sting of forced proximity.
The trouble is, so does that other amazing domestic species: domestic cats
in similar situations are simply stellar at sorting themselves into colonies
with complex and sophisticated social nuances.
Still, no one’s accusing cats of being “pack” animals.
Change is always hard, and changing the Pop Culture
established view of dog social systems has proven to be dreadfully hard. After all, if we retire the old and
inaccurate notion of the Pack, what model are we left with?
Here I’m going to suggest that, once again, Science
is our friend. What’s most exciting to
me in animal studies these days are the new advances in understanding the
neurobiology of emotions. To put it
simply, Science is now coming around to what most of us pet owners always
deeply suspected: our animal companions have feelings. And those feelings have considerable
influence on behavior. So where once
being “anthropomorphic”—projecting human feelings onto non-human creatures—was
considered a serious fault, our best researchers are now allowing for more
shades of gray. To wit, there’s good anthropomorphic (which can give us
insight and empathy into an animal’s world point-of-view) and there’s bad anthropomorphic (where we project
human qualities that animals don’t possess on our poor pets, typically to their
detriment and at our convenience.)
So let’s be anthropomorphic and imagine: taking your
dog to the local dog park is like us going to the obligatory yearly office
party.
When we go to our party, every individual person
entering the room will likely have an agenda—but we won’t all have the same
agenda. Mostly, our personal goals will
revolve around—please do laugh, it’s true—personal safety and comfort, food,
sex, friendship and fun. When we enter
the party, we will, in no particular order, set out on the following missions.
First, we’ll want to know who else is there: who do we know, is there anyone there we’ve
fought with recently or dislike that we should avoid, is there anyone there we
especially enjoy and should seek out, does anyone look really weird, dangerous
or drunk, and who there has something we dearly want, like the power to give us
a raise, a needed recommendation or the library book we loaned them five weeks
ago. The individuals we don’t know or
know only slightly may draw our fascinated attention or be summarily dismissed
into a “stereotype” depending on our agendas.
Swinging singles may scope out the Young and the Beautiful for potential
hot dates—or rivals for those hot dates—and ignore everyone else. Children will gravitate toward each other but
give only token notice to the old fuddy-duddies who offer no chance of
fun. Folks who come from certain
cultures or learning histories may show great deference to the party’s Elders;
the sulky teenagers who got dragged to the (for them) dull party, on the other
hand, may not even notice anyone with gray hair. Shy people may head for quiet corners and
avoid overly boisterous individuals, while two guys wearing the same rock
concert T-shirt may approach each other with friendly curiosity. In short, we’ll sort each other out
according to Known and Unknown, do a fast triage of stereotyping the Unknowns
by age, gender and other appearance clues, and then start making social
behavior choices to seek more information, approach, avoid or dismiss as
uninteresting.
Second and often simultaneously, we’ll start
evaluating the resources available for our party pleasure or pain. How is the food spread? White or red wine? Is there dancing, a karaoke machine, a
swimming pool? What is there for us to
do—things we enjoy or things we hate? As
we’re sorting out the people, we’re also sorting out who’s controlling what
resources—putting out the food, serving the liquor, selecting the music,
etc. Here, a new layer of complexity
might be added—the elderly Grandma our teen-age football star might socially
dismiss may acquire great interest in his eyes if she controls access to the
food table. The grungy bearded guy who’s
Not Our Type may become our best buddy if he runs the DJ equipment and we love
to dance. The icy and elegant lady who
would normally intimidate us may become worth the risk of approaching if she
pulls out a deck of cards and starts a round of a game we deeply enjoy, and the
office co-worker we don’t really care for may suddenly seem worthwhile when we
find out that the handsome hunk we’ve been watching across the room all night is
his brother.
This benign and civilized party experience assumes
that we are competent socially, on our own cultural turf and reasonably
practiced with the setting and contexts. If we’re not—if we were under-socialized as
puppies or trying to navigate in a foreign country, it could be far more fraught. If we don’t speak the language very well, not
everyone likes our nationality, we’re worried about someone stealing our wallet
and we’re afraid if we offend someone we’ll get arrested or beaten up, the social
stress load edges a lot higher. What’s key in all this is that every one of us going
to the party has at the core of our agendas desires to 1) be safe, 2) avoid
unpleasant, distressing or scary things and 3) gain access to the resources
that we find most pleasurable, be it social connections, sexual partners, yummy
food or activities that we enjoy like dancing or intelligent conversation. How
we go about it, how subtly or grossly, how directly or how hard will depend on
a myriad of factors, but we’ll all be in pursuit of our own happiness in some
fashion.
This is pretty much our dogs at a dog park
“party.” Every dog entering the dog park
will have his or her own personal agenda depending on his or her preferences,
history, age, etc. Puppy and adolescent
dogs will eagerly scope out the place for known friends or potential play
partners, shy dogs will head for quiet corners and hope like heck no one
bullies them, grumpy old dogs might warn the youngsters off and look for a
stick to chew in peace. Flash the ball
addict will ignore everyone in his quest to find a tennis ball, like a drunkard
heading for the bar; the intact males will check out all the girls and each
other in case sex is a possibility. Some
overly-boisterous out-of-control adolescent will skid in like Jack Black in a
frat movie yelling, “Parteeeee!” and cause a minor uproar. Like us, all these doggy characters have core
desires to 1) be safe, 2) avoid unpleasant, distressing or scary things and 3)
gain access to the resources that they find most pleasurable, be it a game of
chase-me, a tennis ball, the cute Dalmatian close to coming into season or not
getting bullied by the bigger dogs.
Does Pack Leadership come into this complex and
quirky assemblage of individuals and individual agendas? If so, how and what does it look like? And here, I will assert that if we really
want to understand how Leading works,
we might do better to look at it from the extremely important but often
over-looked other side of the coin: Following.
Part 3 coming soon!
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