Science Friday - The Myth of the Alpha Wolf, Cherokee Nation Seed Banks, History of Gender Affirming Care. April 21, 2023, Part 2

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

How We Arrived At Current Standards Of Care For Trans Medicine So far this year, 16 states have moved to restrict or completely ban transgender kids access to gender affirming care. And 17 other states are considering similar laws, a handful even trying to restrict care for adults. This political controversy has drawn increased attention to “Standards of Care,” a set of guidelines written by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health or WPATH. Health professionals are encouraged to consult these guidelines when providing gender affirming care like puberty blockers, hormones and surgery to transgender patients. A new version of the standards were released last fall, sparking controversy. Some conservatives saw the guidelines as making transition too easy, and seized the moment to further restrict transition-related care. Some trans activists and health care providers felt the opposite, seeing the 2022 guidelines as too restrictive, creating unnecessary hurdles to life-saving medicine. How did we get to a point where one document is supposed to shape all of trans medicine? Guest host Maddie Sofia talks with Hil Malatino, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Philosophy at Penn State University, to put in perspective the history of gender affirming care.   How The Cherokee Nation Is Saving Culturally Significant Seeds Think about your family heirlooms—the most prized items passed down from generation to generation, that tell a story about who you are and where you come from. Did you ever think that seeds could be part of that story? This year, the Cherokee Nation Seed Bank is continuing its program to distribute heirloom seeds to tribal citizens, one that’s been running since 2006. Last year, the Nation distributed almost 10,000 seed packets to citizens across the country in an effort to keep these culturally significant plants from being lost. This year, the Cherokee Nation is sharing seeds for a variety of Cherokee corn, gourds, beans, pumpkins, beads, and native plants and flowers. Guest host John Dankosky talks with Feather Smith, the Cherokee Nation’s ethnobiologist, about how Cherokee heirloom seeds have been cultivated, planted, and preserved over the years. To see an image gallery of the Cherokee Nation heirloom garden, visit sciencefriday.com.   The Long Legacy Of The Alpha Wolf Myth Around the 1970s, the world latched onto a catchy new scientific term: alpha wolf. It described the top dog that clawed its way to the top of its pack, and it quickly became a mainstream symbol for power and dominance. The idea of the alpha wolf was debunked almost 25 years ago, but its legacy lives on. Most commonly, it’s found in circles of the internet where men appoint themselves alpha wolf, and also in dog training. Strangely, those two things are connected. Guest host Maddie Sofia explores how science works and how people use it in their everyday lives, whether it’s true or not. And a little about what happens when science goes mainstream. Maddie first talks with Dr. Dave Mech, senior research scientist at the US Geological Survey and founder of the International Wolf Center. His 1970 book “The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species” helped popularize the term “alpha wolf.” But when he discovered that alpha wolves aren’t really real many years later, he tried to right the wrong. Then, Maddie talks with two researchers about how the alpha wolf idea is still around today: Anamarie Johnson, PhD candidate and canine behavior consultant at Arizona State University, and Dr. Lindsay Palmer, social and behavioral scientist who studies the human-animal bond at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. They explore how biases and societal ideas shape science, and connect the dots between alpha wolves, masculinity, and dog training.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.     Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. And I'm Maddie Safaya. I've been reporting on the state of trans health care for a while now. And as I'm sure you've noticed, it's a topic that's increasingly dominating headlines. So far this year, conservatives in 16 states have moved to restrict or completely ban transgender kids' access to gender-affirming care. And 17 other states are considering similar restrictions, a handful such as Missouri, even trying to restrict care. for adults. This political controversy has drawn increased attention to what's called the standards of care. The standards of care are a set of guidelines written by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health or W-Path, and it's these guidelines that health care

are encouraged to consult when providing gender-affirming care to trans patients. We're talking about things like puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery. When a new version of the standards of care were released last fall, it was controversial and not just for the reasons you might expect. Some conservatives saw the guidelines as making transition too easy and seized the moment to further restrict transition-related care. But some trans activists and health care providers felt the opposite, seeing the 2022 guidelines as too restrictive, creating unnecessary hurdles to life-saving medicine. But how do we get to a point where one document is supposed to shape all of transmedicine, How did we arrive at these current standards for care?

Joining me now to give us some perspective on the history of how gender affirming care has evolved over time is my guest. Hill Malatino, assistant professor of women's gender and sexuality studies and philosophy at Penn State University, based in State College, Pennsylvania. Hill, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me. Okay, Hill, I want to start with a foundational figure in the history of gender affirming care. in the United States. An endocrinologist named Harry Benjamin. He was a creator of the original standards of care to treat transgender patients.

