Sundog asks a good question below that can extend this Stump/Chump immediate-moment problem to a part two.
“What has this chump stumped is why hunting becomes collaborative and the circle of temperament synchronizes to get the moose and why it APPEARS competitive/unsynchronized in the heat pack? I realize as networked consciousness it is not necessarily competitive, but I do wonder what behavior/energy I am putting my thoughts on top of that makes it appear competitive?” Sundog
Yes it does appear as if the males are competing with each other and that the most dominant one prevails. If this is true, then the male must be thinking something like: “I want to breed with that female and I have to whup that other male in order to do so.” Is that his inner dialogue?
So we know that the males have a sexual pressure that is all consuming and they want to find relief from, but the immediate-moment says they are not thinking about that either. To break it down: (1) What effect do female sex hormones have on the male psyche? (2) We see that the female is walking around slowly and frequently stopping, so what could the female be doing otherwise wherein the males would not be fighting over her? (3) What do #1 and #2 have to do with cooperative behavior in the hunt?
I’m going to take a stab at this. I think 1. The female hormones stimulate the male so that he’s knocked off balance and has to move towards her (attraction) at a rate that would fully exhaust the emotional momentum created by the stimulus. So 2. Maybe if the female were moving more quickly (running away) the way a moose would, then the strongest/hungriest (most charged) male would simply outrun the others males instead of fighting them? And 3. I’m not sure. Chump stumped. Lol.
The female in heat charges the system and if she were to act like prey the males would cooperate to bring her to ground rather than fight. But instead if consuming her as they would the moose, the drive would expressed sexually. Since she is not moving the charge builds and seems to go through a load/overload cycle of dissipating the energy until she is becomes sexually receptive.
You guys are blowing my mind, this is the best stuff ever. What an incredible model with such tremendous explanatory power.
I think number three has something to do with the size of the prey, meaning prey the size of a moose can absorb a whole pack of wolves, so they align according to temperament and take down the moose with no infighting. But you wouldn’t see a pack of wolves aligning to take down a smaller prey, because there’s not enough mass to absorb a whole pack. Which is why foxes are solitary hunters, their prey doesn’t require or absorb the momentum of a whole pack.
So with this female dog, she’s putting out a lot of “charge” compared to her ability to absorb the predator. She can only align with one dog at a time. Plus, she’s not moving fast enough to create flow in the pack. So the circuits are overloaded. Or the river becomes turbulent, whichever metaphor works here, IDK. Still just guessing at this.
Bravo. If she were to run, the males would run alongside her and there would not be fighting. They are fighting for two reasons. As Evolved said, the female in heat knocks them off balance and they are stimulated and must move. They are invested with momentum and therefore they must occupy a forward point that is embedded in the females’ body. So their motive is to move and to eat the female (which really translates into ingesting that forward point, this is the basis of the oral urge, not an intention). But because the female’s hormones dilate the dog’s temperament to wide open, they are completely vulnerable to her and the oral urge evolves into sexual urge. (Note she doesn’t act like prey, she has a predatory aspect that reflects their energy of attraction back at the males and they are regressed to the infant puppy mind and so the oral urge lacks the intensity that it would exhibit if they were dealing with an actual prey. Since their hind end is aroused with the hunger circuitry, they want to mount, a form of wave-coupling which itself derives from the locomotive rhythm. Hunger plus prey instinct = sexual energy.) The males want to eat the female just as the mother wants to eat the pup, just as the group wants to eat the moose. Emotion moving from predator to prey polarity, i.e. thermodynamics, a universal principle running consistently through every domain of their behavior. Also note that when the prey is dead on the ground, the pack then fights over feeding for the same reason they fight over the female, their bodies must occupy the forward point that is projected into the object of attraction. When one male crowds another, there is too much momentum in that small space, they are feeling blocked from the forward point and so we witness friction as aggression, nothing to do with competition. It’s just friction that results in a hierarchy. (For example, many owners are bitten when they physically restrain their excited dog. Is their dog competing with them, disciplining them, or is it displacing friction onto the bite as static overload?)
#1 and # 2 = Brilliant
The female sex hormones make her more prey like and completely opens up the male’s temperament and hence her predatory energy goes right to the quick of the males just as an infant pup will go right to the quick of the parent and inhibit the predatory urge. The predatory urge thereby evolves into the sensual/tactile urge. (Note how the males ride up on her shoulders and often snuffle and fixate on her neck, that’s the leverage point whereby a dog can take down a deer, the loci of the oral urge.) So what we’re seeing is the capacity of dogs/wolves to transform predatory impulse into sensual. As long as the object-of-attraction is moving fast enough it is absorbing their momentum. They are coupling to the prey by moving in rhythm with it. Then when the object-of-attraction is static, if it can reflect the predatory impulse back at the predator, it can evolve into sociability through the sensual avenue. So the intense friction we observe that is always interpreted as competition, is part of the wave coupling phenomenon through the oral–to sensual transformation and it is unique to wolves and the domesticated dog. There is no contradiction between the friction in moments of stasis and the capacity to cooperate when things are in flow.