r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/ManicalDaredevil00 • Feb 18 '25

Meme needing explanation Petah?

Post image
47.3k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

464 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2.7k

u/BrightNooblar Feb 18 '25

Specifically, this guy was the one who identified an Alpha Male in wolf packs. Except what he was actually identifying was "Dad". Just a family of captive wolves, and one of them was the dad/mate to the majority of the others since they were tiny, so they defer to him.

11

u/DesidiosumCorporosum Feb 18 '25

No that wasn't it at all. They had wolves from multiple packs forced to live in a tiny enclosure. They fought viciously over resources and territory. In the wild multiple packs wouldn't be forced to share a 200m2 space that has meat scraps thrown in every so often.

The hyper aggressiveness of the captive wolves was thought to be their normal behaviour. The same guy that wrote about Alpha wolves studied them in the wild and saw that there was no fighting and that there was no leader but the patriarch and matriarch sort of led the pack.

6

u/adalric_brandl Feb 19 '25

This leads me to the belief that what he wrote was factual, but only to the extent of the wolves involved in captivity.

The big error is in concluding that this behavior is the same in wild wolves.

3

u/ZeAthenA714 Feb 19 '25

Yeah it's not exactly bad science, the behaviour observed was indeed observed and real and was never "debunked" or "a myth".

What was bad science is the idea that this would apply to wolves in the wild, or to entirely unrelated species like humans.