my dog exhibits insecurity (as discussed in the article) mostly in relation to me, as well as some strangers who she deems to be sketchy in some way. the first months were spent working through severe anxiety (and cleaning up overnight fear diarrhea) while slowly building trust at home. she was hyper-sensitive to my moods and movements, and would hyperventilate if she thought i was even slightly upset with her. this is why i think she was probably abused by her previous caretaker(s).
thankfully, she's gotten much better, and now enjoys a mostly carefree and social dog life, though she's still vigilant and standoffish at times with both humans and other dogs. i can definitely see parallels to human behaviors, and even use techniques you might use with people to build up her confidence (as well as curb unwanted behavior). she's been great overall, and i wouldn't trade her for the world.
lots of love, playful interaction, encouragement... and chicken treats. but it was mostly time, i'd say. she needed to know for herself that her environment, and most importantly i, was safe. even though she was scared, she was a willing participant, which was crucial (she was always very attentive, like she was always trying very hard to understand what was going on). sometimes, it was just ignoring her while i did my usual activities. other times, it was exhibiting positive attention on her, and minimizing opportunities for the negative.
i also worked on desensitizing her to certain triggers that would bring out fear aggression (which was rare, but as such, surprising when it happened), like reaching for her head, by doing it over and over at spontaneous moments to show her that it wasn't dangerous to her (and giving her treats for good behavior, and a tiny, gentle scolding for bad).
mind you, she was a mild case as far as all this goes, but it still required focused and prolonged attention.
We had our pup on an SSRI for about eight months when she was a puppy. We got her at three months old and she had been born in rescue. So we knew her history from birth and knew she wasn't abused, she was just a naturally very anxiety prone dog. After a month of being with us and just not getting over her anxiety (she was basically miserable whenever any humans were around) the vet suggested the drugs. They worked wonders, and after she'd grown a bit and come to accept us as "her people", we weened her off the drugs and all went well.
At four years old, she's still an anxious dog, and always will be, but she's content in her home life now and likes to be with us. She's still very wary of strangers, and really doesn't like being out in more human dense areas, but it's easy enough to keep her activities to things she likes. And she's decided that my mom and her animals are the best thing on the planet, so she gets lots of visits to "Gramma's farm".
I also have a rescue that acted like she might have been abused. She was really afraid of men in particular but not women.
It just took time. She’s still a little more shy around men 10 years later but it’s of no consequence. Once she realized how much we cared for her she turned around quickly.
> Tons of effort to keep that from happening, and to have a pet that doesn’t destroy your home?
It's their home too.
OP's situation was a rescue dog from a likely abusive previous home. There are often pets available for people who are not able to handle that situation; My dog peed on the rug occasionally for about 3 weeks, and pooped indoors twice, and it's not happened again in 3 years. To pull the "children" card, children make huge messes, cannot be unattended or unsupervised for years, destroy homes, and yet that's not seen as "burdensome"
> It’s not. You’re choosing to allow a very dirty animal to inhabit your home. There’s a difference.
My home with a dog is much cleaner than most of my friends with toddlers. My dog keeps herself _mostly_ clean and groomed, my friends kids do _not_.
> They also tend to not do things like eat your furniture, can be more regularly bathed, and smell a lot better, too.
Not all dogs chew destructively, and most that do tend to have other behavioural issues. Are you really claiming that children _aren't_ destructive to your home? My parents tell the story of the time I decided that the TV character was thirsty so I poured a soda into the VCR over the CRT TV and destroyed both of them. Dogs don't sweat, so they dont' _need_ to be bathed as regularly. Sure she rolls around in crap in the park every few days and gets hosed down in the bath, but that's about the extent of it really.
> Oh, and they’re humans. Did I mention that already?
Children being human doesn't mean that dogs don't deserve to coexist with us.
Children are burdensome full stop. They eat my money, which hurts me more than if they chewed on the furniture.
> Oh, and they’re humans.
Yes, they are. The waste of resources and pollution they imply is massive compared to dogs.
But why caring about the environment, there's a lot of everything for everyone laying around, isn't it.
> non-human animal is slotting itself
He hasn't. He roams around freely.
> You’re choosing to allow a very dirty animal
Yes it's my choice and it gets as dirty as my kid does. Guess what, they're animals. Did you notice already? They're animals like you.
It looks like the concept of dog ownership is making you worried or puzzled? In the past I also didn’t get dog ownership and now it makes sense to me, if that helps. I’m not saying that it should make sense to you (see also my earlier comment [1]).
I think the relationship is itself pathological, and it’s burdensome to the rest of us that have to deal with modern codependent dog owners bringing their ill-behaved pet everywhere.
As opposed to a cohort of self-centered, relationship handicapped, intolerant jerks prone to narrow mindedness and rude rants on discussion forums and elsewhere, I know which one I would prefer to have for a harmonious society and whom I find more offensive.
