From the Herald Sun.
A female special education teacher was mauled to death by a wolf while jogging in Alaska, authorities told local media.
The body of 32-year-old Candice Berner, originally from Pennsylvania, was found Monday night off a road leading to the Chignik Lake airstrip, The News Tribune reported.
Police investigating the case believe she was killed in an “animal attack, possibly a wolf attack” after locals reported wolf sightings.
The people who found the woman’s body while returning from clam digging say that a wolf stalked one of them earlier in the day, the Alaska Dispatch reported.
The woman’s death is still under investigation and her body is being taken to Anchorage for an autopsy, police said.
My guess is this is a fatal wolf attack. If this is confirmed, this would be the first documented, no doubts about it, fatal attack by a healthy wolf in North America.
I am convinced that Kenton Carnegie was also killed by two wolves as he walked near an illegal garbage dump belonging to a mining company. This attack happened in 2005, and there was a major scandal. In 2007, a jury inquest found that the wolves had indeed killed Kenton. However, there are still people who doubt the findings.
But does that mean wolves are especially dangerous to people?
No.
Sharks have attacked more people than wolves have, and we are land animals who would be easy prey for a wolf. Part of the reason is that centuries of persecution have made wolves very nervous animals. If they smell us, they leave– just as coyotes normally do.
This video show the normal reaction of Arctic wolves when they are confronted by a person:
But any death is a tragedy.
It is little comfort to the family to know that she was either the first or second person to be killed by a wolf in North America (if it is indeed confirmed).
As you may know, I do disagree very strongly wtih Raymond Coppinger’s theory of domestic dog origins. His theory argues that domestic dogs were self-domesticated. Their ancestors were ancient wolves that lived about 12,000 years ago who discovered that living off people was a far better lifestyle than hunting. He does not believe dogs are parasites, as does Budiansky (if what Budiansky says is true, we need to shoot them all!). Instead, what hapened is that the wolves that had the flight distance to easily scavenge off of people began to fill that niche, and through Darwininian selection, these wolves became like the Belayev foxes.
I don’t buy it. At least I don’t buy it 100 percent. I think some of what he says is true. Indeed, there are parts of his book that are really interesting, and I have quoted them on this blog.
Coppinger got his start studying birds at feeder. He looked at how feeding birds impacted their evolution and their behavior.
And then he took the results of that research and began applying it to dogs. Those that had allowed people to approach them more closely were better adapted to eat out of bird feeders. It was also changing migration patterns.
And then he took the results of that research and began applying it to dog domestication.
Coppinger is one of those people who refuses to change the Linnaean name for the domestic dog to Canis lupus familiaris. He contends that dogs and wolves have since evolved different niches, and that it does not matter that they have such similar molecular and nuclear DNA. His whole focus is on the behavior of the organism. I don’t make that leap, but if we look closely the reasons for it, maybe it can tell us something about dominance theory.
Coppinger believes the “natural” behavior of domestic dogs can be found in developing countries. In villages, there are free roaming dogs that don’t form packs. They compete against each other for resources. Their lives a brutish, nasty, and short. But they don’t have to hunt for food. They can afford to have smaller brains than wolves — as all domestic dogs do. They have less powerful jaws and smaller teeth.
Now, I’ve critique that notion that brain size reduction has made dogs into stupid wolves. Mark Derr offered a far better critique than I did, so I won’t go into here. However, what Coppinger was trying to explain was how dogs became different from wolves. That’s what his focus was about.
I also think that if you read his text very carefully Coppinger very strongly wants us out of the dominance paradigm. If his theory that the natural dog is the village dog, then the natural training method has nothing to do with being an alpha wolf.
Today the popular dog press seems to feel that if dogs are descended from wolves, they would have wolf qualities. But the natural selection model points out that the wolf qualities are severely modified. Dogs do not think like wolves, nor do they behave like them. Books about training dogs [like Cesar's] would have us believe that dogs get their behavior directly from wolves. We are advise to act like the pack leader, the alpha male, and treat our dogs like subordinants. Since dogs came from wolves, they say, dogs should behave like wolves, think like wolves, and respond to wolf-like signals [like alpha rolls].
But dogs cannot think like wolves because they do not have wolf brains…
Asserting my dominance over one of my favorite working dogs by pressing it to the ground and snarling at it is preposterous. I don’t want my sled dogs rolling on their backs and urinating in the air like some subordinant wolf every time I show up. I don’t think a dog knows what people are talking about when they exhibit this “alpha” wolf behavior (67).
