Yeah, I've been thinking about this for a while. It's not news to anyone in behavioral biology that the whole "alpha" thing doesn't really happen in free-living canids, but it's such an inextricable part of Werewolf genre that it's hard to imagine the game without it. Fortunately, I don't know that it's actually totally contradictory to the Garou experience.
Consider: most Garou packs are a bunch of non-relatives (often recent strangers) who happened to wind up at the same caern and are told to band together. This is actually not so different from the scenario in which the original Schenkel study was conducted. Garou packs are not usually composed of relatives, and they're definitely not defined by breeding rights, and they're composed of beings with human-level intelligence, if not always human-like thought patterns. All of this complicates things way beyond the typical wild family pack structure. Especially considering how Homid-dominated modern Garou society is, it's not even necessarily unreasonable to say that the emphasis on all the dominance/hierarchy stuff has been intensified due to contemporary human culture's perception of wolf social systems.
If this influences anything, it's probably how Lupus characters react to trying to pack as Garou. Their first pack was easy - it was their family. Packing with a bunch of strangers, some of whom have very different ideas about what a pack is, is sure to be a seriously confusing experience.
Topic: Things to think about (Read 4407 times)