> self-centered, relationship handicapped, intolerant jerks prone to narrow mindedness and rude rants on discussion forums and elsewhere
You could easily be describing the dog owners here who were just confronted with the fact that their emotional codependency with a dirty animal — and tendency to replace healthy human relationships, foisting their pet onto others in public, at restaurants, on trails, et al — is not, in fact, a behavior subject to universal acclaim.
I agree about causing actual inconvenience in public places, this shouldn't happen. But why are you bothered by the fact that some people are emotionally codependent with a dirty animal? I think you should either let people and dogs enjoy each other; or show some actual proof that the human-dog relationship is harmful; but many sources say otherwise [1].
> it’s burdensome to the rest of us that have to deal with modern codependent dog owners bringing their ill-behaved pet everywhere.
I have had _far_ more issues with people bringing their ill behaved friends/children/parents places than I have with pets. If you go out to a café for lunch, it's acceptable to leave children run around because that's what kids do, but dogs are almost always kept quietly under the table out of the way. It's common for people to blast crappy music on the beach that everyone else around them has to listen to, or for them to leave rubbish behind them, yet it's expected (rightly so) that I pick up after my dog and keep her out of the way of other people on the beach.
The bit about pathological relationship seems very subjective. I'm guessing you've had bad experiences with dog owners or pets. Obviously the human-dog relationship should be good for all parties involved.
I agree about ill-behaving pets; a lot of people should take better care of their dogs. E.g. invest more in socialising, avoid places where the dog is uncomfortable, etc.
I live in a rural area, our dog has a doggy door and we have no fence. She’s completely free to leave. The same goes for my two dogs growing up.
They all would/would have defended me with their lives. I once had to charge a deer with a fawn that was stomping on my current (12 pound) dog, so you could say I’ve at least somewhat approached the same.
For what it’s worth I’m sure all of the dogs could have survived on their own, at least in the summer.
"They all would/would have defended me with their lives."
This can be seen as an instance of manipulation and deprivation of free will on a species level, as dogs have been deliberately bred by humans to have these traits.
Though, then again one could question whether animals (or humans, for that matter) have free will to begin with, even if they're not bred to have traits that are desirable to humans.
Even if that were remotely true, why would you assume co-evolution produced symbiosis instead of a parasitical relationship?
Now, the reality is, the modern pathological, codependent, indoor dog ownership model did not exist in any significant prevalence until the past twenty years.
Modern dogs are social creatures. They literally wouldn't survive in the wild. Even as far back as histories go, humans and dogs have had a symbiotic relationship.
To compare dog ownership to say, slavery or the like, is ludicrous. It's definite survival for the dog, and all too often survival for the human as well in the form of companionship, emotional support, and of course typical working dog duties.
I guess I understand your take from a logical, outside view. But not from someone who has ever lived with a dog.
> To compare dog ownership to say, slavery or the like, is ludicrous. It's definite survival for the dog, and all too often survival for the human as well in the form of companionship, emotional support, and of course typical working dog duties.
History tells us some people also had strong relationships with slaves as well. It doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the relationship being a massive power imbalance with no autonomy on one side. (I say this as a super happy dog owner)
Dogs don’t just survive, they thrive. In Romania the government resorted to mass killing of dogs because they bred so successfully. Also in poor countries and remote places where you wouldn’t expect there to be excess food for strays.
Dog ownership is very often slavery. The nature of the slavery is very explicit - the dog’s work is to sniff drugs all their life, or retrieve dead game, or guide people. In other cases you can read in this thread, a past owner has had a captive dog and abused them for who knows what reason.
I'll grant you that in most cases they did not choose to be with you on the day you brought them home. But aside from cases where they're constantly inside, fenced in, leashed, or the like, can you explain why they can't choose to leave? Plenty of animals stay when there's no external force preventing them from leaving.
As a personal anecdote, at a previous place where I lived (a large property), one day a cat showed up off the street. Plenty of cats would come and go relatively often, and they'd bolt if you got too close. This one was okay with being around humans. It looked hungry, so I gave it some food, and saw it again soon after. It wasn't long before it was living on the property full-time, outside. I fed it, and took it to the vet. It turned out she was pregnant, likely from before she arrived, and she ended up having the litter there.
Did I own that cat? If so, at what point did that ownership begin?
> They didn't choose to be with you and can't choose to leave, and you have the power of life and death over them.
This is an "interesting" mentality I see a lot. Ever dog I ever had was a stray and could leave if they wanted to. I don't really get people who think this way, but it seems really prevalent.
It is bizarre that you think the human/dog relationship is analogous to one with a raccoon.
You seem to disagree with the entire concept of domestication, which means you disagree with mountains of scientific facts along with billions of people's personal experiences with pets.
