The Myth of the Alpha Wolf
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Toxoplasma gondii never ceases to amaze and scare me. I'm one of the many humans with an identified infection of it (over 25 years ago.)
Also super interesting part of this article:
> “We found that even more important than pack size was whether a pack had an old individual, male or female,” she said. At six years old, a Yellowstone wolf is considered an elder—only about one in five lives to that age. “If they have one or two older individuals, they are more likely to win—which was not what we’d expected to find.”
This doesn't sound that crazy; maybe the ones able to live that are the ones in packs that are strong enough to win all the time.
this example of autocorrect made me laugh out loud for the first time in days.
please do not correct it.
If you want more laughs, check out the books ;)
Beware of the old. We've survived. There is a reason the phrase is "Age and treachery will always defeat youth and skill."
Ok, forget about wolves. What about non-human great apes, like chimpanzees or mountain gorillas, much closer to us genetically than canids? Are their societies not hierarchical, polygynous, and alpha-led?
The Bonobo is far more interesting. They have a dynamic society, where sometimes it's matriarchal or more balanced. The wiki article is a fascinating read:
> Although a male bonobo is dominant to a female in a dyadic interaction,[46] depending on the community, socially-bonded females may be co-dominant with males[47] or dominant over them, even to the extent that females can coerce reluctant males into mating with them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
Personally I think humans are far closer to Bonobos than chimps in our societal structure. We should allow more dynamic structures to arise, and have more sex along the way.
It's always the same formula, too.
Step 1: Claim that the idea of an "alpha wolf" is a "myth."
Step 2: Explain that packs are usually made up of families.
Step 3:.... Nothing.
Does anyone have any idea what they mean when they say it's a myth? What is the myth? In what way is the idea incorrect?
The common interpretation is that “an alpha” is someone/thing that can take over a group by being the strongest (where strength in wolves is domination through physical strength, and humans in social domination). This is the myth. Hierarchies exist, but not for this reason.
https://davemech.org/wolf-news-and-information/
Wolf.org also has resources related to the topic and they no longer use the term.
The term "alpha" literally just means "first," as it has meant for millennia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_numerals
If wolves truly have no dominance hierarchy at all, then you can claim that the idea of there being an "alpha" or "first" is a myth.
In any situation beyond that, this is just pseudoscientific pandering nonsense trolling for clicks.
The claim that woman cannot be courageous or independent thinkers is wrong.
And as for societal ideals, specifically in response to a post showing that the concept of being a leader through aggression is also wrong.
Aggression is often a response to fear.
Aggression is a secondary emotion, typically a response to pain or fear.
I personally view aggressive behavior and the attempt to gain status through aggression as a reason to pity someone far more than it ever makes me respect them.
If aggression is your primary method of gaining status you are not courageous, you are weak and lashing out.
I pity those people because they tend to undervalued their own merits and instead of having the courage to lead by example or to be confident in their positions they have to resort to methods ranging from name calling to physical violence.
A true leader doesn't need to resort to unrestrained fear based responses to gain or maintain status.
By definition those who have to resort to aggression are weak and full of self doubt.
Actions based on fear are not the actions of confident individuals but the actions of cowards resorting to letting fear drive their lives.
Which is exactly why the original studies found 'alpha' behaviors in stressed populations.
If you read the above papers you will find that in wolves, submission for the betterment of the pack takes much more courage than aggression.
Incels tend to like the 'alpha' concept because it is justification for not stepping up and accepting that they have caused many of their own problems.
It is only viewed as 'courage' to other individuals with low self worth.
If you truly believe that aggression is courageous I sincerely suggest you work on looking at the examples of truly courageous people and not seeking the approval of low esteem individuals who make other low self esteem individuals feel better by idealizing fear based outbursts. Bullies are pitiful creatures who have to resort victimizing others to feel better about themselves.
Typically people who yield to bullies don't respect them and those who aren't filled with self doubt simply pity them.
Aggression for personal gain is a sign of weakness and doesn't relate to the concepts you mentioned.