Can you give me a quick idea of who he was? Yeah, Harry Benjamin is a really important and fraught, but also deeply interesting figure in the history of transmedicine. He was basically the architect of transition-related healthcare in the mid-20th century in the United States. And he worked alongside many other medical practitioners actually to develop what came to be known as the standards of care. He's a figure that was lionized by many as somebody who was sort of on the side of trans people in the 1950s and 1960s and actually enabled a very small handful of folks to access transition-related technologies, surgery hormones, etc. But he's been

overwhelmingly critiqued, I think, in the following decades by trans activists who have understood his standards of care is deeply problematic, invested in a model of medical gatekeeping that really only enabled access to transition for folks who were understood to be passable post-transition, so to abide by very, very sort of stereotypical white bourgeois, Eurocentric gender norms. I want to talk to you specifically about mental health screening, right? That was a key component of whether or not Benjamin referred his trans patients for gender affirming surgeries or hormones, which, by the way, is still part of the latest version of the standards, right? Like, talk to me about that initial purpose of that screening.

There had already been a long history of understanding trans folks is deeply pathological and is suffering from a mental health condition that came to be known as transsexuality. So Benjamin was really invested in developing trans medicine as respectable and only treating patients that would appear in their lives post-transition in ways that worked against this pathological understanding of trans people and instead operated in the public sphere as respectable, gender-conforming, heterosexual, and deeply sort of normal appearing folks by mid-20th century standards. So his emphasis on mental health screenings was really a way of vetting folks to make sure that they were is invested in the kind of respectability politics around gender and sexuality that he was.

So he didn't develop a bad reputation for offering trans-related care. Right. So it's like partially about their reputation and conforming to this very like binary gender presentation. And then another part of this motivation, right, was that Benjamin and his colleagues feared patients would regret medical transitions and then retaliate against doctors who delivered their care. And we still see this idea of regret, right, being a means to deny access to gender affirming care for trans folks today. But that fear has never coalesced as they imagined it, right? So the historical record bears out the fact that is access to transition-related. healthcare has spread, has grown on very, very few people who transition surgically, hormonally regret those decisions. So that fear that really very much shape the development

of the initial standards of care in the mid-20th century has proven unfounded. That said, we still have pretty rigorous standards of care. They've transmuted over the years. And in some ways, they're much, they've produced a much more accessible medical model. than Harry Benjamin had initially developed. But there still is gatekeeping in relationship to access to transition related care. And it's still, in large part, circulating, that gatekeeping circulates around questions of regret, medical liability. And also, I would say still a certain respectability politic around transness.

When this initially started, this was like large, large majority, if not all cis doctors, right? We start to see a little bit of a change more recently, right? And that came in part because of the role community health clinics played in changing the dynamics of who's making a decision about who can access gender affirming care. There's actually a very long history going back at least four decades, if not longer, of trans folks critiquing and protesting the imposition of the Benjamin's standards of care. So they were initially codified beyond Benjamin's clinic in 1979 by an organization that was initially named the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. And that's the organization that later became the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which is the current organization that develops and sets standards of care. And from the moment that those initial standards of care were published in 1979, we see in trans activist organizations, archives, enormous pushback from trans people that called out those standards of care for being

exclusionary insofar as they necessitated mental health evaluation, often paid for out of pocket, for long periods of time, three months or longer, in many cases, years, before folks could access hormones. And they also necessitated that folks engaged in what was called colloquially the real life test, which meant they had to live in their chosen gender for at least a year, if not two years or more, before they were given access to surgery. And in some cases, even given access to hormones, at enormous personal cost, right? You can imagine transitioning on the job in 1982 and living in your chosen gender full time, which was the requirement of the real life test, ruined a lot of lives, right?

So that being a barrier to access pissed a lot of people off in short. Yeah, I mean, I can imagine. And eventually, trans people did become part of developing the standards of care guidelines. They were part of that process, right? Tell me about how that unfolded. There was enormous tension from what I've been able to discern in the archival record. So trans folks were very, very slowly included in H. Bigden and later W. Path only because of enormous transcommunal pressure that was placed on the doctors, where folks in multiple moments proposed that,

the standards of care that W. Path established just be dismissed and trans folks establish their own standards of care and become their own clinicians, right? Provide care for one another outside of the sort of tyranny of the standards of care established by W. Path. And they were very slowly and very reluctantly, from what I understand, brought on first as community consultants, so not as members of the board of W. Path. And by the time we get to the mid-2000s, we see the first trans person occupying the chair of the W-Path Board. That was Stephen Whittle in 2007. And that was after decades of trans communal pressure.

