Quote: Jennifer Marshal

From the first article:
Jeff, when it comes to dogs, horses, cats, whathaveyou. Animals. Personal experience should make up a LOT of your basis for theory or philosophy of training or behavior. If you have not seen it yourself, dealt with it yourself then you reall have no idea. You cannot read about these things in a book and think you know how things are and will be based on a list of facts and figures that someone else put together that is probably not from personal experience either. When it comes to living thinking creatures you have to be active and reactive with learning and handling them.

A dog is not a book. It is not an essay or a theory or a scientific thesis.

Personal experience should make up a LOT of basis for theory when dealing with anything. But it should not fly in the face of empirical scientific theory. At the same time I agree 100 that until you flesh the theory out, you are generally to be considered a novice.
An example of two extremes:
It may be a personal experience that you or anyone in your family ever got cancer from smoking. To conclude that smoking does increase the probability of cancer is highly subjective.

It was once believed the word was flat. Personal experience corrected that.

I agree with just about everything else you said except. I just tend not to believe the common domestic dog is as pack driven as people say, and no where near as pack driven as a wolf.
That belief leads me to no different conclusions about training, dominance, and behavior than someone who does.

Jeff - have you ever owned a pack driven dog? If you haven't then it is understandable why you think the way you do.

I have already stated that just like wolves dogs have varation in rank drive. A rank driven dog is dominant, a non rank driven dog is not.

Whether a dog is dominant or not does not make the difference between if it is social or not, but it does make the difference of how the social interactions it has will go.

I have already mentioned the variation in pack drive based on breed. But a decrease in pack drive is not from domestication, it is not simply because dogs live with humans that is the reason or cause, it is that the traits were selected by humans.

I have been around wolves. I have been around/handled/observed over a thousand dogs. There is variation in intensity but pack and rank drive exist in both wolves and dogs.

 Quote: jeff cambeis

I just tend not to believe the common domestic dog is as pack driven as people say, and no where near as pack driven as a wolf.
That belief leads me to no different conclusions about training, dominance, and behavior than someone who does.

a. What does "as pack driven as people say" mean, exactly? Hard to speak to a premise like that. Which/what people?

b. How could it not?

Ah to edit my post I was rushed.

My opening statement should read: "Have you ever owned a rank driven dog?" not pack driven.

I posted this thread not to cause problems (honest!) but because I'm sincerely interested in exactly the debate that has sprung up. On the one hand we have a large group of people with very wide experience in handling dogs (and wolves) and most importantly, success in dealing with dominant dogs. On the other hand, careful scientific study of controlled experiments. Not only should the two not be in conflict, but the two CANNOT be in conflict. Any scientific conclusions must take into account the strong evidence that imposing a pack structure appears to lead to lower conflict relationships between domestic dogs. It is not enough to say that

 Quote: jeff cambeis

If thinking your dog is wolf helps people realize that than GREAT! You can believe your dog is bear, a shark or a space alien if it helps you handle it.

There is something going on here that needs explanation. You can't just dismiss the wolf-pack theory of dog behaviour just because current studies tend to cast doubt on it. On the other hand, very often we see that people jump to incorrect conclusions because they don't give seemingly obvious observations a scientific analysis. Just because treating a dog as a pack animal leads to better dog behaviour, doesn't necessarily mean that the dog is a pack animal. That's why people do controlled studies to answer these kinds of questions. You see this everywhere in the field of animal behaviour - for years everyone believed that prey animals gave alarm calls because there was some kind of "group selection" and they were placing themselves in danger "for the good of the pack". Now that explanation has been disproved - but that doesn't alter the fact that they still give alarm calls, and that these calls are in practice "for the good of the pack".

 Quote: jennifer marshal

From the first article:
"Central to this belief is the concept that a wolf pack consists of individuals continually competing for higher rank but ultimately held in check by the alpha male and alpha female."

This is not true.

Wolves, like dogs, are born with temperament qualities that determine the amount of push and shove within the pack. The rank drive. Some dogs have strong rank drive, they are dominant animals. Some do not, they are betas or omegas by nature not because they have been beaten down.

I think this is the key point - the dynamics of wolf packs seems to be more complicated that a simple linear dominance hierarchy. Mertens makes that point too, and that the nature of dog pack, whether at home or in feral groups, is moderated by breed, and by environmental factors such as food availability.

Arik, I still have not read the other articles, only the first you posted. I'm lazy, I will get around to it tomorrow.

In regards to breed differences affecting behavior - this is half of the reason breeds exist. The other half is the physical appearance of them. Humans created breeds just as we are still modifying and toying with dogs to increase or decrease drives and traits we find desirable or not.

The difference in temperament can affect the sociability of the dog. There are not many breeds created to be independent with low pack drive that I know of, however. Even breeds that were created to be this way still have the instincts necessary to interact and communicate with its own species. Whether or not a dog prefers to live in a pack doesn't affect its ability to understand and a social hierarchy and pack structure.

I question the sources of any paper written as a scientific study regarding the behavior of any animal. Unless the information is gathered from personal experience of the one who wrote it it means very little to me.

There is information. And then there is knowledge.

