2. The way I understand it, the original flawed research that showed enforced dynamics, dominance challenges, etc, was based on animals in captivity, while wolves in the wild turn out to live in fairly simple nuclear family units. That basically means that what we see about Alphas/Betas/etc could be taken as an example of (admittedly forced) 'found family' organization. And this actually maps to the sorts of packs you usually see when it comes to fiction and animal-people culture.