My house is opposite one of the two churches and facing the village green and only road leading in and out of the village. I have half an acre of land, of which a quarter of an acre is enclosed by sheep wire fencing so the dogs have an open view over the whole area.

Hungarian attitudes and culture towards dogs is very different to the UK. Dogs are meant to bark and behave like dogs otherwise there's no point in having one ... something I don't think I'll ever get used to. Walk down any street in any Hungarian town or village and as you pass each house a dog will rush to the gate barking. Nobody takes any notice of a barking dog and people can't understand why I don't like my dogs to bark ... but then they can't understand either why mine wear collars and are walked on leads .... I'm considered an eccentric English woman with peculiar ideas about how dogs should behave!

We are having an extremely interesting debate indeed! The biggest thing that I disagree about with David Mech is his theory that packs do not have a strict linear hierarchy and the idea or concept of alphas is that an alpha could be anyone who has mated and raised cubs. This just could not happen in a true wild wolf pack. Within such a pack there is a strong structure of alpha male, alpha female, and then below them various levels of beta dogs downwards to the omegas. In a true wild wolf pack not confined to a small island, where they are able to roam for hundreds or thousands of miles, there is absolutely definitely a hierarchical system of rank. My fluidity comes from the fact that in a natural wolf pack, not one confined on a small island, pups will be kicked out of the nest as it were to go off and form packs of their own ... I think David Mech acknowledges this.

Wolves or high percentage wolf crosses raised in "captivity" will display certain dog-like traits. We adopted a pure wolf cross Czech wolfdog for a few weeks - his mother was pure wolf, father a CWD. The mother raised her "cubs" underground in a den that she had dug, and the cubs/pups had no human contact virtually. Both wolf and CWD were of course fed, watered as they were living in an enclosure, but to all intents and purposes the pups were "wild". We adopted our little boy at 9 weeks, and for the first 3 days he hid under our kitchen cabinets, absolutely petrified of us and his surroundings. We fed him, he had access to water, and he was surprisingly clear - we would leave the back door running off from the kitchen open and he would go out into our garden and do his business. After 3 days and 3 nights of living under our kitchen cabinets, he started to accept us, integrate with us and generally behaved more dog-like. This was because he was only an F1, raised in captivity. Had we taken a pure wolf from the wild at 9 weeks old, we would never have achieved what we did with our little man. It would have been impossible. As it was, we could not keep him, at 16 weeks old he had to be returned to live with his wolf mother and CWD father for his own sake because we would never have been able to walk him on a lead down the high street of our local town without him freaking out. At 16 weeks, this was just about manageable, but as a fully grown F1 wolf cross weighing in at about 9 or 10 stone, forget it, it was just not possible.

So ... although we achieved a lot with our little F1, in other words he acquired certain dog traits such as bonding with us ... us humans, humans being the wolf's number 1 enemy ... we taught him to sit, come, lie down, all the usual basic training, he was still the wolf that he was at heart and we could never have taken him to the pub, walked him through our local town, as you would a normal dog. So he easily demonstrated how ancient man adopted the wolf and turned him into the dog, but in actuality he told us how impossible it was to do such a thing with one wolf cross, one generation ... and he was not a wild wolf. We learned an awful lot from our little F1, and he was an absolute delight and an honour to live with. He bonded immediately with our Utonagan, Tai, and they would spend hours and hours playing in the garden - little F1 particularly loved being wheeled in my large mucking out wheelbarrow! He was an absolute treasure and a delight, and I still miss him.

Gnasher-just a couple questions

How many wild naturally formed Wolf packs have you personally studied to counter what Dave Mech(BTW he does prefer being referred to as Dave) & the rest of the World's specialists in real wild natural Wolf packs ? Locations & time spent observing would be helpful

If Dave Mech is so wrong, why do others who have spent years(probably decades)observing & studying real wild naturally formed Wolf packs agree with him & not you ?

Having been very very privileged to meet him & observe one of the Wolf packs he has studied, I never saw any fighting amongst the males for breeding rights to the only female in oestrus(the mother) & only the mother & father of the pack actually mating, how does your "theory" fit in ?

I would suggest you write a paper on your studies of wild, natural Wolf packs, to back up your theory regarding "the Alpha Construction" of wild, naturally formed Wolf packs. I'm sure that you have all the personal observations, video footage etc to support this. It would make fascinating reading

I look forward to your response(& all the evidence of course)

Joedee ... don't be so patronising and sarcastic, it is extremely rude and frankly makes you look like an idiot.

There are many eminent people who still believe in the "old" theory of alpha male, female and the strict hierarchical pack system that exists. David Attenborough springs to mind immediately, and all the documentaries I have ever watched on television propound the classic hierarchical system within a wolf pack.

