The wolf’s strategy of life is to stay together and hunt in large groups for the best chance of survival. This strategy requires individuals to form strong social bonds, which are largely dependent on non-confrontational communication. This relies on a high level of social self-awareness, with individual wolves having to coordinate, cooperate and compromise with one another in order to stay alive and well. Hunting together is the ultimate teamwork activity, and for the wild wolf pack, getting high-value, nutritious food often involves expending vast amounts of energy. So unless wolves are hunting, they tend to conserve their energy, not waste it. For example, to maintain control of feeding and whelping territories, rather than patrolling fixed boundaries or fighting, each wolf pack howls to signal its presence within an area. As a rule, individual wolf packs stay out of one another’s way.

Usually, a wild wolf pack is made up of close and extended family members with one, unrelated breeding pair. Sometimes, non-family members will be accepted into a small pack, and when a large pack becomes unsustainable (i.e. when the energy expended on hunting is greater than the energy gained), a small group of closely bonded individuals may break away and form a new pack. Whatever the blood-ties, through the routine of daily life, individual wolves learn familiarity with one another and create exclusive rituals. A social hierarchy is established and maintained without bloodshed, and through the repetition of ritualised behaviour, individual bonds are strengthened. Through ritual, posturing and play, individuals receive the assurance that superior (high-ranking) and inferior (low-ranking) social positions prevail. This is not to say that wolf pack hierarchies remain fixed, but it would appear that factors such as temperament type and blood cortisol levels play a large part in determining social privileges and status.

The picture below shows a female Rottweiler and two of her juvenile offspring working together as a pack to 'hunt' down the football. The male lurcher looking on in the background chooses to remain as an outsider to the game. The four dogs belong to three different owners, and it was the first time that the three related dogs had been reunited in about a year. Until this point, the lighter brown male Rottweiler/GSD had spent several months in friendly, neighbourly company with the lurcher, but upon the arrival of his mother and sister, the family bond prevailed.

Domestic dogs have little reason to deepen social bonds with one another when food is easy to come by, and so establishing and maintaining a social hierarchy isn’t necessary. They need to get along with one another, but only as acquaintances and for long enough to mate. The vast number of ‘village dogs’ that scavenge human refuse dumps around the world fit the profile of the domestic dog as a non-pack animal perfectly. Village dogs space themselves out within their environment and remain largely separate from each other. Each dog seems to have its own feeding territory (as observed by biologist, Raymond Coppinger, on the East African island of Pemba), which it appears to maintain control of by barking rather than by patrolling a boundary or threatening or fighting its neighbours. As a hark back to their lupine ancestry, these solitary dogs echo the way in which wolf packs maintain their feeding territories ~ by voice, rather than by force.

So when food is plentiful and easy to obtain, the dog's requirement to deepen social bonds is rendered redundant, however, when the dog’s access to food is restricted, food becomes high-value regardless of its nutritional content because it is scarce. In order to survive, the dog has to ensure that it gets a good feed whenever food is available. By controlling a dog's food intake and therefore making food artificially scarce, it's very possible that for some dogs, the requirement to strengthen relations with other canine and non-canine members of a social group is brought to the fore, but in my opinion, this only gives rise to the impression of a pack set-up. We get closer to the answer to whether or not the dog truly is a pack animal when we remove human owners from the equation. Observations of 'free-range' dogs at outdoor events such as motorbike rallies and music festivals suggest that under the right circumstances (company of other dogs coupled with a lack of owner attention, control and provision of basic needs), individual, unrelated dogs do appear to mass together, and as a group, seem to divide their time between intense bouts of play (i.e. developing and deepening social bonds) and raiding people's tents for food (i.e. hunting). This suggests that the fundamental nature of the pack, as opposed to a mixed-species social group, is exclusively canine. We therefore cannot be our dogs' pack leaders, however, we can, and must, provide them with leadership if we want peace and harmony in our mixed-species households of humans, dogs, cats and other critters.

Ultimately, for many dogs, living in close proximity with other dogs is often unavoidable. Regardless of any innate drive to form exclusive packs existing in the modern dog's psyche, the ability to live together peacefully is largely determined by a combination of individual temperament, favourable social experiences, and breed. While some breeds are naturally able to coexist with their own, other breeds are not. As a general rule, small terriers have been selectively bred to be solitary hunters (e.g. Jack Russell, Patterdale, Fox terrier). Their single-mindedness doesn’t lend itself to peaceful coexistence with their own breed, but they will often get along much better with non-terrier types. On the other hand, hounds (e.g. Fox hounds, Beagles) can happily coexist with their own breed in large numbers because hounds have been selectively bred to hunt together. With hounds, it’s the more, the merrier. With terriers, two can be company, but three can sometimes be a crowd. More than three can be a war zone!