I'm Renaming "Pack Drive"

espencer

He is actually against everything you described, he has never compared dogs with wolves (the positive only people keep bringing that up only to show their ignorance)

It is the ignorant and unschooled people who are so easily fooled that find his methods appealing.  These organizations didn't get together against his methods for kicks.

http://www.dogwelfarecampaign.org/

corvus

Out of interest, I spent a month tramping around in the bush in the Top End down here where dingoes are quite common and there's lots of big game. I saw lots of dingoes, but only once did I ever see more than one at a time, and it was a pair. I saw one wallaby kill and it was a joey, way too little to warrant group hunting. From what I've heard from people that have kept dingoes, they are intensely attached to one person if given the chance, but they still run amok at every oppportunity and during that time, are not remotely interested in being social. At least until they are tired from killing every cat, chicken or sheep in the neighbourhood and happened to spot someone they live with.

To me, dogs are social in the way that rabbits, horses, chickens, killer whales and people are social. They are just trying to minimise costly fights and maximise getting what they want, but they certainly like being with other members of their species. I am not sure about this, but at the moment I think they are not social in the way that some primates or African Wild Dogs are social. That is, they are not obligate socialites. They don't need other dogs to live.

It is good to have you back! I was hoping that someone who had seen a whole lot of dingos rather than one scene on TV would tell us what really goes on. Dingos do have a reputation as being sort of solitary animals here. But that is a reputation. 

I was going to go on and be a bit more esoteric. Often the rules in mobs and masses are quite simple and allow for what looks like quite complex flows. One only needs to look at the flow of a crowd through a railway station (BTW it changes from country to country.). But if the initial conditions go wrong... try shouting something like "BOMB" in a railway station.

You have the trail of bees and the flight of geese. These animals fly together at huge speeds. There are whole branches of maths and science that deal with this kind of phenomena and you yet again get this quite interesting convergence between the ideas of physical science and life sciences. The Maths bits are the Maths of Fractals,Wavelets and  Chaos Theory. This is the kind of Maths that can describe a flower from very basic iniitial condtions. A fairly left field view of this is explained in " A new kind of science" by S Wolfram. Notice my lack of enthusiasm in reccomending the book but it is a good read if you like that kind of thing. The person who wrote it is brillant. 

So from an evolutionary point of view, it might be that what appears to be complex pack activities are nothing of the sort, that a simpler explanation based on stored of imprinted behaviour exists. We know from computer science that certain concepts are easy to compute and get right quickly. Icky complex rules never are. every time we add a condition we allow for a crash or a conflict.

This is what drive theory existed for. Isn't it the ultimate irony that many of the harder trainers use drive theories to do what they wish to do and yet we are using it here in it's simplest most unadorned version (Geese imprinting) to argue for the basis of a more relaxed approach?

Again i am working from the view that social bonds exist as you suggest so that genetic diversity is preserved and fights don't happen. A real fight in "the wild" kills.

I am struggling with the neuro science basis of social bonds. I gave up biology in the fourth form to concentrate on " the real sciences" . fourth form is normal 14 y.o. I have had to go back up this huge learning curve so that i could understand my dogs better... and it is hugely interesting.

 The problem is that we can share this kind of stuff or bicker over crap. I guess the choice is ours. If we redefine the world and get stuck with Tabloid TV then no possibilty of real debate exists.

Corinthian

These organizations didn't get together against his methods for kicks.

 

They sure look like a bunch of no hope do good useless liberal wafflers to me who wouldn't know one end of a dog or other. I mean for heavens sake Vets. I knew this women down the road who told me Vets were useless. She took her 50Kg (130lb) Lab to the Vet and he told her to make the dog loose weight. What on earth are these modern day Vets on about. Just goes to show what this modern education does to them...

Oh hell, another Anecdote... 

I just realised that some would not know that i am as we say here, taking the p****s.. I am.

corvus

I call a group of dogs that live together a family, because that's what they act like to me. Erik is terribly obnoxious with Kivi, but when he meets a dog outside of the family he turns into a model puppy and if you never saw him at home you would never imagine that he throws himself at Kivi and bites him if he interrupts a game of tug, or that Erik will pry food out of Kivi's mouth if he gets the chance. Erik is obnoxious to me as well, and I take it as a sign of how relaxed he is around me that he'll tell me he hates me if I push him rather than showing me what an expert in appeasement gestures he is.

I guess that one way we can work out how diversified doemstic dogs work in a family is to tell our families story. Our family consists of Adult couple , Sam and Luci the poodles and Molly who is a nearly 15 year old cat. She landed up at home because she had "little grey pads"...

Sam and Luci are from sort of similar bloodlines. They are as Chalk and cheese, but get on pretty well. They are a very active couple of dogs and on the go for most of the day.  Luci is older, and had the advantage of being bought up in our household with lots of socialisation and training. You can have a look at her videos on a posting in Conformation and Obedience . She is a bouncy energetic confident dog that is highly gregarious and well over a couple of set backs she had in her earlier days. She is very bright and has learned to learn. She can be a little diffident towards recalls occasionally, and has no appeasement behaviours towards other dogs of any significance. She can be a little spooky and is very literal.

Sam is a very confident very fast outgoing dog too. He is also very strong for his size. He came to us as a 16 month old dog some 5 months ago. He has no right to be as he is, he should be timid and mal adjusted but genetics willed out in his case.

Basically, Sam and Luci play sometimes noisily form dawn to dusk. They are competitive over me, and over certain toys. They have lots of engagement stratergies and often use their intelligence to do funny things to each other. I noticed Luci engaging Sam in a game with a tracking sock. Sam got it off her, and then Luci feigned sleep till he got up and left the sock. She then run around the house showing off the sock.

They take turns at alert barking. We have a public path around our house, and they are aways concerned that the dogs and or people on it may be stealing it. There is the neighbourhood black and white cat which needs telling off to. One barks the other joins in.

They don't have a clear leader, they swap a fair bit. They don't fight to the death but certainly have the odd non contact dust up.Their demeanour in the whole shows happiness and i hope joy. Not the confilt ridden lives that the pack specialists would have us believe.

I certainly don't play the must have control at all times leader. But i do expect that when i seriously ask i get . Luci can put commands in to her diary for reference later when she isn't busy but she does earn the odd consequence for that. it really isn't  a big deal. We run the household on humour and fun and reason. Sam despite his background and being super OTT, is almost always super obedient.