It has a nice little swipe at Cesar Millan– just to show that just because dogs are wolves doesn’t mean that all this alpha nonsense is accurate. Thinking of wolf packs as families helps us understand how dog domestication could have happened:
Well, first, there’s been a huge misunderstanding of pack behavior — so let’s just make sure we’re in agreement on that one. The Cesar Millan “you are pack leader” or “you have failed to be pack leader” routine is based on this notion of what a wolf pack is that grew out of studies of captive packs, which were made up of unrelated animals thrown together in these wolf parks. And people studying them saw that the males — unaltered males, unrelated males — fought for status. And they developed this notion of the “alpha wolf” — the biggest, meanest wolf — leading the pack. (It happened to fit, as an aside, with our views of what corporate America should be like. But let’s forget that for a minute.)
But when the researchers — David Mech is the most prominent wolf researcher — finally went and looked hard at wild packs, guess what they discovered? It wasn’t based on fighting at all; it was based on mutual cooperation. Why? Because the pack was an extended family. Ma and pa were the alphas by definition, because they were the breeding pair. Then you had the juveniles, the two- or three-year-olds moving out, and the puppies. And they worked cooperatively. And in fact, the alpha male often deferred to other animals in the pack. Why? Because not fighting is more important to social cohesion than fighting, if you follow me. Chimps, on the other hand, are known to be a rather violent sort, and wage war in various ways; they’re not as socially minded in that respect as wolves.
The early unit that humans had was the extended family — small family groups traveling around. And so I think there’s a kind of mix there that allows for this movement of wolf into human society, much more easily than other animals might do it. I mean, if in fact the wolf gained its dominance through fighting, then you’d be hard-pressed to see how humans and wolves would have gotten together to produce the dog; it’s more likely they would have gotten together to produce bloodshed.
That explanation goes a long way to explaining why we didn’t domesticate chimps, even though they lived alongside us in Africa for so many years. Chimps would easily learn to respond to human language, but once they hit a certain age, they turn into warlords.
Although not all wolves would have been suitable for domestication, it is likely that many were.
Taming wolves had to have been so easy that a caveman could do it.
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Derr also wrote this piece on Cesar for the New York Times.
I am glad he covers the behavioral neoteny thing, because I’m getting rather sick of it. In Dog Sense (which I finally finished and did not like, btw) it gets harped over and over again and drove me up the wall.
This book is a major, comprehensive attack against the neoteny theory.
He also takes down the Siberian fox farm experiment. It’s an interesting experiment, but it’s being milked and squeezed and punched and contorted to fit all sorts of things that don’t actually fit what the experiment found.