lol I figured humping would be the best starting point.
Anyway. Humping. Christie posted a looooong time ago on here that humping is (or is often?) a case of a dog not knowing what to do with its body but needing to do something.
Exactly - in most cases it's relief of a stressor. Or in non-"I've been reading far too many science books" (sorry guys I tend to get stuck in science nerd mode) doing something to relieve stress. I'm about to gross some people out and I apologize, but monkeys have been known to masturbate to relieve stress of certain situations, usually where they are unfamiliar with the situation. Same thing with dogs. The act of sex releases endorphins in the brain and in a cascade effect calms the system. Dog doesn't know what to do and hasn't been taught a way to relief stress so it goes to a biological basis of humping to "calm down". H will "air hump" his Kong Bounzer toy when he gets frustrated with it. It lasts for about 3 seconds and he stops. There have been dogs known to actually get so excited during bite work they ejaculate on the decoy.
I personally haven't seen dominance humping in person, but I've seen videos and heard stories of it across species. It's in some cases, uh.... traumatizing.
What have you read, if anything, about domestic pack structure/dominance vs. what research showed a few years ago about wolf leadership/pack structure?
I have read a lot that research now thinks the aggression model/Alpha model as we understand it in wolf packs is something produced in captivity and that free range packs do not work the same as what "we" think of. It makes sense biologically speaking that aggression is a last resource - primary care goes to securing resources and viability of genes. Aggression between pack members defeats the purpose of carrying on genetic viability and every organism, even down to mold, wants to keep surviving. There's actually a recent study I pulled that said dogs are less tolerant of other members of packs than wolves.
Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4424647/
Abstract: Cooperation is thought to be highly dependent on tolerance. For example, it has been suggested that dog–human cooperation has been enabled by selecting dogs for increased tolerance and reduced aggression during the course of domestication (‘emotional reactivity hypothesis’). However, based on observations of social interactions among members of captive packs, a few dog–wolf comparisons found contradictory results. In this study, we compared intraspecies aggression and tolerance of dogs and wolves raised and kept under identical conditions by investigating their agonistic behaviours and cofeeding during pair-wise food competition tests, a situation that has been directly linked to cooperation. We found that in wolves, dominant and subordinate members of the dyads monopolized the food and showed agonistic behaviours to a similar extent, whereas in dogs these behaviours were privileges of the high-ranking individuals. The fact that subordinate dogs rarely challenged their higher-ranking partners suggests a steeper dominance hierarchy in dogs than in wolves. Finally, wolves as well as dogs showed only rare and weak aggression towards each other. Therefore, we suggest that wolves are sufficiently tolerant to enable wolf–wolf cooperation, which in turn might have been the basis for the evolution of dog–human cooperation (canine cooperation hypothesis).
Quotes: First, domestic dogs may handle competitive situations around resources on a case-by-case basis by using violence to establish control rather than by relying on the dominance relationships of the interacting partners. This is unlikely, however, given that in free-ranging dogs dominance relationships remain stable across different competitive contexts, and access to food resources is predicted reasonably well by the rank positions of the individuals, with high-ranking individuals having priority of access [32] (see also [33,34]). Stable dominance hierarchies have also been reported for groups of pet dogs [35,36]. Moreover, according to this hypothesis, the agonistic behaviours shown by each of our dogs should be independent of their social rank. By contrast, our results showed that the dominant dogs showed more agonistic behaviours than the subordinates. One can, however, still argue that instead of a functional relationship between