Power of the Pack
There’s an aspect of your dog’s psychology that I only touched
on in the last chapter, but it couldn’t be a more important concept when it
comes to understanding the relationship between you and the dogs in your life.
This is the concept of the pack. Your dog’s pack mentality is one of the greatest natural forces
involved in shaping his or her behavior.
A dog’s pack is his life force. The pack instinct is his
primal instinct. His status in the pack is his self, his identity. The pack is
all important to a dog because if anything threatens the pack’s harmony, it
threatens each individual dog’s harmony. If something threatens the pack’s
survival, it threatens the very survival of every dog in it. The need to keep
the pack stable and running smoothly is a powerful motivating force in every
dog—even in a pampered poodle that has never met another dog or left the
confines of your backyard. Why? It’s deeply ingrained in his brain.
Evolution and Mother Nature took care of that.
It’s vital for you to understand that your dog views all his
interactions with other dogs, with you, and even with other animals in your
household in the “pack” context. Even though I’ve spent the last chapter
outlining the many differences between how dogs and humans see the world,
humans—in fact, all primates—are pack animals, too. In fact, dog packs are
really not so different from the human equivalent of packs. We call our packs
families. Clubs. Football teams.
Churches. Corporations. Governments. Sure, we think of our
social groups as infinitely more complicated than dogs’ groups, but are they
really all that different? When you break it down, the basics are the same:
every one of the “packs” I’ve mentioned has a hierarchy, or it doesn’t work.
There is a father or mother, a chairman, a quarterback, a minister, a
CEO, a president.
Then there are varying levels of status for the people under
him or her. That’s how a pack of canines works, too.
The concept of pack and pack leader is directly related to the
way in which dogs interact with us when we bring them into our homes.
The Natural Pack
If you study a wolf pack in
the wild, you’ll observe a natural rhythm to its days and nights. First, the
animals in the pack walk, sometimes up to ten hours a day, to find food and
water21.
Then they eat. If they kill a deer, the pack leader gets the biggest piece, but
everyone cooperates in sharing the rest. They’ll eat until the entire deer is
gone—not just because they don’t have Saran Wrap in the wild, but because they
don’t know when there’s going to be another deer again.