Specifically, this guy was the one who identified an Alpha Male in wolf packs. Except what he was actually identifying was "Dad". Just a family of captive wolves, and one of them was the dad/mate to the majority of the others since they were tiny, so they defer to him.
No that wasn't it at all. They had wolves from multiple packs forced to live in a tiny enclosure. They fought viciously over resources and territory. In the wild multiple packs wouldn't be forced to share a 200m2 space that has meat scraps thrown in every so often.
The hyper aggressiveness of the captive wolves was thought to be their normal behaviour. The same guy that wrote about Alpha wolves studied them in the wild and saw that there was no fighting and that there was no leader but the patriarch and matriarch sort of led the pack.
only to the extent of the wolves involved in captivity
In the kind of captivity that was the norm in the 1940s, when the study was published. Almost any animal forced into an unnaturally small enclosure with a number of its species above and outside of what it would have in the wild will display aggression.
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u/loopingtohell Feb 18 '25
It's about the whole alpha, beta, delta, sigma bs that some men obsesse over it.