By Dennis McKeon
Copyright, 2024. The original post can be found here.
Very often, when a greyhound trainer, breeder or even an adopter, happens to refer to an individual greyhound as being an "alpha", a "beta" or an "omega", someone will interject themselves to the discussion, noting that such arcane hierarchical categorization has long been debunked, through studies of wild wolf behavior---and therefore, no one should take anything you say seriously, you blithering doofus.
Greyhounds are not wild wolves, and the vast majority of them exist within a relatively small range--an artificial construct, a colony---which, in their numbers, as far as I can determine, are considerably larger than many packs of wild wolves. The sexes are generally kept apart during social and play breaks, and they normally don't experience direct martial competitions for mating privilege during their careers as performance dogs. In the better cases, they are meticulously well-managed and overseen by humans. Greyhounds are bred to be furiously competitive.
David Mech observed wolves for a year, and came to his anti-hierarchical conclusions, which may be true of wolves he observed. I've never done such work. I'm not certain that what greyhound people refer to as alpha, beta or omega behavior is exactly what Mech supposedly debunked, re: wild wolves.
Wolves are beautiful and fascinating, but they are not the concern of greyhound breeders and trainers. Greyhounds are.
The cumulative experience of greyhound professionals would amount to an inestimable thousands of years of working intimately within and among colonies of greyhounds. Why would Mech's observations of wild wolves be any more valuable than the cumulative thousands of years of empiricism and observations of domesticated greyhounds by greyhound professionals---many of whom are with the dogs from birth to retirement to death? And why would they be any more valuable than your own...or even mine?
Whether we use the Greek alphabet, or Tagalog, or even Semaphore to describe a social order that we can clearly see develop within each and every litter of greyhounds, each and every sapling colony, and each and every randomly populated kennel colony, is entirely optional.
John Henry Walsh, aka "Stonehenge", in his mid 19th century treatise on the greyhound breed, recognized it as degrees of "selfishness". Whereas wolves may behave in ways that one might infer are almost "tribal", as I gather from Mech and his disciples, greyhounds have been bred to compete and to be competitively assertive---each generation being the offspring of the most successfully competitive performers of previous generations. At least a couple of modern racing and breeding dynasties were built upon a foundation of "alpha-identification" and selection.
Having handled several whom we would commonly refer to as "alpha" males and females, I can assure you that they exist, in the sense that they are far above the fray, and they possess and exude what we refer to as an unmistakable, inordinate degree of "class"--which the others seem to sense immediately, upon their introduction to the colony. They are granted a wide berth and deference, without any disputation. However, there are some greyhounds, very rare characters, who are intensely quarrelsome with others, many of whom would not be viewed as "alphas", and more often than not are "betas", who are pushing the envelope of culturally-appropriate greyhound colony deportment.
Simple as A-B-Z.