So we have all of these issues of access that are very present in the systemic inequities in our health care system, right? And then we also have this gatekeeping that we've outlined, you know, that are kind of set out by the standards themselves. I'm wondering, can those standards be helpful? I think that some form of standards of care can be helpful insofar as there are many medical practitioners that are relatively uninformed about trans-specific medicine. So having there be easy access to some sort of standards of care, right, that can help, for instance, primary care doctors who are working with a trans patient and they haven't had trans patients before. But the current standards of care, I think, still have quite a ways to go. And we're also in a situation

where W. Path is a transnational organization. So not only are they setting standards of care in North America, but all across the world. So it's hard to think about what the field of trans health care might look like in the absence of W.Path. You study history. You have all this knowledge in the context of history. You're obviously paying attention to what's going on today. you know, what lessons can we learn and what do you hope to see in the future for this type of care? I think that going back to at least the early 1990s, there have been at least a handful of trans activists who have called for informed consent and the maximization of bodily autonomy is the standard for trans-related medical care. So what that means effectively on the ground is folks should have all. of the medical information that they need to make an informed decision at their disposal,

readily available, and that when they make an informed decision, doctors should listen to that, and harm should be minimized insofar as if people have contraindicating medical conditions, those should be known and explored, right, before going on a hormonal regimen, for instance, or undergoing surgery. But beyond that, the decision for transition is entirely in the hands of trans people themselves, and that's a model that I have ascribed to for as long as I I kind of remember, as long as I've been thinking about trans-related medical care. I want to thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate you.

Yeah, thank you so much. Hill Malatino, Assistant Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies and Philosophy at Penn State University based in State College, Pennsylvania. Big thanks to Cassius Adair for consulting with us on this segment. After the break, how the Cherokee Nation Seed Bank is saving heirloom seeds from being lost. This is Science Friday. I'm Maddie Safaya. And I'm John Dankoski, and we both want to wish you and the Earth, a happy Earth Day this weekend. Okay, take a moment to think about your family heirlooms, those things you pass down generation to generation that tell a story about who you are and where you come from. Did you ever think about seeds being a part of that story? This year, the Cherokee Nation is continuing its program to distribute heirloom seeds to tribal citizens.

It's a program that's been running since 2006. Today I'm joined by Feather Smith, ethnologist for the Cherokee Nation, here to talk with us about how Cherokee heirloom seeds have been cultivated, planted, and preserved. Feather, thanks so much for joining us and welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. So tell us about the seed bank. Why did it start? It actually started with a question from one of our former council members.

She wanted to see a Cherokee seed represented in these Fall Bar Global Seed Vault in Norway. but the seed that they were originally considering, we had already kind of suspected, but the team at the time went ahead and did the research and what they found out was it was one of the very many seeds out there that is Cherokee only in name. We consider Cherokee seeds to be things that were actually cultivated by the tribe. And most of the seeds that were cultivated by the tribe were done before European contact. The seed that they were looking at was something that was cultivated in the 1800s by an individual. And so that question kind of got our council and our administration at the time going, well, we know that the Cherokees had been known for growing all of these seeds. So where are our seeds that we would have had? And as we started looking for those seeds, what we found out was that we really couldn't find hardly anything within the Cherokee Nation in northeastern Oklahoma.

So we had to start reaching out to a lot of different entities. We reached out to the Eastern Band of Cherokees, some different groups. to try to find some of those Cherokee seeds. We had to do research to make sure that these were indeed Cherokee seeds and had followed the lineage down from that time period. But the next issue that we ran into was that none of the seeds were being grown for genetic preservation. So they were being grown by Cherokee families for personal uses,

but they weren't actually being grown to ensure that the genetic properties of these seeds were going to be maintained. So we let our administration at the time know that they were are basically at risk for being lost. And then that became the new mission at that point was to actually make sure that we got a hold of these seeds, that we had them all together, and that we were growing them for genetic preservation. That's a fascinating history.

So tell me a bit about the heirloom seeds that you're preserving. What crops do you grow? So Cherokees were specifically known for growing the three sisters, corn, beans and squash, although we were really had a longer history with corn and beans. In that three sisters method, you would plant the corn first. and we actually have, currently we have four varieties of corn. We suspect that at one point we had far more seeds than we do now, but we would grow those four varieties of corn.

