Dominance, Submission and Evolution

Evolutionary biologist Roger Abrantes, author of Dog Language, writes about dominance among wolves and dogs, dissecting the arguments made and holding them up to the light of observation as an evolutionary biologist.  He writes on his blog:

Dominance and submission are beautiful mechanisms from an evolutionary point of view. They are what enables (social) animals to live together, to survive until they reproduce and pass their (dominant and submissive) genes to the next generation. Without these mechanisms, we wouldn’t have social animals like humans, chimpanzees, wolves and dogs among many others.

Abrantes describes dominance and submission as the sustainable versions of their unsustainable corollaries, aggression and fear.

In the long run, it would be too dangerous and too exhausting to constantly resort to aggression and fear to solve banal problems. Animals show signs of pathological stress after a time when under constant threat, or constantly needing to attack others. This suggests that social predators need mechanisms other than aggressiveness and fear to solve social animosities.

Of course, anyone who has been around dogs for a long time, especially groups of dogs, has seen dominance and submission, provided they were really observing the dogs.

This last point is important, because often people see, but do not observe and dominance and submission are rarely in explosive display. As Abrantes notes:

Hierarchies work because a subordinate will often move away, showing typical pacifying behavior, without any obvious signs of fear. Thus, the dominant animal may simply displace a subordinate when feeding or at a desirable site. Hierarchies in nature are often very subtle, being difficult for an observer to uncover. The reason for this subtlety is the raison d’être of dominance-submission itself: the subordinate animal generally avoids encounters and the dominant one is not too keen on running into skirmishes either.

Dr. Mark R. Johnson has said almost exactly what Abrantes has said here, and his opinion carries additional weight because he has handled wild wolves and feral dogs both in the U.S. and around the world.  

David Mech weighs in and says Johnson has it just about right.

And, of course, wolf expert and film-maker Bob Landis, has spent years filming wolf packs in the Lamar Valley of the Yellowstone. You can read (and see!) what happened to the Druid pack (the largest wolf pack in the world at that time) at this link.  And yes, dominance and submission has quite a lot to do with the way things play out in the real world of wolves in the Lamar Valley!

Now is dominance a very useful idea in the world of dog training, and what does it mean in that context? That's another post. For now, let's simply come to terms with a simple fact: that dominance and submission are behaviors that do exist, and they exist not only in wolves and dogs, but also in chickens, horses, bison, prides of lions, walrus, seal, elk, deer, elephants, and nearly every other social higher-order communal animal, including humans.
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