"Alpha" Male Is A Myth; Wolf Packs Are Simply Families

Everyone I know, I mean everyone uses the phrase "Alpha'' to address a human male, dog , wolf and even other animals. 

Little did I know that the roots of it evolved from a 1970 book, The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species.

This book because of biased research done with captive wolves (not wolves in wild) coined the prefix "alpha" for male dominance!! 

Thank goodness for L. David Mech this has now been removed from the latest edition of the book. 

But yet, can we remove the idea of "alpha" instilled in the human brain? I don't think so because of the curse of "locked in syndrome" (stuck with the wrong idea or choice) in a complex system. 

The lessons here are: 

1. Never take anything at face value and dig a little to find the roots from where it started. I have been doing this a lot lately and its fun and enlightening - plus made me more humble, have more gratitude and be open minded. 
2. Before you leash an idea into the world, be cautious of the unintended consequences  and understand complex systems. 
3. Even if one was not successful in doing 1 and 2 through themselves and at some point new truth emerges then please change your mind.

This is a beautiful case of how science learns from past mistakes and corrects itself. 

If you’ve ever heard the term “alpha wolf,” you might imagine snapping fangs and fights to the death for dominance. The idea that wolf packs are led by a merciless dictator is pervasive, lending itself to a shorthand for a kind of dominant masculinity.

But it turns out that this is a myth, and in recent years wildlife biologists have largely dropped the term “alpha.” In the wild, researchers have found that most wolf packs are simply families, led by a breeding pair, and bloody duels for supremacy are rare.

“What would be the value of calling a human father the alpha male?” says L. David Mech, a senior research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, who has studied wolf packs in the wild for decades. “He’s just the father of the family. And that’s exactly the way it is with wolves.”

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Mech, like many wildlife biologists, once used terms such as alpha and beta to describe the pecking order in wolf packs. But now they are decades out of date, he says. This terminology arose from research done on captive wolf packs in the mid-20th century—but captive packs are nothing like wild ones, Mech says. When keeping wolves in captivity, humans typically throw together adult animals with no shared kinship. In these cases, a dominance hierarchy arises, Mech adds, but it’s the animal equivalent of what might happen in a human prison, not the way wolves behave when they are left to their own devices.

In contrast, wild wolf packs are usually made up of a breeding male, a breeding female and their offspring from the past two or three years that have not yet set out on their own—perhaps six to 10 individuals. In the late 1980s and 1990s Mech observed a pack every year at Ellesmere Island in northeastern Canada. His study, published in 1999 in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, was among the first multiyear research on a single pack over time. It revealed that all members of the pack defer to the breeding male and that all other pack members, regardless of sex or age, defer to the breeding female. The youngest pups also submit to their older siblings, though when food is scarce, parents feed the young first, much as human parents might tend to a fragile infant.

The same is true across gray wolf packs: Infighting for dominance is basically unheard of in a typical pack. When offspring are two to three years old, they leave the pack in search of mates, aiming to start their own pack. The alpha wolf notion of challenging dad for dominance of the existing pack just isn’t in the wolf playbook.

Indeed, even general family conflict is rare, Mech says. “Let’s say that [a] pair has some yearling wolves that haven’t dispersed yet. The adults will kind of keep the yearlings away from the carcass while the adults feed and feed the pups,” he says. “Those are places where there can be at least competition and sometimes conflict, but it’s a snap or two.”

Mech used the alpha wolf nomenclature in a classic book of wolf biology, The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, which was published in 1970. But he has made a point of pushing back against the term as new research has come to light. After a years-long effort, he finally got The Wolf taken out of print in 2022, he says. The 2003 book Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, which he co-edited with zoologist Luigi Boitani, is now far more accurate and up-to-date, he says.

There were many people who used to address Max and I as an Alpha - Beta relationship. I used to repel at that phrase. 

What Max and I have is a simple and ordinary bond between two living beings.  What a beautiful and wonderful life it has been because of it. 

And that's what wolf families have too. Nothing less nor more.