Why everything you know about wolf packs is wrong (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Why everything you know about wolf packs is wrong (2013)

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I’ve been training dogs as a hobby for a good 15-20 years. It’s been neat to see the shift away from “dominance” training to positive reinforcement. The difference in how dogs react is pretty wild. With the new way, the dogs are excited to work. With the old way, there were so many dogs working just to avoid punishment, which doesn’t give them the same drive to please.

Middle managers please take note...

I remember some article I read about drug sniffing dogs. Apparently the most important factor in what made an effective dog wasn't intelligence or ability to smell or anything like that. It was motivation. The dogs that were hungry - that were always eager for the treats give as rewards - were the ones that succeeded.

Interestingly for an article with this title it actually does answer the question. The reason why we have this wrong notion of alphas in wolf packs is that it's based on one guy who studied wolves in captivity. Wild wolf packs behave as family units with parents being 'dominant' and offspring leaving to form their own families. There is social dominance involved but it's not simplistic.

Interesting. Almost skipped it for having the sort of title that actually rarely answers 'why'.

Apparently wolves in captivity form gangs, just like humans in captivity.

I would have liked more details about that. For instance, if those wolves were released into nature, would they introduce wolf gang problems into the wild?

I wonder if it's the captivity or the absence of normal family structure. We see gang activity among human populations that while not in captivity, have poor or broken family structure.

To me that is just a semantic problem: do we name them "strongest, wisest, winner of battles wolf" or just "alpha wolf"? Doesn't care who "invented" the term, it is a symbol to mean "the one above the others", a symbol of hierarchy, not a symbol of "Alpha wolf is inherently different than other wolves because of his inherent alphaness"

You seem to have completely missed the point? The alpha, or “strongest, wisest, winner of battles wolf” may exist, but it doesn’t define the pecking order — at least in wild populations.

Like human three-generation households, the patriarch/matriarch are the grandparents, irrespective of whether they can hold their ground in mortal combat.

Though I agree, the notion and usefulness of “alpha” remains unchanged for non-family oriented groupings, of both wolf and man.

Did you read the article? There is no “strongest, wisest, winner-of-battles wolf” in wild packs. There is only “daddy wolf” or “mommy wolf”.

Exactly, daddy wolf and mommy wolf are alpha wolves. The issue is just who to assign the "alpha" term to: Alpha wolf is the top of the hierarchy, not the strongest.

This post just wants to redefine the "top" wolf, because of specifics of his knowledge: that strength is not the defining factor of alpha wolves, which is fine, but it seems to be like a grammar nazi yelling "well, actually, it's spelled xxx".

If a wolf can't keep up a fight then it is bound to be killed unless every time he gets into a fight 10 other wolves defend him, in which case he's not weak anymore: he won a numbers game, or a social game, whatever, in other words, he's strong, the because is irrelevant, but in this case it is because he probably has a family and/or is useful to other wolves.

In the end, the alpha wolf is an alpha wolf because he's resourceful. It could be a purple wolf, maybe you want to call it monkey wolf, I don't care, he is still the 'top of the hierarchy' wolf and I will simplify this to "alpha".

> In the end, the alpha wolf is an alpha wolf because he's resourceful.

I don't think so... In your context, it's simply alpha wolf = parent wolf, and not necessarily parent wolf = resourceful/strongest/wisest wolf. Most of the time, the "alpha wolves" just happened to be parents, nothing more, nothing less.

This is probably a failure of the article. Admittedly an explanation of the common view of the "Alpha" was in the title but maybe it would have been better to start with the current understanding of how wolf packs work and put the origins of older views in the middle or the end.

The title didn’t age well, I think. In the current milieu everyone seems to be aware of this and any person who uses the term “alpha” is automatically considered anti-science alt-right misogynist.

Though, of course “alpha” animals exist in different species and in artificial wolf packs as the article admits, which makes this weird obsession with wolfs as a way to take down the concept of alpha-male quite bizarre. I honestly didn’t even know the idea of alpha animals has originated in the science of wolves before these articles started to pop up in mid 2010s.

For those not familiar, the famous dog trainer who uses extreme dominance techniques is Cesar Milan.

Clickbait title. What's claimed to be wrong is the long-held notion that wild wolf packs have a hierarchical structure with an "alpha" at the top. This turns out to have been based mostly on the study of wolves in captivity. I found it interesting nonetheless.

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