Anyone care to read this paper together?

The abstract is awesome!  This should be a lot of fun and very interesting to read.  Thanks Cressida, for providing this for discussion.

looks like a good read.

sometimes, i read things backwards by skimming, then read forwards in detail.

this jumped out to me when i correlate this with what i see in ceasars well behved pack of 40 dogs:

Unlike a war or a capitalist market situation, where parties try to completely flatten other actors' hills and maximize the height of their own, in this canine system participants migrate to the closest attractor available, striving to restore the stability and predictability generated by consensus rather than to heighten individual hills at the cost of the other(s). In fact, the very presence of the other(s) constitutes in itself a heightening of a dog#%92s fitness hill if only the dog has undergone normal production processes. If it hasn#%92t, it can still be repaired – it can learn. This is, however, dependent on the dog obeying the first, basic system rule. Aggression is abnormal behavior, which, by its nature, prevents a dog from being able to become a part of any canine social system. Aggression, when it does occur, indicates system disintegration. The system as a whole tends not toward a hierarchical structure, but towards a structure in which each dog sits unchallenged on a fitness hill whose height is immeasurable and irrelevant.

1 word - balance

Sweet! I started this one months ago when Kim McMillan posted it in a response to someone else. It's fascinating stuff. I found it quite challenging and a little heavy-going, but really interesting. Looking forward to discussing it and what it means to us as dog owners.

I've got to get to work but I did read the first part and it echoed a statement I made her a few weeks or a month ago. That the whole "alpha dominant" thing may be a human thing that we project onto everything else. And certainly, the alpha wolf thing is something that was started years ago, nominally by men, and with improper experimental controls.

Cool, this is a thread that is worth reading.  Now to down load a copy, (reading on the screen creates havoc with my astigmatism).

Excellent paper. I finally read all of it.
 
It's a bit heady at first with an explanation of terms that is reminiscent of topology, a high form of math, which I like to describe as set theory on steroids. But, on the whole, a suitable model in which to explain the observations. So, you don't have to know the rules and postulates of set theory to grasp the concept given.
 
The paper accomplishes several things. Not only does it provide an excellent way of describing dog interaction, it also points out exactly why basing the study of dog behavior on wolf behavior is erroneous. And she's able to reference the work of Mech to help do this. Wolf interactions and environment are one thing. Dog interactions and environment are another thing and they don't line up. And not just in the case of neoteny in adult dogs and absence of neoteny in adult wolves. Part of a dog's world includes interaction with other species, such as humans, both adult and child, housecats, whatever other pets. Plus a dog is like to meet 100's of stranger dogs in its lifetime whereas a wolf may meet stranger wolves and be able to count them all on a couple of paws. Two different scopes of interactions.
 
And the paper explains perfectly why a dog can display certain signals and it means something different in different circumstances. Or dogs that seem "calm" but all of a sudden get into it. It's because we are misreading the signals. And that each dog is an individual. And what it regards as a valuable resource may change from time to time in different circumstances. It also shows the motivation of dogs as seeking stability and that much if initial interaction, posturing, even limited bites, are simply a way fo ensuring stability by learning the other's intentions that a stable medium can be achieved.

I just started but I thought I'd stop and marinate in this statement for a moment or so:

The conclusion that dogs are equally preoccupied with establishing “dominance” in their social interactions is most likely a failure of imagination.  Unable to conceive of any other way of organizing a group, scientists seem to have projected their own existential paradigm onto the animals they were observing.

I'm being kind of pokey on reading it--I printed it out at work today so it could be bus and bedtime reading (plus reading something that long on a computer drives me insane) but then handily left it at work.

But silverserpher the quote that you highlighted and much of what I gleaned from the abstract and the first couple pages reminded me a lot of my early anthropology training in that your own cultural paradigms very easily, and very invisibly, tend to color what you observe in other cultures. A lot of anthropology schooling is just a process of blowing the students' minds with enough wild crazy stuff that their cultural paradigms begin to get more porous and they can see beyond them a bit more. But it's really really hard.

I mean, we can barely understand one another without superimposing a bunch of our own structures and paradigms over what we observe, and we're all the same species!

ORIGINAL: houndlove

I mean, we can barely understand one another without superimposing a bunch of our own structures and paradigms over what we observe, and we're all the same species!

I also think that this is a subtle, back-handed form of the anthropomorphism that hardcore dominant theorists constantly chastise others for practicing.  What's the difference between imagining my dog as a "furbaby" and buying into a dominance model that is derived from human structures and paradigms of social interaction.

What's the difference between imagining my dog as a "furbaby" and buying into a dominance model that is derived from human structures and paradigms of social interaction.

Good point, they're both anthropromorphism. Even amongst ourselves, we can get stuck in paradigms. The good thing about this paper is that it not only points this problem out but if also offers the solution. I had said before, maybe a few months ago, that maybe the whole alpha thing was a human thing that we cast upon the dogs. It's nice for someone else to come to the same conclusion. I also like that this study is a properly done study, with controls. The test group is a group of unrelated dogs in their natural environment,  a home with humans. The control group is the dogs in the shelter.
 
ETA:
Some more on the difference between dogs and wolves, Mr. Wayne's canid genome aside. We once had here a peer review article on string pulling problem solving. I got to see it in action on the satellite last night. An episode of Explorer showed tests involve a string to pull to get a piece of meat. First, the test is easy, just pull the string, get the meat. Second time, tie the string so that it is not readily accessible. The wolf keeps trying on its own and gets more frustrated. The dog tries, can't do it, and looks to the human.
 
Another test, involving buckets scented with meat. A human points to one of the buckets. The wolf could care less what the human thinks and makes its own decision. The dog takes the cue from the human. Part of the dog's natural world is not some large feral pack poking around and one-upping each other. It is living with and taking cues from humans.
 

this is a good read too:
 
[linkhttp://www.canineworld.com/ngsdcs/Origin.of.the.Dog.pdf]http://www.canineworld.com/ngsdcs/Origin.of.the.Dog.pdf[/link]

Another test, involving buckets scented with meat. A human points to one of the buckets. The wolf could care less what the human thinks and makes its own decision. The dog takes the cue from the human. Part of the dog's natural world is not some large feral pack poking around and one-upping each other. It is living with and taking cues from humans.

 
I wonder if the results would have been different had the wolf been raised interacting with humans in a companion basis. 
 
I ask because some of the breeds that are the longest domesticated are also the most independent-bred for their ability to think for themselves, solve problems on their own and hunt tirelessly-very much like a wolf would do.  But these dogs are socialized with humans and given "training" or understanding on how to communicate with humans.

I havent read a lot yet but i see that they point out that domestic dogs dont have a hierarchy and i think that at least everybody in this forum agreed that they do 

Well, at one point everyone agreed the world is flat, too.