Dominance (ethology)

Dominance in ethology is an 'individual's preferential access to resources over another'. Dominance in ethology is an 'individual's preferential access to resources over another'. Dominance in the context of biology and anthropology is the state of having high social status relative to one or more other individuals, who react submissively to dominant individuals. This enables the dominant individual to obtain access to resources such as food or potential mates at the expense of the submissive individual, without active aggression. The absence or reduction of aggression means unnecessary energy expenditure and the risk of injury are reduced for both. Dominance may be a purely dyadic relationship, i.e. individual A is dominant over individual B, but this has no implications for whether either of these is dominant over a third individual C. Alternatively, dominance may be hierarchical, with a transitive relationship, so that if A dominates B and B dominates C, A always dominates C. This is called a linear dominance hierarchy. Some animal societies have despots, i.e. a single dominant individual with little or no hierarchical structure amongst the rest of the group. Horses use coalitions so that affiliated pairs in a herd have an accumulative dominance to displace a third horse that normally out-ranks both of them on an individual basis. The opposite of dominance is submissiveness. The first published systematic study of dominance in animals was by Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe who described in his Ph.D. dissertation of 1921, the social behaviour and priority of access to food by hens. This led to the colloquial term 'pecking order' describing the hierarchical system of social organization in chickens, although it is sometimes loosely applied to other animals.