the two, dominance rank and showing agonistic behaviours to a partner simply correlate across individuals in dogs. Second, Feddersen-Petersen [30] suggested that visual communication in dogs is somewhat impaired due to their reduced visual (facial as well as bodily) expression caused by their altered morphology (fur colouring and length, head shape, hanging ears, lack of tail, etc.; see also [37]). As a consequence, this impairment might lead to an inability to control conflicts at close quarters, which might appear to the observer as if the dogs had a higher motivation to initiate and escalate conflicts, while in truth they just have no means to communicate properly with each other, and thus to de-escalate conflicts. In this study, we used the same ethogram to code the behaviour of the dogs and of the wolves. While dogs showed all behaviours except knock-down, bite and snapping, wolves did not ‘pin’ or ‘fight’ (for definitions see table 3). Nevertheless, although dogs and wolves seem to use the same signals overall, it is possible that dogs do not use them as appropriately as wolves. Whichever mechanistic explanation (less tolerant or more sensitive temperament, impaired signalling, or non-functional dominance hierarchy) is true, our and former observations that domestic dogs show a less tolerant behaviour towards their group-mates and express a steeper dominance hierarchy than wolves in a feeding context nicely fit the social ecology of wolves and dogs. While free-ranging domestic dogs have retained some similar behavioural patterns (e.g. living in pack-like groups and forming stable hierarchical structures [32,34]), they differ from wolves in several aspects. For example, they are not organized as family units but rather as multi-male/multi-female groups of largely unrelated individuals. Accordingly, female dogs usually raise their offspring alone or with limited help from the father [38]. Moreover, dogs also differ from wolves in their foraging strategies, with wolves relying heavily on hunting, while dogs often feed on stable food resources provided by humans (e.g. scavenging at rubbish dumps or food provisioned by humans [39,40]; but see [41]). It has been suggested that, in dogs, this feeding ecology might have relaxed the need to feed quickly, whereas wolves need to gorge food down to avoid competitors (bears, ravens) taking away their food, and thus cannot engage in conflicts over food. Alternatively, this buffering effect of food provisioning by humans has been proposed to reduce selection against intraspecific aggression in dogs [9], which in turn might explain their difficulties in cooperating with each other and resolving social conflicts [17,30]. Interestingly, from 6 to 12 months of age, dogs seem to be similarly aggressive to jackals adapted to a more solitary life [17].
Another interesting study on wild dog mating behaviors:
Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4048177/
Abstract: Mating and reproductive outcome is often determined by the simultaneous operation of different mechanisms like intra-sexual competition, mating preferences and sexual coercion. The present study investigated how social variables affected mating outcome in a pack of free-ranging dogs, a species supposed to have lost most features of the social system of wolves during domestication. We found that, although the pack comprised multiple breeding individuals, both male copulation success and female reproductive success were positively influenced by a linear combination of dominance rank, age and leadership. Our results also suggest that mate preferences affect mating outcome by reinforcing the success of most dominant individuals. In particular, during their oestrous period bitches clearly searched for the proximity of high-ranking males who displayed affiliative behaviour towards them, while they were more likely to reject the males who intimidated them. At the same time, male courting effort and male-male competition for receptive females appeared to be stronger in the presence of higher-ranking females, suggesting a male preference for dominant females. To our knowledge, these results provide the first clear evidence of social regulation of reproductive activities in domestic dogs, and suggest that some common organizing mechanisms may contribute to shape the social organization of both dogs and wolves.
