Denali – Receiving Renewed Focus

As stated in the last log, Denali appears to be enjoying a bit of peace from Aidan’s lack of confidence in terms of how Aidan typically manages the pack. However, in the past several days other members of the pack are doing a bit more testing of Denali. Recently Denali was the focus of Axel who was biting, chasing, doing ride-ups and generally testing him.  But, Denali is not showing a loss of confidence, in fact, he’s been prancing around with a high tail and doing more Raised Leg Urinations that we’ve seen in a while. This isn’t Denali’s first experience with maturing yearlings, Boltz showed some of the same traits as a yearling. The interesting observations in the last few weeks relates to the the relationship with Boltz and Denali.  When Boltz loses confidence, instead of running away with a low tail, he runs to Denali and obnoxiously submits.  The problem of an obnoxious submission is that the energy is unstable leaving Denali to display airplane ears of uncertainty.  The benefit of the obnoxious submission is that the behavior can include some social grooming.  Denali’s facial expression shows that he does enjoy that part of the interaction.