How Do Wolf Packs Work? The Family Behind the Myth of the Alpha
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
Ask most people how a wolf pack is organised and they will describe a dominance ladder, an alpha male and female at the top who won their place by fighting, betas beneath, and an omega at the bottom who eats last. The picture comes from a study of wolves in a Swiss zoo in the 1940s, it was spread by a book in 1970 whose author later spent years trying to get it withdrawn, and it is wrong. A wild wolf pack is a family. The animals at the top are the parents, the ones beneath are their children, and the leadership is the ordinary authority of a mother and father over their young.
Where the alpha came from
In 1947 the Swiss biologist Rudolf Schenkel published observations of wolves kept together in Basel zoo, unrelated adults confined in a small enclosure, and found them fighting for rank. The American biologist David Mech drew on that work in his 1970 book The Wolf, which became the standard reference, and the terms alpha and beta went from there into dog training, business books and folklore. Mech then spent thirteen summers on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, where wolves unafraid of humans let him watch them at close range, and saw no fighting for rank at all, because the pack was a breeding pair and its offspring. He published a paper in 1999 explaining the error and has asked his publisher to stop printing the book; the captive wolves had behaved like inmates, not like a family, and the science had described the prison.
The family
A pack begins when a young male and a young female, each of whom has left their own family, meet, pair and claim a territory. They breed once a year, in late winter, and the female gives birth to four to six pups in a den in spring. The pups stay with their parents for one to three years, hunting with them and helping to raise the next litters, before dispersing to find mates of their own, so a pack in any given year is typically the parents, this year's pups, and one or two older offspring, six to ten animals. Larger packs are extended families with several litters still at home; the biggest reliably recorded, in Yellowstone, reached thirty-seven. The parents lead because they are the parents. They decide when to travel and hunt, eat first at a kill and feed the pups by regurgitation, and the young defer to them the way young of most species defer to adults, without a contest.
How they hunt
Wolves hunt large prey, deer, elk, moose, bison and caribou, that can weigh ten times what they do and can kill them with a kick, so the hunt is a matter of testing rather than charging. A pack approaches a herd, runs it, and watches for the animal that lags, limps or is old, then pursues that one, and most chases are abandoned; in Yellowstone fewer than one in five hunts of elk succeed. When they attack it is from the rear and flanks, in a series of bites that wear the animal down, and the parents take the most dangerous positions. Some things a wolf pack does that are less well known:
- •It travels forty to seventy kilometres in a day, at a trot, along regular routes through a territory of hundreds of square kilometres
- •It marks the edges of that territory with urine and howls to advertise it, and most wolf deaths in the wild are caused by neighbouring packs defending theirs
- •It eats everything: a wolf can take in ten kilograms of meat at a sitting and then go a week without
- •It teaches: pups learn what to hunt and how by watching adults, and packs in different regions have different traditions of prey
- •It grieves: the loss of a parent disrupts a pack for months, and packs that lose both breeders usually break up
What the myth did
The alpha idea outlived its retraction because it was useful to people. It underwrote a school of dog training that treated a pet's misbehaviour as a bid for dominance to be met with force, which has since been rejected by most trainers and by the evidence, since domestic dogs are neither wolves nor a pack, and it gave a vocabulary to men who wished to describe themselves. The wolves, meanwhile, were being restored to Yellowstone in 1995 after seventy years of absence, and the study of them there, with every animal collared and known by number, has produced the fullest picture of wild wolf society ever assembled: the same picture Mech saw on Ellesmere, of parents and children, some of whom leave and some of whom stay, in a landscape that changed when they came back.
The takeaway
A wild wolf pack is a breeding pair and their offspring of the last few years, led by the parents as parents rather than by an alpha who fought for rank; the dominance hierarchy of popular belief was observed in unrelated wolves confined in a zoo and spread by a 1970 book whose author has spent decades correcting it. Packs hunt by testing large prey for weakness, hold territories they defend against neighbours, and pass hunting traditions from parents to pups.