Not Leaving Home: Wolves on the Serengeti

There is a popular belief that wolf packs are led by an "alpha male", a dominant individual who directs the pack and monopolises breeding opportunities through the force of his masculine aggression. It's all-but universal in modern stories about werewolves, and has even crept into the messaging of online influencers, apparently following the reasoning that anything true of wolves must necessarily also be true of humans.

It is, however, simply not true.

Having said which, it used to be a serious scientific theory, derived from behavioural studies on captive wolves conducted in the mid 20th century. Better studies at the end of the century, looking at wolves in their natural habitats and not stressed by close confinement with non-family members in zoo cages, revealed the truth: not only is the dominant female at least as important as the male, but the correct word for that dominant pair isn't "alpha", it's "parents".

Follow the Leader?

By human standards, the majority of mammal species are comparatively antisocial. Some actively avoid others of their kind outside of the mating season, but even those that are more tolerant are often found together in one place purely because that is where the food happens to be. But, of course, there are a great many exceptions to this; animals that habitually live in groups that socialise and travel together.

Animals that live like this have to have some form of decision-making process that all members of the herd, pack, or other grouping choose to abide by. The most obvious example of this would be deciding when and where to move, but it could also include, for example, determining the best way to escape predators. Lacking the sophisticated communication methods of humans, concepts of debate aren't likely to be applicable, but the decision has to be taken somehow, and, over the years, there have been many studies to determine just how egalitarian the process is and exactly which animals within the group are making the decisions if it isn't.

Girl Power in the Monkey World

There are many advantages to an animal of living in a group, such as it being easier to watch out for predators or even drive them away. One of the downsides, however, is that you also have to compete with others of your own kind for access to resources. Clearly, constant infighting is not a good thing and would lead to a rapid breakup of the social group in question. One way that this can be reduced is through the practice of social dominance.

The first formal model of this concept in animal behaviour was described by Norwegian zoologist Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe in the 1920s. Having grown up on a farm, he had observed the behaviour of chickens, and, in his PhD dissertation in 1921, he described what is popularly known as the "pecking order". What happens is that, rather than fighting constantly, chickens establish a hierarchy where each animal knows where it stands. If two chickens face off against one another, the lower-ranking, or submissive, bird almost always backs down, allowing the higher-ranking, dominant bird to win without a proper fight.