Anyone care to read this paper together?

ORIGINAL: houndlove

What this paper is asking is, is it really, or is that our own human bias that we're imposing on another species?

My job is finding the best way to teach children how to do valid science experiments and what we always start out as saying is that in science, you can't know for sure until you do an experiment. "Thinking" something is right isn't the same as scientifically analyzing and finding out for sure through a controlled experiment. My job would be very boring if science just stopped looking at a problem after a few people decided that they knew the answer.

ORIGINAL: ron2

... 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....

ORIGINAL: espencer

I dont know, i thought hierarchy was a very clear point on domenstic dogs

ORIGINAL: houndlove

No, I'm saying it's a perspective to consider.

ORIGINAL: Xerxes

ORIGINAL: espencer

I dont know, i thought hierarchy was a very clear point on domenstic dogs

I have also stated that in my multi-dog household that heirarchy was flexible and frequently changed.

ORIGINAL: houndlove

At what point of fluidity does a hierarchy stop being a hierarchy and start just being a social system?

But it was, in the first place, not correct to apply a model developed watching wolves to the behavior of domestic dogs.  Though it has become clear that domestic dogs share a common ancestor with the wolf, the genetic similarity is a weak basis for assuming that models derived from the studies of wolves are applicable to the behavior of domestic dogs or adequate to understand, explain or predict the behavior of the latter.  It is clear that wolves and domestic dogs have occupied strongly differing natural habitats at least since the human agricultural revolution and probably long before that.  Therefore, factors relevant to the survival of both individuals and the species themselves will strongly differ.  In light of this, it seems reasonable to propose that the behavior of wolves and domestic dogs may differ as much as the behavior of chimpanzees and humans do.

  A third example is that of the new dog that comes onto a field and is suddenly surrounded by the entire home group plus whatever other acquaintances are present.  Such a dog is surrounded by a group large enough to tear it to pieces in two minutes.  The idea that a dog would, surrounded in this way, try to assert “dominance” or some “rank” with respect to the whole group all at once presumes great carelessness in the dog about its continuing integrity as a living system, the more so if one assumes that all the dogs in the group will also have some “rank” they want to maintain.  Nevertheless, many of these dogs emitted threat signals while surrounded.  The threat signals did not trigger aggression.  The other dogs generally sniffed a little, then moved off.  After watching this happen many times, the conclusion was inevitable that the threat signals were a sign of anxiety while surrounded by the group, and that the group members recognized this, responding with the non-threat signal of increasing distance.  Furthermore, the dog that had threatened at the beginning of interactions did not turn out to have any special access to resources, nor privileges, as interactions on the field full of playing dogs progressed.  In general, dogs threatened only in situations where predictability about what the other would do had not been established, or where predictability was disturbed by some unexpected action.  Size (i.e., physical prowess) had nothing to do with it.    
Thus, the posturing and physical gestures dogs use (i.e., the signals they emit) did, indeed, turn out to have a different meaning than is generally assumed.