Next in that method, you would plant the beans, which are all pole beans, which would be allowed to crawl up the corn. The corn provides the pole for those, and we grow four different varieties of pole beans. And then the last part of that three sisters method would be the squash, which branches out along the ground. And we also have several varieties of gourds, which are sort of funny in that They're all considered to be old world or they're gourds that are actually native to the Mediterranean region, but they predate contact in North America. They predate European contact.

So they have been here for thousands of years. Nobody's really quite sure how they went from the Mediterranean to North America, but we have been growing gourds for a long time. And then we also grow things like native tobacco. Wow. So how exactly are these seeds different from the packets that I'd buy at the store? And I mean, a lot of people throw around the term heirloom when they're talking about growing vegetables in their gardens. So tell me, feather, why are these seeds different? These are all heirloom genetic.

So at one point, you know, we had hundreds and hundreds of different varieties of apples. We had hundreds of different varieties of corn over time kind of due to GMOs and big seed corporations. All of that has really been whittled down to just a few varieties. And there's a few different reasons for that. Part of it is, you know, when you're going to sell something at the store, you want to sell what's popular, you want to sell what's easy to grow. And then there's also issues with cross-pollination and certain varieties. So if you grow two different types of corn in one area, they're going to cross-pollinate if they're

pollinating at the same time. And you end up with corns that are a little bit like both. And so as a result, all of these different varieties of plants, these species that we eat, have all been whittled down to really just a few varieties over the years. and that means that for all of those other hundreds of varieties that have always been out there, they're all kind of at risk of eventually disappearing because nobody's growing them. You know, seeds are only going to remain good for so long. So talk us through the process of producing new seeds and preserving these seeds long term.

What do you have to do? So we actually have, currently we have a pretty small site and we just have the one Cherokee Nation, Arlen Garden and native plant site. Now we do luck out that we've got one or two employees who are also able to grow with their private residence. But that means that in any given year, we can only grow one variety of corn, one variety of bean, and one of our cucurbits on site. And then hopefully we're able to grow something else at the private residences. So we'll start, of course, by planting in the spring. We just got beans in the ground here in Northeast Oklahoma last week.

Possibly this week, maybe next week, we'll start looking into planting some of our corn. corn and our squash. Obviously, we're going to spend all summer long growing that. Come this fall, it kind of depends on what we're talking about. We'll start harvesting our corn somewhere between July to August, depending on when it actually gets in the ground and starts doing well. We'll continue to harvest things like the beans and the squash up until our first frost. Once we've harvested everything, it will come inside to a room in our offices where we have drying racks laid out. We will start by letting everything just dry, for a few weeks, then we will actually shell the beans, we'll shuck open the corn, get all of the

seeds removed from that, continue to let it dry for a couple of more weeks until we're ready to start doing inventory, at which point we can start ordering all of our supplies to get that package stuck into individual seed packets, get back into the seed bank, and it'll be ready to be distributed to our citizens, hopefully by February or March of the following year. That's an enormous amount of work, it sounds like. My goodness. One thing, though, feather, I want to ask you about is how growing crops for the Cherokee Nation is different now versus pre-colonial times when your lands were in a different place, in a very different climate in the U.S.

It definitely has its challenges, and it is a little bit different. So a lot of our writings, a lot of our traditions talk about growing in that Three Sisters method. And that's how most people still want to try to grow today. In Oklahoma, that is a challenge to do because of our high heats and our extreme humidity that we run into here. Because the corn tends to do much better in those high heats, things like beans do not. So our beans actually quit pollinating after we get above 93 degrees Fahrenheit. And that becomes a struggle because a very big portion of Oklahoma summers is spent above 93 degrees Fahrenheit. So we have to plant our beans as early in the spring as the temperatures will allow. And then we also look to try to get a fall harvest on the beans, which I don't think was something that we were traditionally doing.

It's also kind of similar issues with our squash. They will grow well. They do okay in the heat, but they get stressed pretty easily. And we now have bacterial wilt here, which is not something that we had when we lived in the southeast. and the high Oklahoma temperatures combined with that wilt will stress the plants off enough to cause them to die pretty quickly. And so we're constantly struggling with keeping those plants cool enough and the high afternoon heats here in Oklahoma so that way they'll stay alive all summer long and eventually give us a good harvest. So it definitely comes with its challenges.

Feather, before I let you go, you mentioned the big process, all the work it takes to to harvest and package up these seeds. Why is it so important to get these seeds into the hands of Cherokee citizens? So when we initially started this project, it was never really, as I kind of mentioned earlier, we did not start it with the idea of necessarily starting a seed bank. It was just to preserve genetics. But that first year that everybody had started, they had grown all of these seeds and found out that we really just needed a small amount for our genetics.