I have not been priviliged enough to have met David Mech, (yes, despite the fact I think he is wrong I would love to get the chance to talk to him - and to be convinced by his theories - that is because I am an open minded person, perfectly happy to to be proved wrong - in fact I love to be proved wrong, because that means I am learning!) but I have had the immense privilege of living with an F1 wolf cross - mother = pure wolf, father = CWD. This is of course an artificial situation - even more artificial than David Mech's Ellesmere Island wolves - but nonetheless it was absolutely fascinating to observe this beautiful young animal. It was with very heavy hearts that he had to be returned to live with his mother and father, we had taken him into our home just too late to be able to get him to accept any humans other than those in his own pack.

When I retire completely and we sell up and move to our Welsh mountain or wherever we end up, I fully intend to do far more research into wolves, I find them the most fascinating creatures as they are so similar to us humans in many ways ... I am just an ordinary Joe, nothing special, but I have a passion for dogs and their ancestors and I cannot think anything I would love to do more than to go and live in somewhere in the States where wolves still run free, and not confined to a small island, where I could study and watch them in their totally natural environment. Just a pipe dream, at my age and with my lack of money it is never going to happen, but a girl can dream.

Gnasher ... as you've had experience of caring for a captive born wolf x dog you might like to read the 2013 paper ...

Wolves do not join the dance - Sophisticated aggression control by adjusting to human social signals in dogs.

which was a study of captive born wolf cubs and puppies undertaken by Dr Adam Miklosi of the University of Budapest.

I dont know what dog- like traits you mean .
I'm questioning this .
Traits are to do with genes , for any physical or behavioural trait to develop the wolves must have genes for the trait in the first place . The chance mating of wolves with a mutant genes could lead to their offspring inheriting those mutant genes and may cause them to develop a different behaviour if it helped with their survival but this would only happen naturally over the course of many years .
If Mech interfered with the wolves breeding , say he selected wolves that wagged their tails or bark like our dogs do and let them mate , then the pups could also be tail waggers or barkers . That would be selective breeding.
he didnt interfere at all in any way , he observed wild wolves in their natural enviroment .

In the Russian silver fox experiment, Belyaev bred from foxes that were tamer than others , they became tamer but a "side effect" of that was coats became pied colour.

Genes and things Its complicated! Anyone , please feel free to correct me if Im wrong or can explain it better than me .

Do we really know where dogs came from? Whether they just shared a common ancestor or whether they are descendants from ancient wolves. I dont think they are wolves now .

Did you see the documentry Snow wolf filmed on Ellesmereon TV recently? Its on catch up and Ellesmere island must bigger than England , thats one bloody big Woburn Only about 150 people inhabit the island. The wolves there are native to the island , wild and living in a natural state , they werent introduced to the island or made up of different unrelated wolves.

David Mech studied them each summer for some years , I think about 12 . They are not living in a semi- artificial environment.

Woburn Park is 3000 square acres
Ellesmere Island is 75.767 square miles
Great Britain and Northern Ireland is 93.000 square miles.

So yes, it would appear that Ellesmere Island is somewhat larger than Woburn

I dont know this researcher so i googled his name and he founded the Family Dog Research project. Linda P Case is part of this and a few years back she was asking people to join and fill in questionaires and they would update you , I changed my email addy so dont hear from them but it was/is a massive project .

I had a look google scholar ad couldnt find that paper on- line though there were other papers there some were in PDF and you can download them .

That's quite right Adam Miklosi founded the Family Dog Project and in 2014 he joined the NCRC as an advisor. He's also the author of "Dog Behaviour, Evolution and Cognition" which I've just ordered and can't wait to read. I've just received "Do As I Do - Using social learning to train dogs" by Claudia Fugazza who did her PhD at the University of Budapest.

If you go to the familydogproject.elte.hu website you'll find several pdf's on various subjects including wolf/dog comparisons. The paper I mentioned is .....

familydogproject.elte/hu/Pdf/publikaciok/2013/GasciVTM2013.pdf

Hope it works!

So basically you have never personally observed any wild natural wolf packs, condemn Dave Mech for observing the wild natural wolves on a huge island & prefer TV personalities to qualified scientists & think living with a cross bred canine gives insight into wild behaviour. Says it all doesn't it
BTW David Attenborough has admitted to faking some of his"wild life"footage using captive animals in captivity. He does have a University degree on"Natural Sciences" which he gained pre 1950, however his career is totally media based as far as I know. I don't think I would compare his depth of knowledge of real wolf behaviour to that of Dave Mech & his peers. I was given his book on dogs, very dated & lacking in understanding & interestingly has many acknowledgements to the literal works of others ! Indicating he relied on others for his "facts"