In an interview, Coppinger and his wife explan what dog training should be:
The alpha wolf model of dog training certainly does appear frequently in print, but we wonder if it was ever really incorporated into serious dog training. We suspect it was never very useful in training dogs, and that almost everybody intuitively knew that. It was “say one thing, do another.”
Certainly all the new techniques, such as click and treat, are not based on dominance. We’ve watched top trainers like Terry Ryan and Ken McCort, and never saw any hint of “I’m the dominant wolf.” People who try modifying aggressive dogs don’t try to “dominate” them into submission. Everybody agrees that would be a disaster. Imagine training a wolf by dominating it. Quick way to get killed.
It is a mistake to think that because dogs are descended from wolves, they behave like wolves. Wolves do not show the “alpha roll,” or any other hierarchical behavior, except in specific circumstances, particularly during reproductive and feeding behaviors. Wolf packs on a hunt are working cooperatively, and hierarchy goes by the board.
Training dogs is fun for me and for the dog, as it should be. Our sled dogs ran because running is fun and feels good. Endorphins are released, social interactions are increased. Try running while you’re being submissive. Dogs aren’t pulling sleds because they are forced to or are submitting to some person’s will. Everybody who ever drove dogs knows that you absolutely cannot force them to do it.
***
It won’t be hard to get the wolf pack mentality to go by the board simply because we don’t think many of the experts ever really believed it. It is through social play behavior that animals learn from one another. Further, it is fun to play with our dogs even if none of us learn anything. It will certainly make more sense to the dog than to be tumbled onto its back and growled at by a human.
Colin Allen and Marc Bekoff have recently drawn attention to a category of behaviors they call intentional icons. Dogs have signals they use when they want to play — the play bow. The play bow is a signal that all the following behaviors like growls and snarls are all in fun. Consider what might happen if you gave the “dominant male” intentional icon, indicating everything that happens from now on is about the driver being the dominant dog. The sled dogs, if they were reacting as submissive wolves, would then lie on their backs and pee in the air instead of running as a team.
Instead of threatening our dogs every time we want to train them, we need to perfect the human play bow which tells the dog the games are about to begin. Remember that games have rules, and what the dog and the humans learn during play is what the rules of the game are. That makes sense in teaching or training, whether it is dogs or students. The intent of dominance display is to exclude the subordinate from some activity, like breeding. The alpha wolf isn’t trying to teach the subordinate anything.
If only Coppinger had looked at the wolf literature, I think he would have been less likely to focus so closely on the differences. Yes, there are differences between wolves and dogs, just as there are differences between Arctic and Arabian wolves. Wolf packs are family groups that rarely do dominance displays or show aggression towards members of the family– except in captivity or in mega pack situations (like the ones in Yellowstone that have multiple breeding females).
Although I disagree with Coppinger’s theory on the origins of the domestic dog and where we should classify it, I think part of what motivated his research was that too many people were wasting their relationships with domestic dogs by trying to rule over them as absolute monarchs– because that’s what wolves do. No, that’s not what wolves do, and dogs are domestic animals that are wolves but are very different from wolves. It’s all one big misconception.
***
BTW, if we really want to take this appeal to nature nonsense to its fullest extent, we shouldn’t be talking to Cesar.
We shold be talking to this guy, who thinks he’s part of a captive wolf pack:
Remember, captive wolves that can’t disperse to set up these rigid hierarchies that are maintained through lots of aggression.
Domestic dogs are unlike captive socialized wolves in that they don’t have much aggression at all. If dogs were like captive wolves, we would never be able to have a dog park. It would be total murder and chaos.
Wild wolves packs that are based upon a pair and their offspring are not like this at all.
And get over it!
When I first heard that this was an antiquated notion, I screamed “Bullshit!” at the top of my lungs.
But I was wrong.
And I accept that I was wrong. That’s always hard.
It was hurting my understanding of dog behavior, and now that I don’t believe it, I’m open to seeing dog behavior very differently.
***
In 2009, an article appeared in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research. No, it’s not a journal that studies the behavior of your vet! It is a peer reviewed journal of veterinary behavioral medicine. That means that the people who get things published in it are experts who know more about dog behavior than I do.
The article was a review of research on dog and wolf behavior, and its clinical application to veterinary behavior practitioners. Essentially it says that the dominance theory is bunk. Absolute bunk.
It seems the concept was on its way to being overturned through the work of Erik Zimen, a Swedish ethologist who studied captive wolf packs in Germany. He was the first to notice that some of these captive wolves wanted out of their enclosures, which would make sense. No one wants to stay in a cage with a bully.