We store our genetics in a couple different places, but even then we had gallons and gallons of seeds, we just didn't need all of that. And so the idea is, okay, now what do we do with all of these seeds? And it was natural to say, we're going to give this back to our community. And the tribal way of thinking is that something that is Cherokee. So our seeds don't belong to any one person, and they don't belong to any one entity. They belong to the tribe, and that's the tribe as a whole. And so we wanted to be able to have these seeds available for any Cherokee because these seeds belong to all of us, and they are naturally theirs too. And it also helps preserve tribal traditions, culture, language. And so it's really allowing a revamp in not only the

heirloom genetics, but in our traditions as well. That's a great place to leave it. Feather Smith is an ethnologist for the Cherokee Nation. She's based in Toliqua, Oklahoma. Feather, thank you so much for bringing us the story. I really appreciate it. Well, don't. Thank you for having me on. For a look inside the Cherokee heirloom garden and an illustration of a few Cherokee heirloom plants and their very cool illustrations, you can check out Science Friday.com slash seeds. John Tinkoski here with my co-host. Hi, Maddie. You've got a story for us now? Yeah, it's all about the myth of the alpha wolf. Hold it. The alpha wolf is a myth. This big, tough wolf? I thought that was a true story. Nope, wrong again, John. As usual, this term just will not go away. And the two places I heard it a bunch when I was reporting it, dog training and insecure men on the internet.

Insecure men on the internet. I can't believe that. I know, right? But the more I reported on it, the more I realized this story is really about how science works and how people use it to confirm their beliefs, whether it's true or not. And it's a little bit about what happens when scientists get something wrong and it becomes wildly popular. So for that, we got to start with Dr. Dave Meach. He was part of popularizing. the term, and he has spent decades telling anybody who will listen that he and other scientists got it wrong. He's now a senior research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey and founder of the International Wolf Center, and he's joining me from St. Paul, Minnesota. Dave, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Maddie.

All right, Dave, so let's get into it. The term Alpha Wolf was originally coined by Rudolph Schenkel in 1947. Tell me about the wolves in that particular study. Well, I should give you a little background first. At that time, you know, science knew very little about wolves. About all science knew, and that's all Schenkel would have known, is that they live in a pack. He knew they how old and all that. But as far as their social structure was concerned, they lived in a group of animals. And he wanted to study the behavior of animals in a group, in this case, the wolves. And so he wanted to do. that in captivity. To do that, he had to make a pack. And so he just got a bunch of wolves, one or two from some zoo somewhere, another couple from another place, threw them all together, and that was his wolf pack. Now, it turns out, he didn't know it at the time, but that's not how a wolf pack is organized. A wolf pack is basically a family, very analogous to a human family, a set of parents and their offspring.

But Schenkel didn't know that. So he brought all these unrelated wolves together. And when they put them all in the same enclosure, they did what quite a few species would do. They fought, figured out just who's the boss. And yeah, and so it turned out that the males fought and determined who was the top rancor and the females did the same.

And so Rudolph Shunkel decided to name the top-ranking male, the alpha male, and the top-ranking female, the alpha-female. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So we fast forward to the 60s, right? You are doing a lot of research. You're writing a book. And you wrote a book that included that term. Tell me a little bit about that in your role in this term. The book I wrote was supposed to be a compendium of just about all that was known about wolves at that time, including Schenkel's work.

Since I didn't know any better, I accepted what Schenkel said and put that in the book. And that was in 1968. The book was published in 1970. When it came out, that book ended up being a bestseller. So that told the public that in a wolf pack you have the alpha male and the alpha. a female. And that book was in print until last year. So over 50 years. And I knew before 2022 that that was not correct. But it wasn't until 1999 that I published what essentially would be a correction of that. The book comes out, right? For various reasons, people are latching on to this idea. And then you realize that,

Maybe this isn't quite right. When did you realize that? But it wasn't until I actually got to watch a family group up close that my wheels started turning about, you know, the individual interactions amongst the pups and the adults and all that. And so that was when I went to Ellsmer Island, far northern Canada, where the wolves were not afraid of people and I could actually live right with them each summer. So I did that from 1986 to 2010. Wow. And as I did that, you know, there was no doubt as to who was the mother and who was the father. And then they had the yearlings and the pups.

