>“It turned out all that stuff was mostly wrong,” Mech said. In 2022, his publisher agreed to stop printing the book. Yet, although field biologists no longer use the terms “alpha” and “beta,” they have proved too useful for humans to drop—now we use them in relation to our own groupings and conflicts.

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?