Here is another.
https://wolf.org/headlines/44265/
You are offering a false dichotomy and suggesting that gaining dominance through force or challenge is the only path to authority.
Also a 'dominance hierarchy' can exist without the need for contest or battle.
If you have worked around dogs outside of the silly 'alpha' concept you will notice that dominant members can impact the behaviors of other members with a simple look or by withholding attention and positive reinforcement.
This is why real professional dog training for working dogs is almost exclusively positive reinforcement these days.
Fear and intimidation is a rather poor training method for domestic dogs.
Of course if you want to discard the original meaning of 'alpha' as presented by the people who originally coined the term for your own personal definition no evidence they offer that their previous research was wrong will fit you expectations.
'Alpha' was specifically coined to describe their misunderstanding of behavior at the time and doesn't simply imply 'first' in their context.
Dominance and aggression are separate behaviors that may have intersection but gaining status through aggression tends to result in unstable relationships and is incredibly expensive to males in species where it is a predominant method of gaining status.
Wolves rarely gain status within their group through aggression, thus labeling the primary breeding pairs as 'alpha' by default is scientifically incorrect.
Most of the status of the breeding pair was gained through breeding and not aggression and in reality true aggression is simply not typically tolerated by the dominant members of the pack.
Uhhhh...
> The concept of the alpha wolf is well ingrained in the popular wolf literature, at least partly because of my book “The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species,”...
You are directly contradicting the author you're claiming to support.
This isn't an episode of Dr. Who. Time travel does not exist. Two things cannot cause one another over the course of a fifty year span.
Either the concept of "alpha wolf" arose from Mech's work (in which case it didn't imply anything because it was a wholly new term), or it didn't (in which case it wasn't his idea and him repudiating it doesn't carry the weight you think it does).
> A popular belief or story that has become associated with a person, institution, or occurrence
The institution here is wolf packs; the popular belief or story is, well, exactly that. A story, which sprung out of a research study that the actual researcher has admitted was fallacious.
The popular belief is also fairly odd; it has nothing to do with wolves, but rather, with the need for humans (specifically men) to sort themselves into imaginary groups. Nobody besides scientists and naturalists ever really cared about wolf packs.
> As Kira Cassidy, an associate research scientist with a National Park Service research program in Yellowstone, explained, “The wolves generally in those dominant positions are not there because they fought for it. It’s not some battle to get to the top position. They’re just the oldest, or the parents. Or, in the case of same-sex siblings, it’s a matter of personality.”
Suggests the myth is that there's a top wolf in a dominant position in a group because they fought to get there, or were most aggressive. But that that's incorrect because the wolves in the dominant positions are usually just the oldest wolf around, or the parents of the other wolves. She goes on to say there is actually very little fighting within a pack.
Is that the sort of thing you were asking about?
However, I ultimately don't find that responsive. There's still a pack leader. Whatever term is used for it is a question of human linguistics, not of wolf behavior. I fail to see how the idea of there being an alpha wolf/pack leader/whatever is a myth.
In particular, claiming that alpha wolf is a myth is quite a different thing from claiming that alpha male is a myth. Since dominance relationships in a wolf pack are hardly affected by sex, the latter would be a defensible claim. The former is emphatically not.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5126626/#!po=0....
Usually when I hear people talking about "alpha wolf" or similar, the idea is that the individual gets to this position by competing with other individuals, and then winning by using strength or aggression. It's that part the article is suggesting is a myth.
As you say, words are human inventions and people use them in different ways. If that's not the way you are using "alpha wolf", then the article may not address how you are using it.
"alpha wolf" is not equivalent to "pack leader", and the 'myth' of the alpha wolf isn't that there is a wolf in charge that you could call "alpha wolf" if you wanted to, but that the leadership role was attained through dominance[1].
As for the reason it is an interesting myth to explore, there are ideologies that build their basis of human interaction around dominance hierarchies e.g. alpha/beta male manosphere stuff, parts of Jordan Peterson's work.
