In 1970, an ecologist named David Mech published a book called “The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species.” A book which catalogued all the information researchers had at the time on the worlds of wolves. A book that Mech himself would later spend the rest of his career trying to end the publication on. You see, Mech had mistakenly used research on wolves that were held in captivity, and found later that much of the assertions made in it did not hold up to scrutiny when observing wolves in the wild.
In the west we’ve heard, often to death, of the “Alpha Wolf.” We compare people to wolves quite a bit. Especially in the recent trend of armchair youtube “sociologists” and american conservative grifters attempting to explain human behavior in terms of so-called “Alphas” and “Betas,” a great many people still believe that humans, by nature, are pack animals with rigid heirarchies. Like the wolves in Mech’s research: The strongest, most fit male eats first while the weaker of the pack get what’s left over. The Alpha leads the pack, makes key decisions for them, and always has first pick of the mate. Mech’s research contained much of the information used to argue this point and it was inaccurate. Mech researched only wolves in captivity, however, when he took to observing wolves in the wild, he quickly realized how this view of captive animals was simply not how free creatures organize. A pack of wolves in the wild is a family; usually, two parent wolves with a litter of puppies. There’s no “Alpha” male, there’s a father. And the weakest pups certainly do not eat last, quite the contrary. This dynamic is more indicative of a community than a heirarchy.
In research such as this, we can infer that animals in captivity adopt new forms of social organization in order to cope with their incredibly narrowed freedom. Often this organization is inherited from the order they were bred from, forcing them to maintain it generation after generation.
Despite this false representation, I actually do believe people are like the wolves in Mech’s book. I believe that we are in captivity. One so coercive that it encourages us to believe in social heirarchies. We organize our worlds around it. We have our bosses, our landowners, our teachers, our leaders. We see each other as rungs of a social ladder to step on in order to make it to the next level. We either live believing we are or can be the “alpha wolf,” or we struggle accepting that we will only eat when it is our turn. And for what? Why allow our choices and passions be squandered by believing we must adhere to rules upheld by those who are superior in title only?
In my neighbors, my friends, my families, I see animals in a cage. I see a polar bear that shuffles back and forth all day in a bored frustration like an animatron. I see a whale with a melancholic song for a mate, though it has no room in its tank for itself let alone another. I see a panda that refuses to mate, lest it doom its child to a life too much like it’s own. I see a wolf that would want nothing more than to sprint as far as its breath can carry it to the far reaches of the forest it calls its home. Wishing only to be stopped, not by the glass of an enclosure, but by the limitations of its own, wild imagination.
We are not ranks in a social order. We are beings whose freedom has been withheld. We crave free community, free association.
"To look at people in capitalist society and conclude that human nature is egoism [greed and selfishness], is like looking at people in a factory where pollution is destroying their lungs and saying that it is human nature to cough," says Andrew Collier.
We are not free, we are captives. And attempting to learn the potential of an enclosure will get us nowhere closer to freedom. We can appreciate those who were able to conquer or cast aside that cage, like Emerson or Thoreau. And we can find a glimmer of light beam into our enclosures from the minds that saw hope beyond the cage, like Goldman or Tolstoy. But until we can learn to band together as the wolves we are and break loose of our captivity, we can never truly be free.