There are so many different variables in animals that make "controlled experiments" seem silly to me. What did they do, go out and find 100 puppies of the *exact* same temperament, type, age, and upbringing? Did they just go grab 100 or 10000 random dogs and puppies from unknown or just widely varying backgrounds? What animals were studied? Where? I see references cited for Baltimore and Italy. That means little to me.

Regarding feral dogs, the wilder they are the less likely you are to be able to observe them. Feral dogs are primarily scavengers and not hunters, I would venture to say that the looser social structure is affected by the lack of cooperative hunting being a necessity for survival. But even in a non hunting state they will still form alliances and bonds, small packs, mating pairs etc. "Strength in numbers."

Bottom line: Even if the dog is naturally less pack driven it is still able to understand hierarchy. Generally speaking dogs that are truly very low in pack drive and anti social are not kept by most people. Truly anti social dogs don't even like the company of humans and don't make good 'pets.' They are independent, aloof, and don't adhere to the saying "Dog is man's best friend."

Also, Dogs can have low pack drive and still have rank drive. Pack drive - desire/drive to be with and interact with it's pack socially. Rank drive - desire/drive to climb the social ladder = varying levels of dominant temperament.

A dog that doesn't seek out pack interaction can still be a dominant type dog just as they can be a submissive type dog.




Edited by Jennifer Marshal (05/12/2008 04:02 AM)
Edit reason: need sleep

 Quote: jennifer marshal

I question the sources of any paper written as a scientific study regarding the behavior of any animal. Unless the information is gathered from personal experience of the one who wrote it it means very little to me.

There is information. And then there is knowledge.

There are so many different variables in animals that make "controlled experiments" seem silly to me. What did they do, go out and find 100 puppies of the *exact* same temperament, type, age, and upbringing?

Ah, this is the big problem with ethology, isn't it. You can take a bottle of fruit flies and be pretty sure that the behaviour that you see is representative of the wild creatures. But no one would dream of taking a small bunch of humans and analysing them to understand the whole spectrum of human behaviour. The more complex the social and other interactions, the harder to generalise, or even to understand.

 Quote: jennifer marshal

The difference in temperament can affect the sociability of the dog. There are not many breeds created to be independent with low pack drive that I know of, however. Even breeds that were created to be this way still have the instincts necessary to interact and communicate with its own species. Whether or not a dog prefers to live in a pack doesn't affect its ability to understand and a social hierarchy and pack structure.
...
Bottom line: Even if the dog is naturally less pack driven it is still able to understand hierarchy.

Agree! And that's an important point. Even if dogs aren't very much like wolves, we can make use of that common core of behaviour to mold them more to our needs.
Don't get riled, I'm agreeing with you

 Quote: jeff cambeis

There is no need for pack structure in a domesticated dog. There is no hunting. I believe it is a vestigial trait and many believe it is not genetically relevant at all, rather it is epigenetic and is taught to the pups after birth.

Feral dogs do not pack.

Without even talking about the article, or the reason why the OP posted about it, I've got to comment on what you said...
Boy, Jeff, I don't know where you live, but in my neck of the woods feral dogs DO pack. What you just said is just completely wrong. Feral dogs DO pack, they DO hunt and they are more dangerous by far than coyotes as they are not as fearful of man as coyotes are.
Of course, you also said this:
Quote " I appreciate your personal experience. I personally prefer not to base my philosophy on personal experience. The articles provided proved sourced data based on large sampling groups. "EndQuote"
That didn't make much sense to me, either.

 Quote: Arik Kershenbaum

Has anyone read Wendy van Kerkhov's article in the 2004 issue of the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, and the responses to it?

A Fresh Look at the Wolf-Pack Theory of Companion-Animal Dog Social Behavior

I think her conclusions are bogus. What she fails to recognize is that the human is stepping in to assume the position of pack leader. Yes, operant conditioning may be effective in dealing w/ aggression between two dogs, but the human is still reinforcing the correct behavior. And if the human slacks off and stops reinforcing/controlling the situation, I think it's likely that the dogs would revert back to directing their aggression toward each other.

Cesar Millan does not use operant conditioning to control his pack; these 20 or so dogs aren't maintaining their appropriate behavior because they think they're gonna get a cookie!

And regarding feral dogs, she doesn't state whether there are heirarchies within these loose group affiliations that she describes. But of course, there are...these are packs, even if the affiliation is temporary.

Jennifer Marshall, please read that article and comment if you have time!

I haven't read these particular articles yet, but have read a lot of what Mech has written and the Coppingers and their threories.

1st domestic dogs display so much pack behavior on a daily basis I hardly think it's vestigal and unimportant.

I do think they have been selectively bred over the years to work with or for a human, not against them so most don't have dominance issues.

I think that feral dogs do pack up, i've seen it, witnessed, saw them killing sheep and have been "treed" by them as well.

The dogs the coppingers always talk about and their pariah dogs have filled a different niche. They still work with humans to hunt, and they do still depend on humans. I'm sure if humans didn't exist, and they didn't have us to hunt with or our scrap heaps to scavange off of, they would form very nice and effecient packs for hunting and survival.