And that varied a little bit from year to year. But basically there was just that was the way the family was organized. So it was clear that there was a dominance hierarchy. That was not a problem. As we got into the 90s, we put rules in. Yellowstone National Park. You know, I could watch them as well, and I did that. In all of those observations, the ones at Ellesmere and the ones in Yellowstone, I could see that how those packs formed was just a young animal from one pack, I say a maturing yearling or two-year-old,

male or female, both the same as they mature. They leave the pack and they circulate around the population, find an vacant place where there are no other wolves, find each other and mate and produce their own offspring, and that's how a pack forms. What I didn't see was wolves fighting each other to come to the top of a pack. In other words, the social order in a pack was automatically established when the pack was established, just merely by the adults producing pups And those offspring then, just like in a human family, naturally just being subordinate to their parents. You know, when these original studies were done back in the 40s, you know, this idea of the tough, dominant male was very much mainstream. Do you think that could have influenced how the original data was interpreted rather than, you know, we put all these wild wolves in one pack in captivity?

Oh, I wouldn't doubt that at all. Yeah. And, you know, we do have these human dominance hierarchies, with the genital being at the top and all that. So we recognize human dominance hierarchies. And so, yeah, I don't doubt that that was a factor when Schenko did his study. Okay, Dave, this was wonderful. I really appreciate you joining me today. Thanks so much for coming on. Well, you're quite welcome.

I enjoyed it, Maddie. Thank you. Dr. Dave Meach is a senior research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey and founder of the International Wolf Center, based in St. Paul, Minnesota. After the break, how the myth of the alpha wolf shows up in our everyday lives. Stick with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Maddie Safaya.

And we're back talking about the myth of the alpha wolf, the idea that a top dog fights to rule a wolf pack. Before the break, wolf researcher Dr. Dave Meach told us about how he realized the alpha wolf largely doesn't exist. Instead, wolf packs are more like families with a breeding pair, a mama, a dad guiding the pack. Dave has been trying to correct the record for decades, but the Alpha Wolf idea just won't go away. You'll hear about it everywhere, like in TV shows. I am the alpha.

In commercials. You will begin to notice you can outrun, out climb, out throw, out jump, out sleep, out drink, out brag, and outperform the competition. It's become synonymous with a particular. particular type of masculinity. Each and every one of us can be alpha. Being alpha, it's in all of us, as long as we embrace the spirit of alpha. It even informs how we train our dogs. We find out the top five ways to become the alpha amongst your Siberian Huskos. Come on, let's go. Here to talk about all that are Anna Marie Johnson, Ph.D. candidate and canine behavior consultant at Arizona State

University based in Tempe, Arizona, and Dr. Lindsay Palmer, a social and behavioral scientist who studies the human animal bond at the UMass Chan Medical School in Massachusetts. Thank you both for joining me. Thank you. Thank you. It's really nice to be here. Yeah, absolutely. Anna Marie, let's start with you.

You study dog behavior. You've trained dogs for a long time. Tell me a little bit about how this term alpha wolf shows up in your world. When I was dog training, I would have a lot of clients kind of in my introduction sections, and they would talk about how they didn't feel comfortable letting their dog on the couch because they didn't want their dog to think it was alpha over them. And that always just hurt my heart because I was just like, well, if you want to have your dog on the couch to cuddle, go for it.

Your dog's not going to all of a sudden assume this hierarchical composition and think it rules the roost. Right. So there's a lot of this traditional mentality that has been described in the literature. And it's just kind of perpetuated down the line and has gotten a resurgence through television and social media. And so that has trickled down to the general public. Yeah. And I know that there's a bit of a divide in the dog training community. There are people who use a more reward-based training like treats and toys and kind of exactly what it sounds like.

And then there's those that use what's called aversive training, basically making your dog physically or emotionally uncomfortable to get them to kind of do a desired behavior like physically manipulating them or using a shock collar, for example. What is that tension? And how does the elf wolf play into that? Totally. So I jokingly say it's not even just like a gap or a divide. It's kind of a chasm. And it comes down to really the two kind of. camps, so to speak, what people kind of generally say are positive reinforcement. So they're using, as you said, treats and toys in order to kind of get behaviors and modify behaviors in dogs. So as opposed to there being more of what colloquially is called kind of balance training, where they're also using rewards and treats and play. But rather than trying to provide an alternative behavior for the dog to choose, they'll choose to correct the behavior, right? They're trying to

punish the behavior, decrease the likelihood it's going to happen again. And so that can be using physical manipulation. It can be using aversive tools like a prong collar or electronic shock collar. And all that kind of ties into this dominance idea where there's this concept that in order for the dog to do the behavior you want, you kind of have to exert some type of control over it. And once again, this idea that if you give your dog an inch, they're going to take a mile. And And so you need to kind of be a very strict, controlled environment, this leader of the PAC mentality that some dog trainers within aversive communities do have. I want to clarify, it's not everyone. But that is kind of that kind of dominant mentality that some trainers within certain camps do have.