Of course proving or disproving dominance hierarchies in wolves doesn't necessarily mean anything for its applicability to humans, but the connection probably does make it a more clickable topic to write about, especially because proponents of those ideologies often use animal behavior to support their theories.
Like, when someone describes themselves as "an alpha", they're generally, well, beyond showing themselves to be somebody to be ignored, also not claiming to be the oldest.
> As for high-ranking [wolf] animals asserting any practical control over subordinates, the nature of the interaction is highly conditional. For example, with large prey such as adult moose (Alces alces), pack members of all ranks (ages) gather around a carcass and feed simultaneously, with no rank privilege apparent (Mech 1966; Haber 1977); however, if the prey is smaller, like a musk ox calf, dominant animals (breeders) may feed first and control when subordinates feed (Mech 1988; National Geographic 1988).
> Similarly, pups are subordinate to both parents and to older siblings, yet they are fed preferentially by the parents, and even by their older (dominant) siblings (Mech et al. 1999). On the other hand, parents both dominate older offspring and restrict their food intake when food is scarce, feeding pups instead. Thus, the most practical effect of social dominance is to allow the dominant individual the choice of to whom to allot food.
> The only other rank privilege I am aware of in natural situations is that high-ranking pups are more assertive in competing for food deliveries by adults and sometimes accompany adults on foraging trips at an earlier age than do subordinates (Haber 1977).
https://www.wolf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/267alphastat...
Further, how humans are organized changes massively across cultures and usually there is a shared leadership model - shaman and chief equivalents that tell us nothing about how wolves organize themselves.
Is it really hard to accept that there is another meaning that is in vogue, but you did not consider it instead of doubling down on a false assumption?
Hard disagree. Even in communities who like to throw the term a lot, they get into discussion about which ones are the real alphas and thus they invented stuff like “sigma”.
Real life usage is really diffuse and mostly like the meme version of the “chad”, seems to be about who I personally like or like to be.
There is some heuristic which may avoid having to fight it out all the time, but this does not disprove that an alpha exists based on being more fit/dominant/strong/intelligent whatever, even fighting ability! Maybe age, or strength, or assertive personality, etc..all are proxies or different permutations for "fitness" which combine to promote some alpha above the rest. The general point here is that there still can be a hierarchy.
As I said in another comment[0] all of this is propaganda to muddle reality and disprove hierarchies, to re-assert egalitarianism/equality as dominant political ideology.
And a previous comment from yesterday seems applicable[1]... that constant fights don't need to occur to be able to identify and reward alphas even for fighting ability or other proxies of fitness, strength, capability etc shouldn't be surprising.
Here we have a guy who's been studying wolves for decades, and says it doesn't work like you describe. But you are so certain it works that way, that you say, well, he hasn't proved absolutely with certainty that it _doesn't_. That is not the way scientific knowledge works. The people actually studying wolves for years say it does not in fact work like you are simply assuming it does.
This also gives a clue about what kinds of groups might be able to combat corporate leviathans: Families of related individuals.
"Alpha" has not implied harsh dominance through cruelty for at least the past couple of decades, if it ever did.
Indeed, Mech's book even notes the alpha taking the pack's fears and desires into account. "If wolf government is strictly autocratic, one would expect to see pack members always following the leader blindly.... Strict autocracy is ruled out by an observation that I made on Isle Royale.... The island's pack of sixteen wolves was headed across the ice of Lake Superior from Isle Royale toward the mainland, some twenty miles away. The wolves had gotten about one and one half miles from the northeast tip of the island when dissension among them became evident. Although most of the wolves appeared unwilling to continue, the leader seemed determined. Several times he returned to the hesitant pack and apparently tried to urge the members on. They continued for another half mile or so until they came to a section of rough and jagged ice. After testing this, the pack returned to Isle Royale. I had the distinct impression that it was the hesitancy of most of the pack members that stimulated the leader to turn back." Id. at 75-76. The current criticism of the term "alpha" is a straw man that mischaracterizes the original work's claims about pack leadership. "Alpha" in Mech's book isn't about unbridled "fighting" or "aggression," it's about kin relationships and social capital and taking care of the pack. The current view is not meaningfully different from the view in the book.
