©Monty Sloan
Passive submission is a combination of distance increasing signals.
Examples:
• The canid rolls over onto his side or back,
• Presenting belly up to another canid,
• Submissive urination, inguinal presentation.
• There are few attempts to greet or appease the other canid; tail may be tucked, ears may be partially or entirely flattened.

There’s a lot going on in this photo. Notice the chin-over being done by the third wolf, the inguinal twist being done by the passively submitting wolf, and the wolf who is standing over the submitting wolf with piloerector reflex, and dominant posture.

©Giampaulo Urso

“As a strategy, submissive behavior may benefit the canid in several ways:
• He may avoid the risk of injury during a fight;
• He may be able to take a less risky role during group hunting;
• He may obtain the opportunity to have access to resources by the association formed with a more dominant member of the hierarchy” (Sue Alexander, letter to author, September 2007).

©Marco de Kloet

© Giampaulo Urso

This Rotti has asserted dominance between himself and the white dog by pouncing and standing on the submissive white dog. Note the tense expressions (wrinkled brow, whale eye, tension ridges) on the face of the dog passing behind. Although the Rotti has struck a dominant pose it does not mean that he will always be dominant in dog-to-dog interactions, not even with particular dog.

©Monty Sloan

©Monty Sloan

A dominance submissive relationship does not exist until one individual consistently submits or defers. In such relationships, priority access exists primarily when the more dominant individual is present to guard the resource.

http://www.avsabonline.org/avsabonline/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=80

The word alpha has had a long history. For many years books and articles about wolves have mentioned the alpha male and alpha female or the alpha pair. In much popular writing the term is still in use today. However, keen observers may have noticed that    during the past few years the trend has begun to wane.This change in terminology reflects an important shift in our thinkingabout wolf social behavior. Rather than viewing a wolf pack as a group of animals organized with a “top dog” that fought its  way to the top, or a male-female pair of such aggressive wolves, science has come to understand that most wolf packs are merelyfamily groups formed exactly the same way  as human families are formed. That is, maturing male and female wolves from different packsdisperse, travel around until they find each other and an area vacant ofother wolves but with adequate prey, court, mate, and produce their own litter of pups.Sometimes this process involves merely a maturing male courting amaturing female in a neighboring pack and then the pair settling down ina territory next to one of the original packs. In more saturated populations, this may mean wolves moving many miles to the very edge of wolf range and finding mates there that havesimilarly dispersed. This is the process  that helps a growing wolf population expand its range. A good example is the ever-increasing wolf population in Wisconsin. There, not only is the mainpopulation in the northern part of the state continuing to fill the north with more and more pack territories, but wolves have managed to form a separate population in the central part of the state through this dispersal and proliferation of packs. http://www.google.com/search?q=Whatever+Happened+to+the+term+Alpha+Wolf&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Even in the relatively few cases where aggression is related to rank, applying animal social theory and mimicking how animals would respond can pose a problem. First, it can cause one to use punishment, which may suppress aggression without addressing the underlying cause. Because fear and anxiety are common causes of aggression and other behavior problems, including those that mimic resource guarding, the use of punishmentcan directly exacerbate the problem by increasing
the animal’s fear or anxiety  (AVSAB 2007).

Second, it fails to recognize that with wild animals,  dominance-submissive relationships are reinforced through warning postures and ritualistic dominance and submissive displays. If the relationship is stable, then the submissive animal defers automatically to the dominant individual. If the relationship is less stable, the dominant individual has a more aggressive personality, or the dominant individual is less confident about its ability to maintain a higher rank, continued aggressive displays occur.

There are several photographs in my book of different canine styles of drinking, but here is the real “scoop” on what their tongues are doing.

dog-drinks-water