Most homes have dog rules. For some, in the proper climate, the rules mean dogs live outdoors. In others, with proper early training, they are allowed inside, but must stay off the sofa.
In other homes, dogs rule the joint. That’s mine. The only rule I have is no dogs in bed, and I’d probably give that one up too if I weren’t such a light sleeper. My dogs sometimes wake me with just a vigorous stretch from their dog bed across the room.
Dogs, as we know, are wolves that clean up well enough to meet the parents. Sometime in the past, when our ancient ancestors were on the cusp of settling down and creating civilization, the friendliest of wild wolves crowded up to the fringes of the human world and learned that living might be a little easier if they teamed up with two-legged apes and survived on our cast-off surplus. And so a mutually beneficial partnership was born.
We all know wolves thrive in packs, and we’ve learned these packs are run by alpha males and females. Modern humans have mythologized this pack hierarchy to the point of nonsense. Wolf packs are often mom and dad and the pack consists of a generation or two of puppies. There’s certainly some social organization in your average wolfpack, but wolf groupies who’d like to apply the dominant alpha concept to human interactions miss the true strength of a wolfpack: cooperation.
Just because a pack has alphas doesn’t mean it’s a canine dictatorship.
Wolves, it seems, are predators that also happen to fall on the friendly side of the spectrum. They live in a tough, cruel world, but their ability to cooperate with one another makes them a force in wild ecosystems.
This pack structure and placement on the high end of the friendliness spectrum is likely what made wolves such a natural fit to domesticate themselves and choose humans as their new posse. They adapted to us, and we were the better for it.
Humans, the Homo sapiens variety at least, shared a spot on the friendliness spectrum with wolves. This friendliness, the skill of cooperation, gave our ancestors the advantage they needed to become the one surviving human species. And later, our partnership with dogs gave our ancestors the needed boost to settle down and become civilized, for better or worse.
We may think alphas are cool, that the baddest dog in town always wins because survival of the fittest determines outcomes, but friendliness has more to do with canine success. There are about 250,000 wolves roaming the planet today, but nearly a billion dogs. And while all the Neanderthals and hobbits, Homo floresiensis, and other hominids have joined the list of extinct humans, there are more than 8 billion Homo sapiens, a species so prolific we might have outgrown our planet’s carrying capacity.
Organizational structure is important, and that usually includes someone at the top who is ultimately accountable for the success or failure of a group. It’s a mistake, however, to think that size, power and a bullying instinct are the best ways to organize a social organization. Cooperation and friendliness are our strengths. At least that’s how we came to exist in such numbers that our mere existence is a problem.
When I come home from work, my cat runs to the back door waiting to be let out in the yard so she can chase squirrels, yet my dog meets me at the front door, waiting to have her ears scratched. I know she needs let out to relieve herself, but our bond is such that she needs my connection more than she needs the backyard. That tells me something important about how two of the world’s friendliest species built the greatest interspecies partnership ever.
I say that, and it won’t even be hunting season for another six months.