Free Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz

and a body close to the ground, a younger wolf is acknowledging the older's biological priority. Young pups are naturally at a subordinate level; in mixed-family packs pups may inherit some of the status of their parents. While rank may be reinforced by charged and sometimes dangerous encounters between pack members, this is rarer than aggression against an intruder. Pups learn their place by interacting with and observing their packmates more than by being put in their place.
    The reality of wolf pack behavior contrasts starkly with dog behavior in other ways. Domestic dogs do not generally hunt. Most are not born into the family unit in which they will live: with humans the predominant members. Pet dogs' attempts to mate are (happily) unrelated to their adopted humans'—supposedly the alpha pair's—mating schedules. Even feral dogs—those who may never have lived in a human family—usually do not form traditional social packs, although they may travel in parallel.
    Neither are we the dog's pack. Our lives are so much more stable than that of a wolf pack: the size and membership of a wolf pack is always in flux, changing with the seasons, with the rates of offspring, with young adult wolves growing up and leaving in their first years, with the availability of prey. Typically, dogs adopted by humans live out their lives with us; no one is pushed out of the house in spring or joins us just for the big winter moose hunt. What domestic dogs do seem to have inherited from wolves is the sociality of a pack: an interest in being around others. Indeed, dogs are social opportunists. They are attuned to the actions of others, and humans turned out to be very good animals to attune to.
    To evoke the outdated, simplistic model of packs glosses over real differences between dog and wolf behavior and misses some of the most interesting features of packs in wolves. We do better to explain dogs' taking commands from us, deferring to us, and indulging us by the fact that we are their source of food than by reasoning that we are alpha. We can certainly make dogs totally submissive to us, but that is neither biologically necessary nor particularly enriching for either of us. The pack analogy does nothing but replace our anthropomorphisms with a kind of "beastomorphism," whose crazy philosophy seems to be something like "dogs aren't humans, so we must see them as precisely unhuman in every way."
    We and our dogs come closer to being a benign gang than a pack: a gang of two (or three or four or more). We are a family. We share habits, preferences, homes; we sleep together and rise together; we walk the same routes and stop to greet the same dogs. If we are a gang, we are a merrily navel-gazing gang, worshiping nothing but the maintenance of our gang itself. Our gang works by sharing fundamental premises of behavior. For instance, we agree to rules of conduct in our home. I agree with my family that under no circumstances is urination on the living room rug allowed. This is a tacit agreement, happily. A dog has to be taught this premise for habitation; no dog knows about the value of rugs. In fact, rugs might provide a nice feeling underfoot for some bladder release.
    Trainers who espouse the pack metaphor extract the "hierarchy" component and ignore the social context from which it emerges. (They further ignore that we still have a lot to learn about wolf behavior in the wild, given the difficulty of following these animals closely.) A wolfcentric trainer may call the humans the pack leaders responsible for discipline and forcing submission by others. These trainers teach by punishing the dog after discovery of, say, the inevitable peed-upon rug. The punishment can be a yell, forcing the dog down, a sharp word or jerk of the collar. Bringing the dog to the scene of the crime to enact the punishment is common—and is an especially misguided tactic.
    This approach is farther from what we know of the reality of wolf packs and closer to the