This is totally out of curiosity, but in your opinion would your dog's retain the same cohesive structure if you were out of the picture? Would they have formed it in the first place without your guidance?
Also, earlier you mentioned that you knew a really hard bitch that didn't like outside dogs, and wouldn't breed except to one specific male. What breed was she? (just really curious) I guess without seeing her myself, I would have interpreted that behavior as a type of dog aggression, similar to how some of the really game strains of bullies won't breed without being restrained. From what I understand, it's wouldn't be out of the question for a dog aggressive animal to not tolerate strange dogs, but to be comfortable with familiar ones.
And you also mentioned how some of the hard bite dogs will go for the handler if the handler is on the ground. Wouldn't that be pure prey drive? I guess I don't understand how that is a type of social behavior. But I don't know everything so maybe I'm missing something.
Also, I think the problem people are having with the "pack" model being used is that, nearly 100% of the time it refers to "wolf pack". They are the ones studied in the most detail, we have the most information about them, that is just how the term is used. And it has been proven to be an innaccurate behavioral model for training dogs. That is what people have an issue with. It can also be interpreted vaguely, like a "pack" of african wild dogs, who have a totally different social structure. It's been tainted by one association and is vague enough it could mean a million other different things. That makes it impossible to be concise with which is important in science.
And for the most part, I agree with your posts, just wanted to throw that in there so you don't misunderstand.
*note: the rest of this is directed at nobody in particular, it is just some observations*
We too have dealt with dogs packing up and killing livestock. Like I said before, dogs will pack up when it's to their benefit (bringing down large game), but these same dogs all split up when it was over. They didn't build dens together. They didn't live together and stake out a territory. They didn't band together to help raise the puppies of the dominant bitch because they all bred at will.
Most of them were feral or strays, a few of them were neighbor dogs (huskies, shepherds, and dalmations). Which is interesting, because the neighbor dogs lived as far as 5 miles apart from each other in a home/farm environment, had completely separate "packs" on their home turf in terms of the humans and other dogs they shared living space with. Specifically it was the husky and shepherd who chose to temporarily pack up with strangers and each other (though they lived 5 miles apart in separate households), they killed my cousins horse. They had packed up with these feral dogs on more than one occasion to take out livestock, but they didn't live together. They didn't go around staking out a territorial boundary with this group of animals. They didn't raise a litter of pups together. They simply got together to hunt, and when it was over went their separate ways. Extremely different from a wolf. I would not say their group consituted a "pack" in the behavioral sense. It was a group of loosely organized dogs hunting together.
It does seem to be an issue of semantics. To a lot of us on here, a "pack" is a group of tightly bonded animals that hunt/eat/den/ together and share the responsibilities of raising offspring, regardless of how closely related those offspring may be. Then there are social animals, who well, socialize, and sometimes cooperate when it benefits them. A lot of the body language and posturing is similar, but the whole underlying structure is really different. Then you have the non social animals, like bears, who pretty much are death to others of their own kind if they aren't interested in breeding.