The authors point out that wild wolves don’t have linear hierarchies. On page 137, the authors have a diagram of a wild wolf pack hierarchy. It’s more complex than anything you’ve read in the popular literature. There are two hierarchies: one for dogs and one for bitches. And the arrows are going in many different directions. It’s not linear at all. It is fluid. It is only the male hierarchy that has any linear quality to it. Dominance displays are very rare in the wild, because the breeding pair are able to hold their family together without much aggression. In the wild, only larger packs– mainly the result of disruption, as in the Yellowstone populations– engage in frequent aggression towards packmates. Normal wild wolves are not typically aggressive with their family members.
But the authors very quickly stop talking about wolves for a very simple reason– and a very good one.
Dogs are not big game hunting wolves from Canada, Alaska, the Rockies, or Eurasia. They are a domestic animals. Domestic animals do not always have the same social structures as wild ones. This assumption runs right through most traditional training modules. Cesar Millan relies upon this assumption almost entirely. The authors clearly state this assumption:
“Because the domestic dog Canis lupus familiaris is descended from the wolf Canis lupus, it is often assumed that its capacity to form social relationships is similar to that of the wolf.”
And that’s where it is dead wrong.
The authors explore literature on free-roaming and feral dogs, as well as the social behavior of domestic dogs that have been neutered. Feral dogs do not form pair bonds at all, so the wolf pack structure doesn’t happen. In wolves, status determines whether you breed or not. In dogs, virtually everyone gets to breed.
“Overall, it appears that domestication has radically altered the social behavior of dogs, so that when theyhave the opportunity to interact and breed freely, although they do form exclusive kin-based groups, they do not readopt a wolf-pack social system within these groups.”
Free roaming, feral, and neutered dogs don’t form hierarchies that are anything like wolves. I don’t have an answer as to why. However, the basic unit of a wolf pack is a mated pair, and if you don’t have a mated pair, you can’t have a wolf pack. It may have something to do with the fact that domestication has made dogs so socially tolerant of each other that they don’t care who mates with whom. The only time dominance displays were common is when bitches were in season, which makes sense. This is a competitive mating system.
The authors eventually conclude that this whole dominance concept is next to useless in understanding dog behavior. Wolf packs are more cohesive and less belligerent towards each other than that model suggests, and dogs don’t form packs based upon mated pairs. The conclusion, then, is to look at dogs a from a social learning perspective.
The authors discuss very briefly how social cognition is very different in wolves and dogs. Dogs can be thought of as a tabula rasa. Wolves are much more controlled by their natural history. Dogs are much more influence by social and associative learning. If a behavior works, the dog will keep doing it.
Dogs also use what they have learned previously to inform their social decisions.
The authors explain how this works:
Let us imagine, for example, a neutered male Afghan hound (AH) and a neutered male Jack Russell terrier (JRT). Although the 2 dogs have not met before, each will use information learned previously in similar encounters in deriving their behavioral response to the situation. The AH, for example, may have previously encountered a small, white male dog that responded to it with aggression. Because of the similar cues in this encounter, its anxiety would increase, and it would try to identify any other cues predictive of potential aggression. The JRT may have learned to be anxious about all large dogs that show a tense body posture, because it has learned that this posture predicts aggressive behavior.
Because of previous learning experiences in other situations, therefore, the risk of aggression occurring in this encounter is relatively high, whereas if the same 2 dogs had met without any previous negative experiences, the outcome of the interaction would more likely be a friendly one. Using this learning-based model, therefore, explains the complexities of social interaction with no need toinvoke the concept of ‘‘dominance,’’ either as a goal or as an element in an overall hierarchical structure.
This model is much better than the dominance theory. It is more consistent with Morgan’s Canon. It is easier for people to understand than the dominance-based nonsense, and it provides a clearer remedy to the situation. You retrain your dog not to be aggressive. You don’t fight him as if you are the alpha wolf!
***
So what does this mean for dog trainers?
Well Gun Dog Magazine has the answer. Gun Dog is hardly a PETA rag. It’s a hunting dog magazine that has articles on gun dog breeds and training methods, as well as how to use tools like e-collars.
However, Ed Bailey writes that we need to drop this nonsense:
Unfortunately the dog behavior wannabes who love the alpha concept either haven’t read the updated literature, haven’t grasped the concept of wolf social ordering, or accepted it and are still flitting around spouting 40-year-old misconceptions.
What need is what he calls the “leader-follower” model, in which we utilize the social learning aspect of dog behavior to train our dogs. I wouldn’t call it “leader-follower,” simply because that isn’t enough of a semantic change from the dominance model. I would call “teacher-student” or “parent-offspring.” (Remember, I think it’s very wrong to consider dogs human children.)