Domestication is a defined term referring to animals that have significantly evolved in instinct and, often, physiology to be useful and cooperative to humans. You can't domesticate a raccoon.
I don't neuter my dog? Wtf. The vast majority of Northern Europe also doesn't neuter their dogs. Hell, Norway apparently considers it animal abuse (which I think I agree with mostly due to the negative effects of lacking hormones)
The Norwegian Animal Welfare Law of 2010 §9, 2nd paragraph reads “Det skal ikke gjøres operative inngrep eller fjernes kroppsdeler på dyr uten at det foreligger forsvarlig grunn ut fra hensynet til dyrets helse.” - “No surgery or removal of body parts of animals can be done except when there is a proper reason considering the animal’s health”.
That means no tail dockings, no ear cropping, and no castrations.
It's complicated, though. I'd have preferred to keep my male dog intact, but once he matured he was constantly getting attacked by other males, and it made walks miserable for him, not to mention dangerous. To see how castration would affect him, we gave him a hormone implant which has the same effect, but wears off after a few months. He didn't get attacked any more, so we made it permanent.
He leads a safer, happier life now because we made that choice. It has certain downsides, like some loss of muscle tone and a greater tendency to put on fat, but it's totally manageable. It doesn't completely cut testosterone production, it just reduces it by 90% or so, as some is still made in the adrenal glands.
This is a tangent, but I recently spent some time trying to decide whether to neuter my cat. I don't know how different this is for dogs, but female cats tend to act as if they are in quite a bit of distress while in heat. They also tend to enter heat something like one week per month unless pregnant, and they go back to the same cycle a few weeks after giving birth.
So, a female cat in nature can either endure being in heat with no relief about a quarter of her life, or give birth about three times a year (wrecking her body). I'm not convinced neutering her was a less humane choice (neutered female cats also have the longest lifespan on average).
it was stressful for the first few weeks, but that's adoption, even with other humans. she's much better, and it was a rewarding experience for me, so win-win in my book.
she didn't want to poop uncontrollably, and knew it was 'bad', but she couldn't help it until she could get her own fear and anxiety under control. human babies poop uncontrollably too, for much longer even. eventually i learned to put pee pads everywhere in her (initial) sleeping area, and just threw out the ones that were soiled in the morning. it wasn't that big of a deal, and certainly didn't "destroy" anything.
Nothing wrong with you not understanding dog ownership; it requires a passion. Note that while you sacrifice something, you also get something in exchange. I guess it’s similar to how some people don’t want to have kids or start a company; nothing wrong with that either.
My vet saw me on day 3 with my rescue and he warned me it would be months to years to correct. He advised me as a first time owner to return the dog and I did.
Glad OP was a better person and had the time, patience and love to share.
Some dogs are easier than others. Don't worry about it. I also returned a dog where it just didn't work. Got a different one later and we bonded very well.
And you shouldn’t. I love dogs, I hate people and their dogs, mostly. They treat dogs like funny looking needy people instead of respecting them for what they are, animals with animal thoughts, animal feelings, and animal behaviors.
That's like hearing about someone who adopted an incontinent, abused child from foster care and loudly proclaiming how you don't understand child-rearing for the same reasons.
What I don't understand is letting them into your home. Disgusting. Some people even let them on their beds, which is truly bonkers. Why anyone would let naked dog butt, complete with poopy fur, onto their bed, is beyond understanding.
> What I don't understand is letting them into your home.
Then of course you wouldn't do it, and nobody is saying you should. But other people who have their dogs in their homes understand it just fine. Live and let live.
both my cat and dog sleep on my bed, and both are surprisingly clean and self-attentive about grooming. but like children, they do get dirty more easily and spread it more easily. that's why we have sinks and showers and washing machines, for them and for our own dirty selves.
and as with caretaking humans, i do clean my dog's (and very rarely, my cat's) butt with wet wipes if she happens to get some poop on her fur, but that doesn't happen too often since she doesn't like it either and positions herself to avoid it.
dogs need social interaction, especially with their humans and with their dog friends, to avoid (specific) behavioral problems. if you have only one dog, it's often easiest to fulfill that need by allowing it indoors to be with its human(s).
If your dog, inside or outside dog, has a poopy butt you should do something about it. Some breeds need trims back there from time to time.
I personally don’t understand people that get breeds that shed like crazy as indoor dogs, or people that get large dogs and keep them cooped up all day.
Letting dogs into your house is a cultural thing. Amongst old-school US Southerners who love their dogs, it's seen as bizarre. I'm pretty sure among most cultures who keep dogs, it's seen as bizarre.
> Where are you from that dogs are not seen as family members?
Where did you get that idea? My dogs absolutely are members of the family. They don't get to live in my house though, just like the dozens of other relatives I have who don't share my roof.
> Also what about children? They are not exactly known to be clean either.
