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Are dogs pack animals or not
must do everything wolves do. The little we do know of how wolves behave in
the wild shows that even a wolf is not magically, innately a ‘pack animal’. Most
– but not all – wolves live in packs. These packs are closed groups. They are, in
fact, families, consisting of parent animals and their offspring of the past several
years. Living in packs is not genetically inherited behaviour in wolves. It is learned
behaviour. Whether a wolf lives in a pack is dependent on many factors in a wolf ’s
life. The circumstances under which he is socialised as a young pup will determine
whether he is able (and willing) to live in a group. The specific environment he
grows up in will determine whether a pack can be formed, for example by whether
there is enough food available to support more than a single lone wolf. Human
occupation might make group living impossible. A lone wolf can hide more easily
and thus survive where a group might not; or a wolf may start life in a pack but
end up alone, because his pack mates have been slaughtered. Various accidental
events during his life will play a role. He may leave his birth group but never run
into a lone female to mate with. Famine or disease might wipe out large prey,
forcing a group to break up, with each animal hunting and living alone on prey
too small to share. When wolves do live in a pack, it is a closed family group, in
which strangers are but rarely admitted. New families are formed when a young
wolf reaches maturity, when (if) he leaves the group to find a mate of his own and
raise his own puppies. Among the canids, a ‘pack’ is, by definition, a family group,
whose members hunt together and defend a territory together. Okay up to here,
except we were all so sure the dog is a sort of tame wolf that we forgot to take a
look at real dogs.
But not everyone was so careless. A few researchers have taken the trouble
to study dogs, going out to follow free-living dogs around and watch what these
dogs do. One study of free-ranging urban dogs showed the following:
• More than half of the dogs wandered around town alone.
• About 26% of the dogs had a special buddy they hung out with for a while.
• About 16% of the dogs travelled in groups of three, in which members came and
went with time.
• Less than 2% of the dogs moved around in larger groups.
Where there is even a group at all — and that is in less than half the cases —
scientists do not describe the group as a ‘pack’. Rather, they refer to ‘a group of
dogs’. The group is not a family. It is evanescent. Even the groups of two are not
always the same two. A group is neither closed nor permanent and stable. New
dogs can join, sometimes a dog or two leaves (or dies). At the spots where dogs
gather to sun a little, or at the rubbish dump, or in the alleys where the waste bins
are, large groups of strangers can hang out together without any problem at all.
A group of dogs is a temporary gathering of friends and acquaintances, in which
basically solitary animals enjoy each other’s company for a while before all go
their own way again.
Now, this isn’t such a surprise. The grey wolf lives in a group partly because
her existence is so unbelievably hard. She generally lives on large prey that she
can’t catch and kill alone. She has to wander far and wide to find prey, then expend
large amounts of energy to bring it down. She then has to travel long distances
to bring food back to her pups. Raising offspring demands an investment that
no lone wolf can afford. Even so, it is not unusual for 80–96% of the pups to die
before they reach the age of ten months.
that doesn’t run away and doesn’t have to be killed with the help of a group. She
doesn’t have to wander great distances in the hope of running into prey (city dogs
wandered a range varying in size from two to ten football fields). In fact, freeliving
dogs turned out to spend about eighty percent of the day playing, sleeping
or lazing around. In her natural habitat (this is, somewhere close to humans), the
domestic dog doesn’t have enemies that group living would help defend against.
The main causes of death for her are cars, poisoning and shooting by humans, or
slow decline due to heavy parasite loads. A group offers no reproductive advantage,
neither for protecting the pups, nor for bringing them food. The mother protects
her pups mostly by bearing them in a hidden place. After that, she nurses them.
When they are ready to eat solid food, the pups start to search the rubbish dump
themselves, taking care of themselves at an age that would totally amaze a wolf. In
urban areas, about half the pups reached the age of one year without the help of a
group. In rural areas, the survival rate was much lower, but this was mostly due to
human efforts to find and eradicate litters. Pack living serves no purpose for the
domestic dog, so, like most canids, she doesn’t bother with it (see also Myth 8).
These are all facts revealed by the few scientific studies that have been
done of free-living domestic dogs in their natural environment (cities, Third World
villages, rural areas around the world). However, we don’t need to consult science
to find these facts. All we really need to do is put aside all the blinding dogmas
we’ve learned, so we can actually see our own dogs for a change. When we take our
daily walk with her in the park, we usually run into at least a few new dogs. Our
dog has no problem with this. In fact, we go to a park specifically to allow her to
meet new dogs because we see how much she enjoys it. Dog walkers take out large
groups of dogs, often with a different group composition each day. They make a
living at this, so apparently it works just fine. When two dog walkers run into each
other in a park, the two groups of dogs merge into one large, merry gathering, no
problem. When they split up, the dog walker might have to go physically retrieve a
dog who leaves with the wrong group because she found a great new friend there.
Sometimes we have to call our own dog quite a few times before she will leave
play with a new acquaintance to rejoin us. This is a demonstration, right before
our very own noses, that dogs live in open, flexible groups, not in packs. Shelter
dogs are another example. Shelter dogs have been ejected from the group they
originally lived in for some reason — but this doesn’t mean there is no choice
but to kill them. Re-homing remains an alternative, precisely because dogs are not
pack animals, and because they are both able and more than willing to form close
relationships with total strangers. None of the things mentioned in this paragraph
would be possible if the dog were, in fact, a pack animal.
by Alexandra Semyonova
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