I suspect, though have no evidence, that this revisionism is due to political pressure over perceived "toxic masculinity" adopting "alpha" as a trope. If so, it is extremely distasteful, even dangerous; reinforcing the idea that science should bend to politics is authoritarian, naive, and threatens the survival of any nation where such is done.
Idk why this saying persists. Many, many negatives are easy to prove. For instance, it is very provable that an adult elephant is not sleeping in your bed right now.
Sure in situations where you can see 100% of my beds, but the only meaningful context for that phrase is when you're trying to generalize information to learn about more than one thing in the world. You know... What studies do. The whole point of the scientific method. So what burden of proof would you recommend beyond subsequent observational studies in wolf behavior not showing this phenomena? Or were you just using a deliberately obtuse interpretation of that phrase for pure pedantry?
Hell, "you can't prove a negative" is itself a negative -- so it's tautologically impossible to prove that you can't prove a negative (either because it's false or because it's true).
Also, more appropriately, in the sense of the problem of induction (see Hume). You can't prove that there are no black swans, until you've observed a black swan.
And, no, if you asserted that an adult elephant is sleeping in the OP's bed right now, they wouldn't be able to disprove it to you.
I forget what we were arguing about. Please go ahead and have the last word and thanks for the exchange.
But I'm tired of it, too, by now. Thanks for your engagement as well, even though I took us on a detour!
But another is to actually look at the rest of your comment. And you might also ask why my 'pedantic' reply is the only one your comment got at all, as of time of writing. Let's review:
> The burden of proof is on whoever makes the claim— that wolf packs are led by alpha male wolves– not on everybody else to prove they aren't. One experiment in very unnatural conditions showed these results. They were not observed in subsequent studies that were better designed. Why would someone conduct an expensive study specifically to search for phenomena observed once but never again? Because of people so insecure they need to justify their antisocial, domineering behavior through unrelated research?
There are a few observations about norms in the scientific community, which might be a bit useful and relevant.
But this?
> Why would someone conduct an expensive study specifically to search for phenomena observed once but never again? Because of people so insecure they need to justify their antisocial, domineering behavior through unrelated research?
Fully half your comment was rhetorical questions that serve only to dress another person down— pure ingroup signaling, snark, and moralism. You're unlikely to get the kind of engagement you imagine you deserve with an approach like that, whether from pedants or anyone else.
I can understand finding yourself riled up by this topic. I can't claim that I never indulge in snark. But seriously, I didn't respond to the rest of your comment or even really address you directly in my reply because your post told me that talking to you would be unpleasant and hostile.
You've called me out for pedantry, which is what we call it when someone's corrections seem trivial to us. But the comment I was replying to was all about correcting someone else's thinking, and it was frankly uglier than it was interesting. The same turned out to be true of your subsequent comments in the wider thread as well— not seriously engaging with you was very much the right call for me.
I hope at least some of this has been useful, but either way you won't get another reply from me.
I hope you have a better day tomorrow.
Edit: The text is so short I'll just post it here.
"A pedant (/ˈpɛd.ənt/ PED-ent) is a person who is excessively concerned with formalism, accuracy and precision, or one who makes an ostentatious and arrogant show of learning."
> Does anyone have any idea what they mean when they say it's a myth?
They mean that men shouldn't strive to be assertive and dominant.
> What is the myth? In what way is the idea incorrect?
The myth is that you can read news without getting constantly bombarded by inane agendaposting.
Suppose there's a leader who's the oldest, their spouse is gone, and he/she has 6 littermates who "follow" him/her. Then the leader dies. Which of the littermates becomes the new leader?
Maybe the pack disperses? Otherwise there's a fight. Please explain how that's incorrect.
Imagine alien scientists had studied humans, but only in prison, and then created a model of social behaviour around their observations of prison gangs with a lot of fights to establish hierarchies and who has preferential access to resources.
