IN PRAISE OF ALPHA
© melinda lerner 2008
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I am always seeking ways of capturing my subject’s inner self, their strengths and their weaknesses, a certain truthfulness. My photos usually tend to be erotic, sexual, raw. As my gentle Elvis a black poodle, exercised in the dog park, I started seeing past the French Poodles, the Labradoodles, the Chihuahua’s and the Puggles who were all bounding about, pulling tails and having fun. That in their play their real, nature was revealed; and I was taking pictures of wolves, of ritualized aggression and submission, of danger. The paradox of what 40 thousand years of human domestication has evolved our pets into.
The appeal to us of dogs is devotion, playfulness, affection and the resulting companionship their slavish love brings. Are we therefore so different to the Alpha wolves in the wolf pack? With our hound by our side we form a unit, a pack. Their purpose in our lives is similar to the role of an Omega wolf (the lowest ranking member) whose role often involves initiating play to relieve pack tension. The very things we find so unattractive about pack mentality are things we as humans are guilty of: although we strive not to, in reality, in business, in adolescence…we still hunt in packs, we still prey on the weakest. Wolves psychological warfare and rank order within a pack is established and maintained through as series of ritualized fights. Is this so different to human adolescence? Ritualized aggression in the fight to be an alpha dominate?
I finally understood the real disposition of those dogs playing ecstatically around me. I saw the wildness we have attempted to strip away through domesticity, and all it’s beauty and ferocity. In the city dog parks we can observe the true nature of the beast.
No dogs or humans were hurt during the making of this project.