Children don't enter the house with dirty feet. They don't lie in the dirt outside and then come and nap on the couch.
They wipe their butts and shower twice a day.
Most dogs live free, out in the open. I'd bet only a small proportion of the worlds dogs are kept indoors.
Just last week I saw Daniel Dennet get asked by an interviewer whether he had a dog, and what it might like to be his dog, with the implication that Dennet's takes on animal consciousness tend to diminish the relevance of a dogs thoughts or emotions as lacking meaningful sapience and self awareness because of their lack of a complex verbalized langage. He said he has had dogs, but is mostly allergic, and has a robot dog of some sort now, which I thought was a complete dodge of the question, and even later in the interview, it was as though he hadn't really thought his language model of self and consciousness though. He's got a new book out, which I should probably read as he's likely more of a writer than an interview, but I heckled my screen most of the way though anyway.
If this study has more details, it would be interesting to see what consequences it has for other theories of mind.
In my opinion that one view of his is obtuse, and TBH I'm happy that you agree with me about that, but he has many other views and overall he's extremely smart (according to me, and according to almost all philosophers). Perhaps sadly, obtuse ideas are not limited to obtuse people.
Insisting subjective experience isn’t real is like pissing on someone’s leg and telling them it’s raining.
Seriously, if you read the book, you realize his main angle of attack is (intentionally?) substituting a different definition of consciousness. The position he is arguing against is the existence of qualia/subjective experience, but the book is mostly about showing that we overestimate our capacity for higher order cognitive synthesis of sensory input. In new editions/epilogue/? (it’s been a while), he finally does address the hard problem (though doesn’t admit that his whole book misses the point), and just makes a few dismissive points.
When you say "substituting a different definition of consciousness", exactly what definition of consciousness was there in the first place such that one could usurp that throne?
What exactly is "subjective experience" and "qualia". For a moment lets go with the banal wikipedia example: "The 'redness' of red is a commonly used example of a quale" (followed by a graphic that is entirely just red pixels). When I take a picture with my phone, does the phone not experience "redness"? If so then consciousness and machine consciousness are trivial and we are done. If not then the "quale" of redness must involve some sort of processing which happens along the path from the eye to wherever-the-train-of-thought-lives. So suppose I write an app such that when I point my phone at something it either prints the words "that's red" or "that's not red". Is my phone experiencing the quale of red yet? How sophisticated must the processing get before my phone has subjective experience?
Thus we arrive at my real gripe and why I'm inclined to agree with Dennet. The entirety of the conversation around "subjective experience" and "qualia" seems to be a word game designed to rig the definition of consciousness so that machines can't have it. We could get all the way to a Turing-test-passing AI having this very conversation with you, and some people would still reject my consciousness and call me "a p-zombie without real qualia or subjective experience". It comes off as being in denial about materialism out of an egotistical need to believe ones consciousness is somehow better than computation, and that ones atoms are somehow more special than the atoms in my phone.
Give a definition of qualia/subjective experience which isn't just "cognitive synthesis of sensory input" and also isn't contorted such that only humans could have it.
That's part of the trouble with subjective experience. It's not fully reducible to objective explanation. If it was, it would not be subjective experience. But it is such a central part of the human experience—it is experience itself—that when you nonetheless do your best to evoke it with language, reasonable people without philosophical agendas (e.g. the defense of a materialism, or relatedly, the absence of true mystery in the world) all know what you're talking about. I would be surprised if anyone who is not studied in the area would dispute the existence of phenomenal consciousness upon a quick explanation of what they are alleged to be. I imagine they would think there's something wrong with someone who did dispute it. Only an intelligent person well-studied in the area, understanding the implications of the problem, could manage to convince themselves of something so utterly ridiculous.
My inherent philosophical objection is that "reality is shared consensus", or more accurately "reality is the set of things which forces there to be a shared consensus about them". The more people who corroborate the things I observe to be real, the less likely it is that I am delusional and imagining them all in my head (unless everyone I've ever met has been part of my delusion, but that's an excessively obtuse view). Reality isn't the shared consensus per se, but shared consensus is a multi-meter we use to measure reality. We can never directly observe "this battery has 9 volts", only that our instrument reads "9 volts". At some point we have no choice but to drop the abstraction and accept the measurement of reality as reality itself. The reality of the battery is whatever the multimeter reads. Maybe every single multimeter is wrong and by sheer coincidence and this battery is actually 10 volts. Maybe the multimeter is right but every single persons eyes have a glitch causing them to read 9 volts in this one particular instance. But neither of those "true realities" is distinguishable from the one where its actually 9 volts.
So when we come around to "subjective experience", this thing which by construction no one but you can observe your instance of it, by definition its not real. Your personal "subjective experience" is not and cannot be part of the shared consensus. No one but you can honestly agree that your subjective experience is there. Even if they think they have their own subjective experience, they can't know if you're a p-zombie or not.