Quotes: The domestic dog is a very recently evolved member of the genus Canis. Monogamy – exclusive mating between pair-bonded individuals – is rare in mammals but it is typical for wild members of the genus Canis [113]. The ancestor of domestic dogs, the wolf (Canis lupus), usually live in family packs consisting of a mated pair, their juvenile offspring, and adult helper offspring from previous years, whereas unrelated animals rarely associate with the group [76], [114], [115]. Usually, only a single pair within the pack breed and consistently lead group activities [76], [78], [116]. As long as offspring remain in their natal group, sexual maturation and mating are typically delayed until they disperse from the pack to seek for their own mates [115]. Moreover, in case subordinate wolves delay dispersal and reach sexual maturity in their natal pack, they are usually prevented from mating through active intervention by dominant animals [75], [117], [118]. All group members cooperate in raising puppies born to the dominant breeding female by providing allofeeding and other care to them [76], [119]. The social organization, the mating system and the reproductive biology of domestic dogs differ in several respects from those of their wild ancestors. Free-ranging dogs can form packs composed by related individuals, although they probably contain a higher proportion of unrelated animals if compared to wolves [62], [70], and also a higher number of sexually mature individuals of both sexes [60], [61], [62], [65], [67], [68], [70], [80]. Although several of these mature individuals usually breed in dog packs, we have shown for the first time in this paper that their reproductive performance can increase with their dominance rank, age, and tendency to lead pack movements. We believe that previous studies on groups of domestic dogs (reviewed in: [72], [74]) failed in documenting any social regulation of reproductive activities possibly because they either lacked detailed quantitative analyses of social interactions, or because the small number of females in the studied groups prevented them from ascertaining the statistical significance of reproductive asymmetries. In our opinion, it is likely that the social regulation of reproduction will operate in small groups of dogs as well, since dominance hierarchies can be found also in such groups [70]. Notably, a positive relationship between variables such as reproductive activity, dominance, age and leadership has also been found in wolf packs (e.g. [76], [78]), and this similarity suggests that some common organizing mechanism may contribute to shape the social organization of both species. According to our view, the main differences between the two species reside in the degree of reproductive suppression exerted by dominant animals over subordinates, and in the degree of cooperative breeding, that are usually higher in wolves (see also [70]). Once we know that domestic dogs display mate preferences and that these are affected by the social relationships within the pack, we may ask how the former evolved. Notably, mate choice cannot evolve through artificial selection simply because the latter implies that human beings are those deciding which animals are allowed to mate. So, it may be hypothesized that 1) either mate choice evolved in wolves and was maintained in dogs by natural selection, or 2) that dogs evolved a different pattern of mate preferences by natural selection during the domestication process. The latter may also be plausible since, even nowadays, human beings seem to control the reproduction of a very limited portion of the global population of domestic dogs [58]. To our knowledge, the present study provides the first clear evidence that an age-graded dominance hierarchy in a pack of free-ranging dogs affects several aspects of reproductive activities such as mate preferences, male copulation rate and female reproductive outcome. Dogs of both sexes displayed mate preferences for high-ranking partners, reflected in the differential distribution of affiliative signals, and old high-ranking dogs of both sexes showed a higher copulatory/reproductive performance. Overall, our results suggest that the social organization of pack-living free-ranging dogs may resemble that of wolves to a higher extent than previously thought. Further investigations of mate choice in both species may shed light on how their natural evolution diverged since the initiation of domestication.
It makes sense that mate choice would favor the stronger of the animals, which is why wolves are run by the "alpha" male and female - they have the desired characteristics to pass onto offspring for survival - and not just because they "fight the best". Dogs are a little bit different, possibly due to the fact there is so much competition.
Here's another one I could only find an abstract on:
Title: A fresh look at the wolf-pack theory of companion-animal dog social behavior. By van Kerkhove W
Abstract: A popular perspective on the social behavior of dogs in multiple-dog households sees the dogs' behavior as reflecting the sociobiological laws of the rigidly structured dominance hierarchy that has been described for wolf packs. This view suggests that aggression problems among dogs are natural expressions of conflict that arise whenever dominance status is in contention. One recommended solution has been for the owner to endorse and enforce a particular dominance hierarchy because, on the wolf pack model, aggression is minimized when the structure of the hierarchy is clear, strong, and stable. This article questions the validity of this perspective on 2 principal grounds. First, because it does not seem to occur in the wild, this article suggests the strong dominance hierarchy that has been described for wolves may be a by-product of captivity. If true, it implies that social behavior--even in wolves--may be a product more of environmental circumstances and contingencies than an instinctive directive. Second, because feral dogs do not exhibit the classic wolf-pack structure, the validity of the canid, social dominance hierarchy again comes into question. This article suggests that behavioral learning theory offers another perspective regarding the behavior of dogs and wolves in the wild or in captivity and offers an effective intervention for aggression problems.
Definitely eye opening when you think about dominance between dogs nowadays and how to read the behaviors. Sorry if I overloaded anyone else - I get stuck in science brain sometimes and let my mouth wander.
Facebook page.
...uh...yes...then no....
Either way I love hearing about your girls. And if you have any humping stories feel free to post them here. 