My other complaint about this analysis is that it does do the “dog as wolf” analysis. It’s not wrong. Dogs are wolves, but dogs are different from wolves. If you want me to explain the nuances of that contradiction, I would have to write for two or three days. I’m not going down that path right now. If you read the blog regularly, you know that it’s much more nuanced than you normally get.
For a dog trainer, the most important focus is on being a good teacher for your dog:
When the dog does the desired task it gets paid by receiving some of the desired resources. The dog is working for a living, but because he is getting paid with something positive, he is willing to repeat the desired task. When the dog does something undesirable or refuses to do the desirable thing, the pay is withheld. Gradually the dog does only the correct thing because it pays off and the undesirable drops out because there is no pay-off.
In this situation, the dog corrects itself. A mild correction such as a “no” or “ah-ah” can speed things along and even a heavier correction when required can be beneficial. But the need for any correction gets less frequent as the dog learns that “If I do this I get something good and if I do something else it’s just not worth it.”
The research by David Mech showed wolves train their young pups using this technique.
Teachers in grade school train their charges this way. Wild animal trainers and psychology rat researchers give a pay-out for every small increment of correct steps toward forming a complex behavior and have termed this process “shaping.”
There is a lot of evidence that animals that have been taught how to learn using shaping techniques are far better at solving novel problems and will work harder at it than control animals that were not taught how to learn. Hunting dogs respond the same way.
Wolf scientists moved away from the alpha concept long ago. They have re-evaluated the dominance-submissiveness model in parental care of pups and are now seeing it as a leadership model. Dog people, taking an opposite tack, seem to be getting more enthralled with alpha dominance as the way to go.
Dog people should catch up to the wolf people and drop the whole alpha thing from the vocabulary. And, like the wolf researchers, dog people need to rethink the dominance-submission model for training and realize that it can be counterproductive, cause problems, and that it may be good for making automatons but not thinking dogs.
They need to be teaching a dog to think, to put two and two together to get more than four. Why? Because for real hunting situations, a dog has to learn to think outside the proverbial box.
So for normal working dogs, it might be more useful if we adopted the learning model.
I also highly suspect that learning can also be more effective in treating dogs with aggression issues, but I’ve not had experience with dogs that are aggressive.
But when has a dog learned problem solving from being strung up on a choke chain every time it goes out? Cesar doesn’t teach dogs to think. He teaches them to obey. And that’s a major problem if his methods are applied to working dogs.
***
I need to clarify some things about wolf social structure.
As I stated before, the basic unit of a wolf pack is a mated pair, their pups, and grown offspring that are generally under the age of 2 or 3 depending upon the location. Some wolves remain with their natal packs until they are as old as 5 years of age. Others leave when they aren’t even a year old. All wolves eventually leave their natal packs. This includes both dogs and bitches.
Canis lupus is not the only species of dog to form packs. Ethiopian wolves, Lycaon pictus, bush dogs, and dholes form packs. Ethiopian wolves and Lycaon typically have more males in a pack than females. In fact, it is not unusual for these animals to have only a single breeding female in the pack.
Eastern coyotes also form packs, but this appears to be a relatively recent adaptation to living in deciduous forests that are full of deer. Hybridization with wolves also may have made them more likely to form packs.
It is likely that wolves and the others evolved packs from a phenomenon seen in coyotes and the three species of jackal. In those animals, it is not unusual for grown offspring to remain with their parents to help raise the next generation or two. In jackals and coyotes, these helpers also have been seen helping their parents hunt larger prey.
In the pack hunting dogs, it is likely that they used this helpers helpers to eventual establish a niche as specialists at hunting large prey. However, Ethiopian wolves do form relatively large packs, but their diet is almost exclusively rodents. So exactly why these animals formed packs in the first place is still a pretty good question. It’s much more likely that assistance in raising the young was a stronger motivator than hunting. It is also possible that finite nature of available vacant territory forces young adults in these species to want to remain with their parents. It is probably a combination of all of these factors.
All wild dogs that have been studied have a mated pair as the main social unit. Dogs are unusual among the Order Carnivora in that monogamy (or serial monogamy) is the rule. Pair bonds are very important. The only exceptions that have been found are some populations of red foxes in which harem-type systems have been observed. No one knows what sort of social unit exists among the small-eared dog. They are so hard observe that we know very little about them.
The original studies on wolves focused on their aggression. Aggression was the thing for ethologists to study in the 1940’s.
Now the emphasis is one what makes wolf packs more cohesive, and it has been discovered that what makes them more cohesive is not dominance or aggression. It is the strong family bonds that exist between members of a pack. A pack is a family.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
***
It’s time to put the folk ethology away.
And open up our minds.
The dominance concept has damaged too many relationships between people and dogs. It may have hindered our ability to train good working dogs.
