Guest Author - MaryEllen Schoeman
Temple Grandin’s new book, “Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Lives for Animals” is, as usual, completely fascinating. Next week I will have a review of the book and of her work in general, but this week I want to talk about some new research that she quotes in the book, regarding wolves. Her information comes from a thirteen-year study by wolf biologist L. David Mech, a widely respected researcher, writer, and expert on wolves.
Let’s start with what we all know about wolves. Wolves live in packs dominated by a top male and female, known as the ‘alpha’ wolves. This monogamous pair are the only wolves in the pack who are allowed to mate, and they will actively prevent other wolves from mating. They also control access to food, no matter who catches it, and will always eat first and then decide who gets to eat next. The other wolves in the pack are constantly fighting to get to the alpha role, and when the male or female alpha gets too old to successfully defend their position, they are chased out of the pack by the newly-dominant wolves. Wolves who constantly challenge the alphas can also be run out of the pack, becoming the typical “lone wolf”.
Thus, wolf society is a top-down hierarchy with rules enforced by the alphas, who are in a constant struggle to retain their position, while the other wolves in the pack are in a constant struggle to move up the ranks and become the alphas themselves.
Except… that’s not true. The problem has been that all the studies on wolf society have been done on wolf packs in captivity (since wolves in the wild tend to live in inhospitable places and are also shy and secretive). But captive packs are made up of unrelated wolves put together in a confined space. When unrelated wolves or families of wolves are put together, they do indeed fight it out until one pair of wolves takes control, becoming the alphas. The other unrelated wolves then work to position themselves in a place to take over the pack, and older wolves or those who refuse to submit to the alphas are often shoved out of the pack and denied the opportunity to eat.
But in the wild, it turns out, wolf society is *not* a pack. It looks like a pack from the outside, with two wolves who are the only ones who mate and who are in charge of the other wolves. Wolves who start to challenge the alphas constantly leave the pack and strike out on their own. So, it looks like our idea of a wolf pack. But think carefully. What structure does this remind you of? What other social organization works this way, with two individuals, a male and a female, who decide what the other members of the pack can do? And when that male and female get too old to rule, they move on and another, younger set of individuals take charge? And in which individuals reach a certain stage where they start to chafe under the rule of the two in charge, and move out on their own?
A family. A wolf ‘pack’ is a simple family structure. The two ‘alphas’ are the parents of the wolves in the pack. They are the only ones that mate for the same reason that only the parents mate in a family – the other members of the group are siblings. The wolves that are ‘kicked out’ of the pack are the young adults, and they do the same thing that human young adults do – when they get tired of following the rules of the family, they move out and start their own lives. When the alphas get old, they move out of the way and let the younger folk take over the family. This is the only time a non-related wolf enters the pack – the oldest child still ‘at home’ takes a mate from another family and they begin their own family, sometimes looking after the youngest cubs of their parents (their youngest siblings) until those wolves are ready to move out on their own and start their own families.
This is a really good example of how studying a species in captivity and then transferring that knowledge to the wild is not always a good idea. Very valuable things can be learned from studying animals in captivity, but studying them in the wild has equal value, and scientists need to get together and share their knowledge in order to get a complete picture. There has been, historically, a sort of disdain between the two groups – field scientists don’t respect lab scientists, and vice versa. Often, information from field scientists is totally ignored by lab scientists, because it doesn’t fit into their ideas of how things work. Field scientists, for their part, will ignore findings of lab scientists as being irrelevant because they are working with animals under unnatural circumstances. Things are getting much better now than they were twenty or even ten years ago, but there still needs to be more communication among all branches of science, in order for us to gain as complete a picture of the natural world as possible.
The following two books are by David Mech, who first made these compelling discoveries, and explain them in much greater detail than I have been able to above.
