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Location: GLOS, UK.
Joined: Apr 2004
Posts: 317
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"So on the basis of Coppinger’s research, as we provide our dog with sufficient food, water is always available, they have five star accommodation, exercise is provided and their health cared for, why would they form a pack with us?"
Because those are the functions/services that wolves provide for each other!
"We don’t have to be Alpha, dominant or pack leader, and neither does our dog. All we need to be is an owner responsible for guiding our dog, shaping and influencing its behaviour through correct socialisation and training so they can live in harmony with us."
This correct rearing of dogs is exactly what will establish the human members of a household as being higher ranking pack members.
I don't agree with his observations regarding feral dogs. Perhaps that was a one off case. I can tell you that I have witnessed dogs who have been abandoned by their owners form packs. These packs will usually scavenge for food, from dustbins etc, but there is still a social heirachy even though they haven't hunted and killed their food (though it has been said that they will kill and eat the feral cats if they catch them). The dominant male and female will eat first. I've even seen dogs with an owner one day, then the next (when the owner has buggered off) it has joined up with 1 of the packs. Sometimes the new addition can fight his way to being the alpha.
"They lived semi-solitary lives or in small groups, probably mum and her offspring"
How was the observer to know that the small groups consisted of a mum and her offspring? He doesn't state whether or not within those small groups there was a social structure.
"Therefore dogs and people cannot form a pack in the true sense of the word; a social group yes, but not a pack. "
What is a pack if not first and foremost a social group? Just because dogs may not hunt anymore (though my dog has killed rabbits, he does not go ahead and start eating it, but brings it back to me first. I never instructed him to do this as I didn't realise he would be able to catch and kill a rabbit, and when he brought it to me I was more than a little shocked! Oh, and it wasn't because he didn't know what to do with a dead rabbit, he is on a raw diet and the rabbits he kills himself sometimes form a part of it), they still show all the other traits of being in a pack. They bond to us as they would other dogs, why else would they guard our territory and us? We protect, feed and love them, they do the same for us (apart from the feeding, no way am I eating a rabbit my dog has killed :smt078 )
My dogs even 'fight' amongst themselves for the top spot beneath the people in the family (one dog always has the best bed, best spot in sun....). You must have noticed that as a dog gets older it tends to lose its higher rank. Even if the older dog is fed first by the owner, gets the best bed, is petted and played with first, the younger dogs will find ways of asserting their dominance over it; you may find that it gets moved out of its bed by the others. I've noticed that younger dogs don't have to growl, they'll just use their body to push an older dog out of the way (say when the dogs are arguing over who gets petted first, the younger dog will just push the older dog out the way so that it gets petted first). Of course younger dogs will always be trying these sorts of things, but the difference is the older dog will stop fighting back, it just submits to the younger one.