Sure many seemingly reasonable people all seem to agree they know what you're talking about when you say "subjective experience", but each and every one of them might have a completely different idea of what that means. I can't possibly agree that I "know what you're talking about" when you mention subjective experience, as any time I ask someone to define subjective experience it eventually circles back to requiring me to acknowledge my own subjective experience first. It's infuriatingly circular! To define subjective experience you have to already know what subjective experience is. If I drink the cool aid and acquiesce that yes I have subjective experience, we could continue the conversation in perpetuity without ever confirming that we are in fact talking about the same thing.
So my objection to the notion of subjective experience, aside from being a popular coat rack for tedious agendas, is that its inherently undefinable and untestable. Therefore the "hard problem of consciousness" isn't hard in the "you just have to work harder" sense. Its literally impossible because at its root the problem is worse than undefined, its undefinable. When you try to present a solution to it you'll find...a lack of consensus about your solution.
Your position is that your entire experience is not part of reality. Sure, you can define "reality" that way if you want, but it's obviously omitting something that exists, so it's not going to be a popular definition. And how can you base your moral/spiritual outlook on a view of reality that omits the central aspect of your world?
Or another say of saying the same thing: I dispute that there's nothing useful or actionable to be found in the mystery of consciousness, even if it's true that we can't hope to make any further headway in our scientific understanding of it (which I also think is false).
Which brings me back to my original point. Dennett's real issue is that he correctly senses that acknowledging this wonderful mystery of the mind is at odds with his physicalist, and somewhat nihilistic, view of the universe.
This laugh made my morning, thank you. That would have been a pleasure to watch. I in fact agree with Dennet's self-as-effect of language comments if I've interpreted them correctly, but I think it's a small part, and he was even emphasizing physical competence as a way to interpret and develop it, but doesn't appear to want to take the leap into more interesting but maybe dangerous territory.
Perhaps he dodged it because he thought the question about his dog seemed a bit searly.
It was a pleasure to watch, and made me very fond of Searle, who clearly loved his dog (even though I disagree with him - Searle, not his dog - about lots of things too ... but, you know, all philosophers disagree with all other philososphers about lots of things).
> seemed a bit searly.
Good pun but also nail on head. He must be so very bored of the main arguments against his most famous position. In my opinion those main arguments are right but in terms of Dennett's boredom that's not even relevant.
I really like the phrase “study argues” over the more common “study says”. It implies science is process of making arguments that can be challenged instead simply new “findings”.
Working dogs definitely stress over losing their jobs. I've had several herding dogs that spent far more energy than I ever would worrying about the state of the ranch, where each animal was, and the possibility of outside predators.
The day I saw a 50 lb dog herd a 2,000 lb uncastrated bull into an unused pen, all on it's own initiative, while everyone else hid in the house was the day that I treated the dog as an equal coworker.
As a friend of mine once said, a working dog doesn't just need a job, they need a task list. I live in a city with one and it's almost a full-time job for me keeping him from getting bored. (A very fun job though - I'm not complaining.)
I'm not actually a dog expert (sorry), but I believe individual dogs vary enormously. My dog has a list that works very well for him but wouldn't work for other people. Also, it depends on the city - I'm in Australia, where the cities contain a huge amount of forest. But to answer your question directly, my dog spends three or four hours a day exploring our local creek.
It's an interesting parallel. I discovered how insanely deep this fear run in me. A job is not just a job (for my reptilian brain anyway) it's:
1) a group i belong too
2) roof and food
Saying this because technically, I have a roof (parents house), I have money (unemployment benefits). But I don't feel secure at all. Whenever I got into a job, the anguish vanished (no matter how smart I tried to be, meditating over it, thinking abstractly about ill emotional reflexes, it stayed there). Whenever leaving a job (toxic workplace) was on the line I was gutted.
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised that animals (mammals or else) can sense what behaviors get them to belong to a group and ensure a regular daily life of friendly people and nice meals.
From what I've seen, an animal that knows what it's like to be hungry tends to treat every meal as if it's their last meal, even after they're in a place with abundant food and consistently timed meals.
I'd recommend have a dog dna tested to see what breeds they might be.
I got a rescue dog from a well known UK canine trust, they said the dog was a particular middle class docile breed mix, prey drive was too strong based on my limited knowledge, dna test later, none of the breeds mentioned by the trust were there!
Someone had been breeding something else, which explained the dog's prey drive. As a personal protection dog it would have fetched a very high amount considering its ability at seeing off a couple of loose German Shepherds and a couple of loose staffie's that wanted to attack him.
If I wasn't allergic to dogs which I have also found out, I'd probably get another one, but with hindsight there is alot of things nobody really teaches you about dog ownership which might make people think twice about having one. They will take up a large part of your time which is something you may not want.