Okay, so what do the data tell us about these two different types of training? Generally speaking, in the last, I would say, 20 years or so, the scientific literature has provided, some insight into the fact that non-aversive, so training with treats and rewards, is better for dogs' welfare, whether that be their stress or even actually cognition. They perform better on different tests. They can do better training, as opposed to aversive methods where dogs are performing more stress-related behaviors and performing worse on different cognition tests. Okay, so it looks like from the data that we have now, and I know. know we always need more, that the positive reinforcement training seems to be best for the welfare

of the dog in most cases. Are there situations where aversive methods are appropriate? That's a tough question. So there's no doubt that punishment works. But there's a lot of caveats to that use of punishment. And so I'm strictly talking about, let's talk about shock, right? So the idea of a shock collar, shock does work. We know that. The problem is that the general dog owner is going to have a difficult time with implementing correct timing, knowing what correct device is going to be right for their dog, knowing what level. So there's so many caveats to it that it runs the potential risk that there could be fallout for your dog. Yeah. And Lindsay, you've actually got some preliminary data, essentially asking if exposing people to this idea of dominance, like the

alpha wolf, for example, actually leads them to train dogs in a way that mimics that. Yeah, so in our ongoing work, we find that near exposure to dominance theory or other sorts of dominance hierarchies between dogs doesn't give us a complete picture of why people use aversive methods. In our work, we found that the reason why dominance theory predicts the endorsement of aversive methods is because it's mediated by hegemonic masculinity, which is the culturally epitomized or idealized definition of manhood. And so the reason reason why that dominance theory predicts the endorsement of aversive methods is because of beliefs in traditional gender norms and in particular hegemonic masculinity. Right. And it's probably not

surprising to, you know, somebody like you who like studies this human animal bond. But I really thought, like, maybe this theory came from this alpha wolf. And maybe people are just hearing about the alpha wolf and that's like enough. But it's not. It's like based in this societal belief. belief system, right? Yeah. And so that was definitely our inspiration for looking at this variable, is that our own social scripts, sort of our beliefs about what is going on in our own culture might actually be mapping on and how we interpret animal behavior. Yeah. And Anna Marie, you looked into gender and dog training too, right? I mean, what kind of people are more likely to, like, alpha wolf their dogs? I did a comparison of a hundred dog trainers.

across the United States. And I just was pulling information from their websites. Someone was presenting as male or female. I coded that as a male or female joiner and looked at what kind of method they used to train. And while there definitely were female aversive trainers in the mix, statistically there were more female trainers that would identify to a non-aversive or a positive reinforcement training methodology compared to men. Okay, so let me make sure I've got everything right. It's not just that people, you know, like heard about this alpha-wolf study or heard, you know, in movies or whatever, and we're like, okay, this is the way we train dogs. It's more like this observation fits really well into an already established worldview of this, like, dominance-based masculinity.

and the people who tend to accept that, kind of use this as evidence to kind of dominate their dogs in that way. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I think that, you know, that's definitely something we see in our work is that, first of all, establishing dominance and control is really central to achieving the idealized status of manhood. And so we definitely sort of see how, at least in our work, how dominance theory is really mapping on.

So one of the things that we found, for example, in our work is this relationship was most meaningful for men. So even though all genders in our study, you know, if they endorsed hegemonic masculinity, this would lead to the endorsement of aversive methods. We found that it was most meaningful for the cisgender men in our sample. Just sort of really mapping onto social scripts that we already have. And we're using that social information to be able to understand and navigate our world with animals. Can I ask you about that, Lindsay?

because that, I think for a lot of people listening, you know, it might feel a little strange talking about, you know, like human gender and our relationship with pets. But our human biases very much impact the way we think about animals and the way we interpret data, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's a ton of literature out there about, you know, experimenter bias, basically how our knowledge is socially situated. So that comes a lot from black feminist thought is stand. point theory or the idea that our knowledge is socially situated. So our social positions and our experiences impact how we interpret the world around us. Your beliefs and your experiences and your knowledge, you know, are situated within your position, basically. And this is what is what you're using to navigate your social world. And so our beliefs, attitudes do impact our behavior.