It’s a dinosaur.
Its time has come and gone.
What follows is for biological purposes only. It is not for the puritanical, and it is definitely not for children to watch.
Free roaming dogs tend to be very different in their mating behavior.
Here are some dogs in a developing country. I don’t know where, but in many developing countries, you have legions of dogs roaming around. When a bitch comes in season, the dogs show up.
Notice how little aggression exist between the male dogs in this video. It’s very different from the miniature pinscher video I embedded a few days ago. Aggression and dominance displays are not seen in that video. In fact, that’s one reason why the bitch is in so much pain. She’s being jostled around during the tie. That’s also why you should never have a ton of male dogs hanging around two mating dogs. (I thought that was an obvious rule, but I guess not.)
There are no pair bonds here. It’s just mating. The bitch wants inseminated, and the dogs are all volunteering.
Now compare that video to this one of some wolves:
There is aggression even during the tie. The dog wolves fight very hard over the bitch.
The reason for this difference in mating behavior is that free roaming dogs and wolves have very different social structures. In free roaming dog society, males tend to form groups. They don’t generally form pair bonds with bitches.
When a bitch comes into season, one dog will mate, and his companions will hang out nearby. When the bitch becomes available again, one of them might get a chance to mate. No pair bond exists here, and no dog gets status by being a breeder.
This is why so many litters of free roaming dogs vary so much in appearance. Most litters have multiple sires, and for a wolf, this would be unacceptable.
However, the higher level of social tolerance in domestic dogs has fundamentally changed their mating behavior.
Now, I’m not saying that if you put a bunch of strange male dogs together with a bitch in season that you won’t have issues. You will.
But among a community of free roaming male dogs, you don’t see a lot of fighting over bitches in season.
Minnesota is known for its successful wolf recovery program.
But the native subspecies of Canis lupus is the Great Plains wolf (C.l. nubilus.)
It is a big game hunting wolf, and it is very well adapted to the severe continental climate of the Western Great Lakes.
It is not the best place in the world for the Mexican subspecies of C. lupus. The Mexican wolf (C. l. baileyi) evolved into the southwestern US and Mexico. Neither of those places is quite like Minnesota in the winter time.
But there are Mexican wolves in Minnesota. At Forest Lake, a wolf research facility and zoological park called the Wildlife Science Center is working to conserve this subspecies. Currently, only about 150 Mexican wolves exist, and the Wildlife Science Center is working on finding ways to better increase its numbers.
The Mexican wolf is perhaps the smallest subspecies of wolf in North America. It is a golden retriever sized wolf that could easily be mistaken for a large coyote, which can also be found in Minnesota.
This resemblance to a coyote is not trivial, especially for one particular Mexican wolf.
As I mentioned before, the Wildlife Science Center has Mexican wolves, and it had three bitch wolves in a single enclosure. Earlier this week some hooligans broke into the facility and did a Born Free with those three wolves.
Wolves tend to be nervous animals, and one of the wolves refused to leave the enclosure. Another was found within the grounds of the facility.
And one still remains on the lam (or it is lamb?)
Now, this particular wolf has never lived in the wild. The area where this wolf was released is not in the core wolf habitat in Minnesota, and what’s worse, she looks like a coyote.
Wolves may be protected in Minnesota. Coyotes are not.
It is feared that someone might mistake this rare wolf for a coyote and shoot her.
A wolf that has spent its whole life in a pen isn’t going to know about the dangers of roads. It is even more likely that this wolf will be hit by a car.
It is hoped that this errant wolf will return to her enclosure. Road-killed deer has been placed in the pen to bring her back.
Let’s hope she does come back. Most Mexican wolves are in captivity, and their genetic diversity is quite low. This is particularly true when it was decided that a major line of these wolves were wolf-dog hybrids. This line had been kept at a facility near Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Although it is not clear whether these wolves were actually hybrids or that their doggish appearance came through generations of captive breeding and being fed a domesticated animal diet, it was decided to euthanize every wolf in the line.
Every wolf in this subspecies is valuable. I don’t know why anyone would have released these wolves. It may have been misinformed animal rights enthusiasts. Or it may have been anti-wolf extremists. Turn a wolf loose, and then the facility that keeps them gets a bad reputation.
Let’s just hope this wolf makes it back before something bad happens.
***
The Wildlife Science Center has been featured on television. I distinctly remember two episodes of Animal Planet’s Growing Up series were based upon animals that were being raised at the facility. It has also been featured on the History Channel’s MonsterQuest program.
Here is an example of some of the research that is performed at the center:
UPDATE: Good news. The wolf has been recaptured.