Glycine can have anti anxiety effects and tastes much like sugar so may be useful for dogs displaying signs of anxiety.
This is alarming: this means what's totally obvious to ten thousand years of humans is now being touted as a funding-needed topic, where dogs will be subjected to various nonsense so flunky "scientists" can observe what most humans across the planet know as obvious.
I agree -- although I think some scientists will do rigorous science with dogs; as in any field there will be a Gaussian curve. However, although I do think this is a set up to ask for more canine funding, I do think the public is not super keen on canine research -- I even feel the illogical repulsion and I understand the good outcomes that could come of this work.
Also, we learn in basic neuroscience classes that animals can often seem like they are understanding you or have anthropomorphic characteristics, but oftentimes this is just imitation. An example of this is with Koko the gorilla that they taught sign-language to: she is thought to actually just be repeating things for treats, etc in order to make her handler happy.
I'd only disagree with the somewhat recent common ancestor since it was on the order of 60 million years ago. Even geologically speaking, that's a bit. But it's quite clear if you observe rats, dogs, and other mammals (especially social ones), they've got some of the same wiring. I'd go so far as to say that most human laws are just codified innate primate tribe dynamics.
I even hear people say they can relate with their reptiles, but that seems harder for me to square.
I'm always particularly befuddled by the idea that animals don't have emotions. I mean, emotions are based in the deepest, oldest, most lizard-brainy parts of our minds, it's everything else that's more recent.
i'm always surprised by these "we just discovered humans and animals are the same" articles, i've never understood the difference between humans and animals, i always believed we all shared similar fundamental bits, just didn't consider the brain bit but it makes sense.
Well there is only one species that was able to put lightning into a rock, make it smart and use that instead of shouting at each other - not to mention the use of language while doing so.
Animals are treated as automatons which is IMHO very wrong. But saying that there are no fundamental differences seems wrong too.
"But saying that there are no fundamental differences seems wrong too."
i don't think thats what they're saying, though i see how it could be interpreted as that. i think what they're saying is that on a basic level we (animals/mamals?) are very similar. ofc there are big differences between species but the building blocks all come from the same place.
also yes we're the only ones to do all that stuff but it doesn't deny the difference between animals, it compares the output of a species abilities (for lack of a better word), our ability just happens to be a really powerful one and one that compounds really quickly.
We share some commonalities with animals - they can have OCD, anxiety, or PTSD for instance. Animal models makes sense for those.
But animals cannot, for example, experience schizophrenia or other psychoses. Nor can they be autistic. Directly from our capacity for improvements in intelligence and self-awareness comes psychosis. Directly from our unique social evolution comes autism. Brain differences that are wholly unique to humans are what underpin a lot of disorders.
The animal model approach has a very limited scope. Some "researchers" think animals can be autistic (under an outdated idea of what autism is from over 60 years ago). It's dangerous pseudoscientific research being used to propose dangerous quackery treatment models.
Eh, it's extremely unlikely that dogs have developed any totally new types of emotions during the domestication process. More like they were easy and useful to domesticate because as intelligent, mammalian, social pack predators, their ancestors were already a good fit for humans, mentally.
There are papers/studies that show that dogs have facial muscles that wolves lack that effectively give them expressive eyebrows. You could argue this is the result of human selective breeding but it does allow them to portray emotion in a way wolves can’t. Not sure how one would define “new emotion” but certainly their ability to communicate emotion to people at least has changed/increased.
Adding on to this, there’s evidence that domestication involved selecting for genetic abnormalities in dogs that are analogous to Williams Syndrome in humans, a disorder which is known to cause pro-sociability, a strong sense of empathy, and relatedly, anxiety.
I’d argue we have pretty good evidence that the emotional processing of dogs has been dramatically altered by domestication.
On the one hand, it's not obvious how much this helps research, since dogs can't be asked what they feel.
On the other- psychological practitioners should totally not be let onto people before they've successfully treated an animal. Get past that whole "your problem will disappear when I've revealed my brilliant insight" thing.
Cool, I've never gone up to another human while he barks at me, and pee directly in his face, but apparently it is now justified due to my "psychiatric disorder". Thanks science!
Jeffrey Masson wrote a book called "Dogs Never Lie About Love" that said similar things. The book was pretty good iirc, regardless of the controversies the author later got into.
In my experience, dog owners tend to anthropomorphize their dogs quite a bit. They’ll dream up motivations for their dog’s behaviors, often with very little basis in reality. Surveying dog owners about their dog’s personality will tell you a lot more about the dog owners than the dog.
Is that more or less sensible than the position of "here's another social land mammal of roughly similar size that evolved on the same planet, yet I'm going to assume they are completely different and inscrutable and don't have any real sort of consciousness or emotion"?