Only later they study humans outside prison and discover that actually humans - in this hypothetical scenario - are most often organised in farm households/families with a husband and wife leading the household, their children and in richer/bigger households maybe a few farmhands, maids and grandparents around.
They discover that the social patterns in extended families are very different from the patterns in prison gangs, children usually don’t fight their parents for the leadership role, sometimes the head of the household gets the nicest piece of meat, but sometimes in times when food is rare the youngest children are also fed first….
So the models and terminology these alien scientists developed to describe human social behaviour and roles are only fitting for a very specific artificial scenario - prisons - and they try to discourage the old terminology like “gang leader” and start to use new terminology like “head of household” in their work.
It's all right there in the article. The "alpha wolf" idea was promoted back in 1970 by a researcher named David Mech in his book "The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species". Mech continued studying wolves, realized that his earlier theory was mistaken, and actually asked his publisher to stop printing his own book. It is Mech himself who "claims" that his own "idea of an alpha wolf" is a myth, because of his continued research into wolves in the wild, which demonstrated that "packs are usually made up of families", and the alpha/beta structure found in groups of wolves in captivity is simply a recreation of the family.
There is no Step 3 because it would be very strange to say, "this guy who has spent his whole life studying wolves understood them much better 50 years ago than he does now, so we ought to keep using his old, obsolete theory instead of his newer, better-informed one".
[0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Inside-of-a-Dog/Alexa...
I do appreciate that the article reminds us that the wolf is most often not a vicious animal. Having known people who’ve kept wolves, they’re amazing and family oriented animals with capacity for care and compassion. Often even more than dogs since they’re smarter and haven’t had the wild bred out. The fact that such an animal would become comfortable and exchange love with a human while ignoring their desire to be free is amazing!
Wolves are greatly misunderstood and demonized in mass media - most recently “the Grey” with Liam Neeson.
> while he was on Ellesmere that “it dawned on me the need to tell the world about this alpha stuff. Because it’s nonsense.
so basically both the original and the myth are one anectdote each? he even say:
> It makes no sense up here.
how this special community of wolves generalize to other? article doesn't care enough to say.
does the researcher say at some point?
is there anyone doing actual research with data that can be repeated, instead of deriving principles from natural observations? I thought we were past Aristoteles&co.
Parents and children. Wolf packs are just a family of related animals.
I can’t imagine a way to do a controlled reproducible experiment looking at the social behaviour of wild animals. It’s not like any of this could be observed in a lab environment.
There are a lot of subjects that can only be studied through natural observation.
the wording of the article and your reply hints at this research being of the first type.
The question isn't "what would happen if", but "what's the behavior as exhibited", so you don't need to do a "controlled experiment". You just need to observe and accurately describe the kind of pack dynamics and behavior seen.
Observation is enough for this, and there are tons of studies done exactly that way on animals, some of them lasting decades, from gorillas to meerkats and from dolphins to mice...
It's impossible to have a controlled environment to study a phenomenon in an uncontrolled environment. As soon as you put these wolves in captivity, you're not measuring the same thing. And good luck repeating an experiment with wild wolves in nature.
As a side note, you seem to dismiss research through observation of natural behavior. How else are you going to do it?
that's the whole point. everyone seem to presume, nobody seems to bring data. few special cases here, few special cases there.
The article is summarizing a lifetime of observation-based research
https://wolf.org/wolf-info/basic-wolf-info/in-depth-resource...
But it describes wolves in captivity pretty well! Most references about "alpha" I seen were from a dog behavior. Pack of dogs has a hierarchy and follows orders.
Pick-up originated from dog training. Maybe that is how this term got applied to people.
But I think there should be enough public wildlife wolf documentaries and videos to be presented as data on how wolves live or others
If you just looked at a random 10hr of raw footage of wolves, you wouldn't be able to conclude anything. Most of it would be uneventful, only experts would even be able to recognize which wolf is which ,and it wouldn't be representative anyway (because it's much easier to capture wolves when they're doing certain behaviours, and because 10hrs isn't a large enough sample for rare but critical behavours).