Right, right. Can you give me like just some examples of like performing gender in our relationship with animals, you know, other than this wolf study? Oh, yeah. So I think that using Aversive Methods, for example, is actually a kind of a type of gender performance in dog training because using Aversive methods based off of what the definition of hegemonic masculinity is, is sort of this emotional toughness, right? Or even, you know, putting clothes on your dog might be a more feminine gendered performance. So we do have those sorts of cultural. culturally acceptable ways of interacting with our animals that are based off of our gender. Okay. So back when this original research was coming out, right, like 40s, 50s, 60s, it was all being

done by men in a time where very stark traditional gender roles were the standard in the U.S. Do you think that could have played a role in how these men interpreted the wolf's behavior? Yeah. So, you know, sort of throughout psychological research, there's actually been you know, a phenomenon of, you know, especially because in so many, so many studies, like, we have a lot of underrepresentation of certain types of social groups. So we often find that a dominant cultural perspective is often the lens through which we interpret results. So for example, and this is completely unrelated to dogs, but like even the research on gender differences in heart attacks, those results were really interpreted from the lens of male bodies, right? And

And so we actually didn't know exactly how gender impacted the manifestation of different types of cardiac events until much later because we were generating knowledge from a very specific type of perspective in this research. I'm Maddie Safaya. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Yeah, it's really, it's kind of interesting to me that this Elf Wolf theory and the late dominance theory have really stuck around, even with very little science backing them in these context. Lindsay, can you speculate why that is? I think part of the reason why it sticks around is just

because it has, you know, really infiltrated popular culture. And so it's just a narrative that it just refuses to die because it sort of just exists within our social consciousness. And for many people, they just, you know, repeat this type of information and they don't really know the source of it. It's just sort of out there and it exists. And so it's like playing a giant telephone game with everybody around you, right? Where, you know, maybe there is this education available to get a more informed perspective on their companion animals, but unfortunately, this information is just out there. So it's the most widely available information because you can just, if it's in popular culture, you can literally just walk up to anyone on the street and have this

regurgitated out you, right? Unfortunately, the way to deal with this sort of information is the way that you combat any type of misinformation, which is just actually very difficult. And then on top of that, from what we've seen in our studies, is that education alone at this point may not be the only answer. So we may also have to do some, you know, cultural change here and maybe even develop interventions around, you know, masculinity and encouraging a more healthy masculinity and showing people that there are other ways to have relationships with animals. that are not just dominating and controlling them. Absolutely.

Yeah, that leads me to like, you know, what I want to kind of close with. I want y'all to kind of speak to all the dog parents out there. I just got a new puppy, and I have been trying to figure out the best way to, like, train with her, bond with her, not have her openly disrespect me in public. You know, I'm hearing that the idea of pretending like I'm an alpha dog is unnecessary, and I would venture even weird because I'm not a dog. you know, what does a science say about some good ways for us to bond with our dogos? Yeah, so I would wholeheartedly agree.

You know, your dog does not think you are a dog. I think we sometimes aspire a lot of knowledge on our dogs and then sometimes have them just as these naturalistic behaviors. And there's a weird cognitive dissonance that happens for some people there. But I would say, honestly, this most simple thing, you know, not. getting into the training debate is just to kind of provide opportunities where you are together. The science shows that it's a great stress reducer just to be present with your dog and have a dog present around a human. So it could be you both sitting on the couch. If you so choose, your dog will not think they are alpha over you. But if your dog pee's on the couch, it's a different sport,

right? But if your dog is respectful on the couch and is totally fine, welcome your dog up and sit on the couch and watch something together. Or go on a walk. Any of these kind of really chill bonding experiences can actually help that creation to kind of have your dog seek you as a point of comfort and resource for them. Your dogs are not silly. They know there exists a relationship because we provide everything for them. adding that as a training to kind of power on to the dynamics that are already there isn't necessary. Right. So I'm hearing like your dog knows that you're kind of the boss because you provide it's food and shelter. You know, there's there's no push and pull there necessarily.

We control all our dogs' resources, but needing to heighten that relationship by exerting physical control over our dogs in relation to training just isn't necessary. The dogs know that we exist and provide them food, shelter, water, access to resources, access to other dogs. That's all there. And so you are totally fine in letting your dog on the couch. It is not a slippery slope. All right. So check out your dog trainers. And it's okay to cuddle your dog.

That's what I'm taken from this. Yes, exactly. All right. Okay. Thank you both for joining me today. Thank you so much. I had fun. Thank you.

Anna Marie Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate and canine behavior consultant at Arizona State University based in Tempe, Arizona. Dr. Lindsay Palmer, a social and behavioral scientist who studies the human animal bond at the UMass Chan Medical School in Massachusetts. If you missed any part of this program or would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts. You can say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or you can email us. The address is SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Send us feedback and tell us what you'd like us to cover too. I'm John Dinkowski. And I'm Maddie Safaya. Have a great weekend.