[the_af]

Disney is an extreme offender here (I mean, dropping lemmings off a cliff, what where they thinking?), but I hear some of what we "know" about animals is sometimes an honest mistake and may be the result of an involuntary artifacts of researcher involvement.

Don't know if it's true, but a couple of examples I've read:

It's not true that wolves live in "packs" and that there are alpha and beta males. In truth wolves form families of the breeding couple and their cubs, and that's it. Saying daddy and mommy wolf are the "alphas" is a trivial assertion. But apparently this dynamic is broken for wolves in captivity, and the artificial alpha/beta thing arises.

Female praying mantises do not regularly chomp on the male's head while mating. It's true they are highly cannibalistic and will eat another mantis if they can, but while mating the males usually have tactics to avoid this fate; it's only under observation by researchers that the female gets more aggressive and the male less prone to escaping.

Not sure if either is true, but I'm willing to entertain the notion they may be.

[consumer451]

Yes, the Alpha Wolf myth appears to be a very damaging slice of b.s.

https://phys.org/news/2021-04-wolf-dont-alpha-males-females....

[LudwigNagasena]

What is very damaging about it? Beyond facilitating A/B/O fan fiction, of course.

[namanyayg]

That people (usually males) believe this fanfiction also applies to human society and change their behaviours to be perceived as alpha

[LudwigNagasena]

I don’t think many people would base their behaviour off wolves, parrots, gudgeons, mollusks or whatnot. That’s such a random species to choose.

If anything, I would conjecture that the causality is actually in reverse: the ideas of pecking orders and dominance hierarchies were well-established in the scientific communities among zoologists and social psychologists (and even in common parlance), so people who studied wolves didn’t question external validity of their studies on captive wolves.

[the_af]

The wolf is not a random animal. It's a big predator associated in popular culture with aggression and dominance, e.g "a wolf in sheep's clothes", "the wolf of wall street", etc.

[wryoak]

Both of those describe deceivers (though the latter may not originally have), not aggressors or dominators.

Given humanity’s long history of antagonism towards wolves, it is a very strange animal after which to choose to model one’s own behavior.