19/06/2026
🐾 Are you and your dog a pack? Someone asked me recently — and I mean this kindly, they really meant well — "apart from you, who is the leader of your pack?"
And it got me thinking. Because I hear this all the time. And I think a lot of us use those words " pack, leader, alpha " without really knowing where they come from or what they actually mean. So in my latest podcast episode, I sat down and unpacked it (pun intended).
Here's some of what we covered 👇
🐺 What a pack actually IS — and the scientific definition might surprise you. A pack is a stable social unit of the SAME SPECIES, coordinating hunting, territory and reproduction together. Humans and dogs? Two completely different species. So already, scientifically, we are not a pack.
❌ The alpha wolf myth — this came from a study in the 1930s and 40s of captive, unrelated wolves under stress in a zoo in Switzerland. They weren't a natural pack. They were stressed animals forced into a small space. And yet that flawed study leaked into dog training and stayed there for nearly a century.
🔬 The man who debunked it — L. David Mech, one of the world's leading wolf researchers, spent 13 summers studying wild wolves in Canada and concluded that wolf packs are simply FAMILIES. Parents guiding their young through cooperation and experience, not fear and force. He spent the last 25 years of his career trying to correct the damage his early work had done.
🌍 Feral and street dogs in Italy, South America, Eastern Europe — researchers Luigi Boitani and Paolo Ciucci spent years studying dogs that were dumped in the wild. Their finding? True feral dog groups are temporary. They last 1 to 2.5 weeks. They don't form stable packs. Even abandoned dogs don't behave like wolves.
🧠 Dogs evolved to read US — research from the Family Dog Project at the University of Budapest shows dogs have developed cognitive abilities to read human facial expressions, gestures and emotions that even hand-raised wolves don't have. They are not trying to dominate us. They are trying to communicate with us.
💛 What we actually are — I don't fight my dogs for resources. I don't need to eat first or walk through the door first. I guide them. I provide for them. I help them navigate a world WE created and put them in. That is not a pack dynamic. That is a family.
🐕 My dogs — Jock, Tay, Kite, Hester, Auri, Tali and Kes. I talk about their relationships with each other, how fluid and individual those relationships are, and why there is no single "leader" even among them. Jock is a bully sometimes. Tay is the most submissive dog you'll ever meet until he's had enough. Kes is a proper madam. And Kite once came back from the garden with a baby rabbit half-hanging out of his mouth, and I decided that was a battle I wasn't going to fight that day. 🐇
If your dog is being difficult, it is not because they are trying to dominate you. It might be pain. It might be fear. It might be something they haven't been taught yet. Or it might be something we need to understand better as their guardians.
👉 Listen to the full episode — link in 🥇 comment
