Max debunks the alpha dog myth, tracing it to Dr. L. David Mech's 1970s wolf study. Mech later found wild wolves organize around a breeding pair, not dominance. Feral dogs are sociable and move between groups, not pack animals.
Chapters
Was this dog really the alpha, or was the whole entire world wrong? I've got an explanation that anybody can understand. Hello, my name is Max, and welcome to day 9 of the January series, sharing a self-improving tip each day until we become the humans dogs dream of having. And here is what you need to know about dominance and alphas and stuff. This man is Dr. L. David Mech. After writing a book in the 1970s of his observation of wolves in captivity, he and the world finally understood how wolves and dogs worked. They are submissive to the ones above and dominant to the ones below, and that would be the alpha. And people started seeing this in their dogs everywhere around the world. It just made sense. He has spent the rest of his life, including other people in his field, disproving the very thing that people think he proved. You see, he did a really smart thing and decided to go and observe wolves in the wild. Realized you don't see any of those behaviors. There's no fighting over food. There's no submitting others. There's also no alpha. What he found is that there's a breeding pair, just mum and dad, and they have their authority through being mum and dad. And that is a functional pack of animals that can actually survive. And let's talk about dogs for a second. There have been studies over the years observing feral dogs, and they found something even more interesting. Dogs aren't pack animals. They're actually sociable animals because they jump from group to group, they choose when to sleep alone, they don't hunt or scavenge for food for the good of their group, and the dads don't stick around to raise the young. So already this is polar opposite from what we see in wild wolves. Now, what about this guy here? See, this behavior is only seen in captivity or only seen with human interference. They are unhealthy environments with limited resources. This is not dominance. These are dogs that have learnt to police, learnt to submit, and learnt to survive. It's not normal, it's not natural, and it's not seen anywhere else. And these videos of people taking their so-called alpha dog into dog parks? These are just really insecure and easily offended dogs owned by people who don't know what they're watching. Just letting the dog loose and filming it like it's some sort of flex. Yet again, unhealthy human creating an unhealthy dog, flexing about it. There's no alphas, just dogs that are healthy or unhealthy. I'll see you tomorrow morning.