(Especially in response to an article about academics studying animal emotion and mental states. If you want to disagree, let's not anecdotally say "dog owners are silly lol", let's rebut "Twenty years ago, Overall and other experts began to suggest the dog be used as a model for human psychiatry. The same types of mental illness don’t occur naturally in rodents; researchers have to induce them.")
We have a 2 year old lab that constantly digs up any plants we put in the garden. My wife has come up with lots of reasons for this behaviour, but none of her solutions have made any difference. I suspect the dog enjoys digging up plants and doesn't understand that we'd prefer she didn't. In short, from my limited experience, I think you're right.
My 2 year old lab recently gave birth. Before doing so she would constantly "dig" on the floor of the house, like a compulsion. Didn't damage the floor, but she just kept going and going. I figure it's some kind of nesting thing where maybe they'd make a hole to lie in if they were in the wild.
The labs I've known have been happy diggers. I think it's gotta be something like direct wiring to their pleasure center.
My poodle loves to get his dig on at the beach. Really goes to town. To the point of exhaustion. Once he experienced sand, he stopped digging in our yard. I imagine it just wasn't as fun any more, comparatively.
Likely the dog instinctively believes that it has a higher chance of finding something interesting in a hole that someone else filled in, than another spot. You won't get it to stop this behavior unless you fulfill it's needs to dig and find stuff, plus give it a reason why it shouldn't be digging up certain items. The later is done with negative reinforcement, which is not acceptable to some dog trainers these days, despite being sometimes necessary.
I didn’t like my sister’s dog going to the bathroom inside. She refused to do anything but positive reinforcement.
Within a couple days of my (fairly minor) negative reinforcement it stopped.
She eventually got another dog once we weren’t living together. It’s probably 8 years old and still goes to the bathroom inside - on a “puppy pad,” at least.
I also love dogs, and enjoy having a well trained companion that will walk along side me without a leash or harness across the city (Oakland). I would have only been able to do that by showing them that I'm in control, that they don't need to worry about possible dangers, and that they need to follow my commands to stay safe.
Positive reinforcement is great. But without a small amount of negative reinforcement, I believe a dog feels like it needs to be in control and make decisions. The modern world is too complicated for it to feel safe doing so...so it will either become neurotic, or completely unsafe, running after things and barking at anything that looks threatening.
Not to mention that going to the bathroom in the house is completely unacceptable. My puppies get a stern no, while I point their nose at the mess, and a quick pat on the rump. Then they are put outside.
Most dogs don't want to go in the house anyways, if given the chance.
exactly, as with humans, negative feedback is not only necessary but absolutely required to be able to exist around other beings, humans or otherwise. and yes, employ mostly positive reinforcement, and a small, focused, non-angry amount of negative feedback to show them the boundaries of acceptable behavior. most dogs, like most humans, are happy to be given reasonable boundaries.
> "I also love dogs, and enjoy having a well trained companion that will walk along side me without a leash or harness across the city"
It has associated digging with something positive. You need to work on associating not digging with something positive (that is stronger than the positive of the digging)
1. actual anthropomorphizing, that is ascribing distinctly human motivation to a non-human actor
2. in Dennett's words, "taking the intentional stance", that is choosing to describe and understand an active entity in the world as if it had intentions.
We do (2) with other people all the time, without much to really back it up. I don't consider such a bad thing to do it with dogs (or other animals).
No of course not, animals are soulless automatons without any relatable emotion or reason that humans could ever perceive let alone understand. Anybody who thinks otherwise is just deluded by anthropomorphization and overzealous pattern matching.
An angry dog? No such thing, anger is a human emotion. A happy dog? Again, no such thing. A sad dog? Never existed, sadness is uniquely human.
You could be correct, of course. Your viewpoint is basically the same one that Descartes argued for 400 odd years ago.
Or it could be that you personally can't empathize with dogs or other animals, so you think they have no feelings. (IIRC some people made that criticism of Descartes.)
The major difference with humans as compared to other animals is that we can use language, which means we can describe what we are thinking and feeling in elaborate detail. But that does not mean animals who can't use language must necessarily have no feelings at all, just because they can't describe them verbally.
The way to investigate this question is not by dogmatic pronouncements but by looking at evidence. People who spend a lot of time with animals use much the same nonverbal cues to read their emotions as we all do with other humans. Since in both cases predicting behavior based on those cues works reasonably well, it is reasonable to conclude that the underlying causes inside the animal or the person are at least somewhat similar.
This dog and the whole process of teaching is fascinating because it highlights how much we depend on verbal communications and easily discount other types.
…I see the opposite, I believe this strongly supports the original view. The dog is pressing buttons almost arbitrarily and the owner is dreaming up motivations.
They have the same basic motivations as us: food, sex, shelter, affection. My dog lies about the mailman walking by in order to go scare him. They're also self-aware, to a degree.
