The military used punishment as a training tool. This gave us a pretty clear picture of the wolf as a very authoritarian animal with an almost a military ranking," she said.ĭog training comes from the military, Møller Gabrielsen said. In addition, you have a number of other well-known names who published research based on animals in zoos. "This was true especially after 1970, when David Mech published his study. The alpha wolf theory was of great importance in dog training, says NTNU's Ane Møller Gabrielsen. He is now struggling to get this changed," Zimmermann said. But by the time he realized that this was a mistake, the term had already taken root in the literature. "David Mech, the world's most profiled wolf researcher, used the terminology alpha animals in his early research. Nevertheless, the book is still being sold. Mech has written on his website that he repeatedly asked the publisher to stop printing the book because much of the information is outdated-including the concept behind the alpha wolf. The book helped to popularize the alpha concept, because many people referred to Mech's work. In 1970, the book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species was published, written by David Mech. These wolves were not necessarily related and were kept in an unnaturally small area. For example, Erik Zimen, a Swede, worked with social organization among wolves in captivity. Credit: Andrew Astbury / Shutterstock / NTBĪ great deal of research was done on the wolf's pack structure in the 1960s and 1970s, but this was mainly on wolves in captivity, Zimmermann said. In 2015, she completed her doctorate on "Power and meaning in the conflict zones over keeping dogs." Her dissertation describes research on pack structure in wolves, and how it in turn affected views on dog training.Ī moose meal in the snow. Rudolf Schenkel's work had great influence, said Ane Møller Gabrielsen, a senior research librarian at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. "By continuously controlling and suppressing all types of competition within the same sex, both 'alpha animals' defend their social position," Schenkel wrote.Īccording to another well-known wolf researcher, David Mech, it was Schenkel's work that gave rise to the idea of the alpha wolf, according to The International Wolf Center website.Īs early as 1947, Schenkel mentioned that it was possible that wild wolf packs consisted of a monogamous pair, their puppies and one- to two-year-old pups. He saw that the highest ranked female and male formed a pair, and that the hierarchy could change. Schenkel studied wolves at the Basel Zoo in Switzerland, where up to ten wolves were kept together in an area of 10 by 20 meters.
Rudolf Schenkel wrote about social structure and body language among wolves in 1947. So how did the idea for the alpha wolf come about? We don't talk about the alpha male, the alpha female and the beta child in a human family," Zimmermann said.
"The adults are simply in charge because they are the parents of the rest of the pack members. The group may also include one- to three-year-old offspring that have not yet headed out on their own. Most wolf packs simply consist of two parents and their puppies. But this is not a concept that works for wolves in the wild," she says. Then there may be several rank levels, beta, gamma and so on. Zimmermann is a professor at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences who studies wolves. In reality, wolf packs are usually much less complicated.Ĭalling wolves alpha and beta animals comes from research on wolves in captivity, says Barbara Zimmermann. The pack structure is said to include a "beta wolf" who is the deputy and the "omega wolf" who is at the bottom of the rank, and often the victim of bullying. On the Howstuffworks website, for example, you can read that wolves follow "an incredibly sophisticated group hierarchy," and that wolves naturally organize themselves in packs for stability and to help each other with hunting. Maybe some of these wolves might challenge the alpha male to take over leadership of the pack? You can imagine that relatives, newcomers and challengers are all part of the system. Given this designation, it's easy to imagine that a pack consists of young adults and older animals in a strict ranking system.
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