Documentaries must carefully select what shots to show, and provide voice-over explaining what is going on. This means they are really just using footage to explain the documentary creator's understanding, not proving or discovering anything.
But the growls are kind of cute, and probably sound a lot more ominous than they are. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRv5LQGC/
(If this is a “citation needed” situation: https://www.mayoclinic.org/first-aid/first-aid-human-bites/b...)
there's no wilderness... it's all somebody's backyard.
I don't know anything about wolves really, but with dogs, most individual components of body language are pretty ambiguous. For example,
- many dogs will rapidly wag their tails just before getting into a vicious fight (it doesn't just mean 'happy')
- dogs will generally bare teeth as a warning/threat, but some will also show their teeth as a greeting (Google 'heeler smile')
- some stress/calming signals (e.g., pulling ears back or lowered tail) can occur as normal parts of safe, mutual play
All of that is to say that if someone who works at a respectable wolf habitat/rescue tells me that a growl-y vocalization from a wolf is not always aggressive, I don't have a hard time believing that.
(I'd love to learn more about wolf body language and how it differs from that of domestic dogs!)
My dog has played a few times with a rescue mutt (bit of rottie in there?) who growls pretty loud in the heat of the moment. Was frightening to hear, but shes not aggressive at all.
Bears are sometimes pretty cool. There’s a lady on tiktok that scratches one behind the ears with a rake whenever it shows up. Which is apparently a frequent thing for her. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRv5qd55/
Somehow she trained it to sit… https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRv5yDQk/
But I don’t think bears are domesticatable through selective breeding, whereas there’s some evidence that wolves are.
You don't have to fear wolf attacks because we just aren't something they are familiar with, but if they're really hungry they'd have no qualms over turning a couple humans into lunch, and you can't just scare them off.
Find the treat that the human points at. The dog puppy follows the cue, while the wolf does not.
That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the wolf, but it's genetically less likely to defer and learn from the human.
It was in some dog documentary on Netflix. Wish I could remember the name!
Anyway I think that tendency to attune to us, generalized to other contexts, is part of what makes dogs so wonderful. It's not just a matter of being able to direct them explicitly, but the fact that they're interested in what we're doing, how we're feeling, what we want, etc.
All of that varies with each individual dog, of course. But it's obvious that generally, wolves and humans aren't as fit for each other as dogs and humans are.
You say that like it's shameful for them to feel that way.
Pet owners really don't like it when wolves kill off their dogs & cats, either.
The people who have lived here a while pay no nevermind. But new locals always fill nextdoor with coyote sightings. I mean, yeah, you can hear them basically every night.
> He went to jail for hitting her
> He went to jail because she didn't like that he hit her
This makes it sound like she would or should sometimes like to be hit, rather than being straightforwardly the victim of a crime, or straightforwardly because the person committed a crime
so, "bad reputation" is unfortunate, X caused it, but it's unwarranted to read that as "X is unfortunate"? It seems like a reasonable inference.
Right. I have some affection for wolves and coyotes because of their resemblance and relatiom to domestic dogs... but I also don't want them near my home any more than they have to be, and I avoid them at parks, because they will 100% kill and eat dogs like mine. They do it all the time.
The most damaging thing you could ever do to soil is expose it to direct sunlight. The whole point of annuals is that they come up to protect the soil from the harmful radiation that kills the soil ecosystems. That's why annuals seeds can survive in soils for sometimes even decades. They're not meant to displace anything. They're meant to be there when there's some sort of "disturbance" (in nature this could be a fire or a mudslide or a windstorm that knocks over some important shade-providing trees, but in Western agriculture this is basically all of our farming) and kickstart the process of ecological succession
If you let your lawn get overgrown by weeds it might look terrible the first year (tho I personally think it looks much more beautiful than the green deserts we spend so much money trying to maintain). But the second year you'll start to get some perennials and a lot less of the weedy annuals. Maybe some grasses will start. Eventually the soils will have developed so that they transformed from bacteria-dominated to fungal dominated and mycorrhizal networks will allow much more hardy plants to grow including shrubs and eventually even trees. These advanced soils hold up to 50x as much water and plants who've made mycorrhizal associations are much more resistant to pests, droughts, freezes, etc and have access to a much larger network of nutrients. So that means you'll have to spend much less time maintaining, watering, fertilizing, etc. In fact fertilization with nitrogen impedes the formation of mycorrhizal associations so, if your goal is a long term garden, "leave it the fuck alone" is actually a very effective strategy.