Dogs certainly think for themselves, they just don't necessarily think like us. Every so often I get an insight into how my dog's brain works, and I find it absolutely fascinating.
For example, recently I had to carry a big heavy bag of stuff from home to a couple of streets away, and I took the dog with me. As we walked along, he kept going up to random parked cars and stopping by their doors.
I couldn't understand why he was doing that. Did he smell something interesting? Was there a small critter hiding under the car?
Then it dawned on me. We don't have a car of our own, but from time to time we use a carsharing scheme. Particularly when I need to transport stuff. He saw me carrying a big bag and figured that meant we were getting in a car. So he was just going up to any old car and saying "This one?"
I realised he'd been observing this over time and he thought he understood it. So if he's spotted and figured out this pattern with a fairly rare event, it's reasonable to infer that he does this with everything else too.
What's his motivation? I don't know, but he seems to really enjoy anticipating things, like he gets satisfaction from understanding how things work. He's visibly excited when he "gets it right". Like many of us, I'm sure.
Related to that is his propensity for steering people and events in a direction favourable to his interests. "Oh, while you're on your feet, if you would just follow me I'd like to draw your attention to this food bowl over here which doesn't seem to have any food in it". "Please lift this blanket so I can get under it and snuggle". And so on.
I don't think it's anthropomorphising at all to say he's got goals, can plan ways to achieve those goals, and communicate with us to get us to play along. Quite the opposite, in fact. He communicates these messages very clearly, he just does it in a doggie way that takes a bit of effort on our part to understand.
Perhaps your cat (which presumably has a gender) is living in an emotional desert.
Cats have different behaviours, but mine (born feral, now very domestic) greets me in the morning, yells for his breakfast, chomps down a few mouthfuls, hops on my lap for a quick fondle, then resumes his breakfast. Afterwards, more cuddles, some dashing about, then he snoozes in a fixed sequence of spots during the day, interrupting his sleeps to join me for lunch. He comes and yells at me around the time I should be knocking off work.
Try assuming there's more going on emotionally in your cat's head - you might both benefit from it!
The robofeeder has not diminished The Cat's appetite for snacks 24/7, but it did reduce The Cat's stress with its predictable precise delivery of food.
I still restrict its access to the computer, as it had been logging on to KatNet and plotting the overthrow of humanity and having us all stuffed into the KatFud hopper.
There have been real scientific experiments done on pets, their remarkable abilities disappear once you remove the owner from the picture.
What dogs and other social animals are great at is reading humans and acting accordingly. So what happens is that the owner is unknowingly instructing their pet to behave in a certain way in certain situations and the pet just acts accordingly. The pet doesn't know X, the owner knows X and signals that to the pet.
Humans tend to anthropomorphize the heck out of virtually all of their pets. The more emotional the bond, the higher the expected rate of anthropomorphization will be.
Anthropomorphize - verb
Attribute human characteristics or behaviors to an animal, god, or even an object.
Sure. I wouldn't argue that people don't make silly claims about their pets. At the same time, historically scientists have made what now seem to be silly claims about pets in the other direction. Regarding anthropomorphization, what are "human characteristics"? Are those characteristics that can only be found in humans? Or is it just characteristics that we commonly see in humans, but which may be present in other animals as well? Because that list of characteristics was much larger even 20 years ago than it is today.
How do we know which behaviors or characteristics are uniquely “human”? Maybe humans and animals have more behaviors and characteristics in common than a lot of people would like to admit.
There are experts on dog body language and book on the subject- my point being education is also something that can be applied to understanding non humans.
On the other hand, nobody has a greater wealth of intimate experience with a dog than his owner. So in this case the owner is the authority. Overwhelmingly so. So we would do well to listen to what he says.
I’m a lifelong dog owner and it’s extremely true that people do this. They literally go as far as creating instagram accounts to role play as pets. They follow other people’s pets who do the same. It’s bonkers.
The greater the ignorance of a subject, the greater the confidence of one's opinions about it. There's a name for this malady. It's on the tip of my tongue.
And speaking of that. It's interesting to consider it taken to absurd yet utterly plausible levels.
Now that I think about it pets avoid the narcissistic boomer parent who likes to drink, yell at the tv, be unpredictable or pet too aggressively and gravitate towards quiet friendly people, which is probably a good model for the way humans naturally feel. Over the years I have tried to overcome this aversion for the sake of family but its really hard to be totally calm with someone you can’t trust to behave.
thankfully, she's gotten much better, and now enjoys a mostly carefree and social dog life, though she's still vigilant and standoffish at times with both humans and other dogs. i can definitely see parallels to human behaviors, and even use techniques you might use with people to build up her confidence (as well as curb unwanted behavior). she's been great overall, and i wouldn't trade her for the world.