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Understanding
A Dog's Pack Behavior: Look To The Wolf
Many of
the things dogs carry over from wolf society are useful to their new
role; many are not. The most clearly useful, though only up to a point,
is the wolf's innate sense of social rank, and the system of
communication that supports this rank structure.
Social rank is a
consequence of adaptations that many group-dwelling animals have made
to the inherent contradictions of living in a group. Being part of a
group gives an individual advantages and access to resources he could
never commandeer on his own. It also puts him in immediate and constant
conflict with members of his own species for those limited resources.
Competition with one's fellows for limited resources is a nearly
universal fact of nature. In species in which individuals can forage
and defend themselves successfully as loners, it is generally the case
that individuals seek to maximize their distance from one another.
Males, or females, or mating pairs, set up and furiously defend
exclusive territories and keep out all other comers. Whoever is best at
seizing and holding ground - whoever manages to keep the other,
competing members of his own species the farthest away from him - is
the most likely to reproduce and raise viable offspring who will in
turn pass on their parents' genes.
The relentless logic of evolution admits no other outcome: every
Carolina wren alive today is the descendant of a Carolina wren that
succeeded in fighting off the competition. The nice guys did not merely
finish last; they dropped dead, and their nice-guy genes died with
them,
In group-dwelling animals, undeniably self-interested forces hold
the group together, but it's still every wolf for himself when it comes
to the struggle to pass on one's genes to the next generation. Every
wolf in the pack has an evolutionary mandate to claim a mate, produce
offspring, and see that his offspring survive - and that inevitably
means survive at the expense of the other guys.
And in the wolf pack,
the other guy is not over the next hill; he's lying a few feet away.
The situation is inherently explosive. The wolf pack is a tightly
packed powder keg of competing interests. Every member of the pack has
an interest in being the only member to breed and produce offspring.
At the same time, wolves need the pack. Wolves that hunt very large
prey such as moose may form packs with as many as twenty or thirty
members, but even when the food supply consists of smaller game,
cooperative hunting by smaller packs of four to seven brings in more
food than the sum of those four to seven wolves operating on their own
could manage.
There is also an evolutionary bootstrap process at work
in favor of group formation: groups themselves become a force that
favors groups, for packs can defend large territories, and only other
groups then have the wherewithal to resist that otherwise superior
force.
When everyone else is a member of a territorial group, the lone
wolf is in big trouble, for he now doesn't have a prayer of claiming
and holding any substantial territory on his own.
There are more
information articles on all aspects of basics dog training, dog health
issues, dog grooming and dog nutrition in
John Mailer's article directory
Copyright 2007 http://www.BasicsDogTraining .com
Understanding A
Dog's Pack Behavior: Look To The Wolf
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