Those weedy annuals depend on nitrogen that comes in easy to access forms but fungal dominated soils tend to have nitrogen in harder to access forms like ammonium (mainly due to the advancement of the soil food web into more complex organisms) so that means that the "weeds" will eventually work themselves out of a job (or at least until the next major "disturbance").
It's really a problem that solves itself and the more you fight that harder you need to fight.
I might've strayed from the original point but I think there's a similar lesson with wolves. Wolves drastically decrease the number of disease vectors (e.g. rats or deer with ticks) in an ecosystem and also balance out other predators that take their place like birds of prey. The more we fight them the more we have to come up with solutions for all the side effects of their absence (e.g. large deer populations leading to reduced vegetation that stabilizes river banks or the increase in diseases)
This is horse shit. Do NOT interact with wolves. They're beautiful and majestic. They also absolutely don't deserve the damage that can come from food from humans or habituation, and you don't deserve the risk (from attack, from disease, from a park ranger who's pissed that yet ANOTHER tourist is ignoring all of the postings to leave wild animals alone.)
Bison near you? Get the fuck away. Wolf? Get the fuck away. Chipmunk? Seriously, stop interacting with wildlife. If you feed wildlife, you're an asshole. If wildlife is put down because a TikTok video got you attacked, you're an asshole. If yet another bear is relocated because you helped habituate it, you're an asshole. (And if you're wondering, there are usually a lot of laws around how people shouldn't interact with wildlife. For good reason.)
Leave no trace. Let wildlife be wild. Leave it the fuck alone.
Move to a new house near wild fauna and flora ? You’re an asshole, leave it the fuck alone.
Expending suburbs and creating new one is taking over some life territory.
Can you find a quote you disagree with, and then explain why you disagree with it? That usually clarifies situations like this.
For example, the “when cared for” is an important qualifier in my statement.
Dogs might have descended from wolves and can even interbreed with them, but they're not the same.
I’m trying to let the insults roll off me, but saying I’m horse shit and ignorant for two things I didn’t say is a bit much. I think that’s enough HN for the day. Have a nice weekend.
This would also apply: "lions are closer to house cats than they are to humans or bears." So would you say "lions are basically large house cats" ?
I can see how your comment is not about habituating wolves, but it feels like I have to be extra charitable to read it that way even knowing your intent.
Even wolves that have been crossbred over several generations with dogs to get a more wolflike appearance tend to be exceptionally difficult to manage, have been well-known to attack other pets, can be very destructive, and ultimately most people want them because of how they look.
People who believe that wolves will reciprocate human affection and somehow magically ignore all of their instincts are people who tend to overly anthropomorphize what are at heart wild animals.
In general, unless you know what you’re doing, just don’t.
Most of the time, you’re just fine handling a tame wolf if trained properly. It’s that time you make the mistake of thinking you can ignore what they want that will get you hurt.
Maybe there is a myth of "alpha males", but the article doesn't expose it, it doesn't even talk about it beyond a single sentence.
The last fifty or so years of western literature beg to differ.
On a metaphorical level: pick your favorite male-focused self help pop psychologist. There's a reason the phrase "sigma male grindset" was coined to make fun of these people.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=alpha+wolf&yea...
TV Tropes also has a good collection of occurrences in popculture, including literature.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AlphaAndBetaWolv...
So, dispelling that myth in wolves may be an attempt to shake off the pseudoscientific idea that this concept can be used to describe human social structures.
Of course, not being based in science in the first place, a scientific appeal has no chance of changing anything. Which is why it gets rewritten every few years.