As a dog owner, I smirked when the author described dogs as only interested in humans because we supply the food. Yeah, that's probably true, but I don't care if my beloved pet only thinks of me as a meal dispenser, it's actually kinda funny.
> But when they murmur and pump their legs while sleeping, they’re dreaming of freedom.
My dog got free and was lost for four days earlier this year. It was one of the most scariest experiences in my life, although nowadays from time to time I feel happy he at least got to experience a little freedom, especially when I neglect to take him out to an off-leash dog park for a few weeks.
I'm not sure I fully agree with the article's takeaway that dogs are only in it for the food. It's a bit of a crude summary. In addition to food, humans provide shelter, protection, love, attention, play time, and companionship - I don't think food is the only driver of the relationship.
My dog will hide behind me if he's scared, and enjoys attention from people he doesn't know - irrespective of whether they provide food for him or not. And he'll cry and ignore food from others for hours if I'm separated from him. Maybe this is just anecdotal data, but seems doubtful.
Or, going one step further, universal optimization by means of more efficient use of energy. The end game is the heat death of the universe (maximum entropy, no more energy differentials), after all ;)
I think you're right. They massively over simplified the relationship between humans and dogs imo. Yeah, food is a huge part of it, but dogs even in my limited experience bond on way more levels than just that. Silly premise.
Any trainer can tell you some breeds just care more about food than others.
My German Shepherd would do anything for a piece of chicken. He would suddenly seem to understand English. My boxer couldn’t care less for treats as a motivator - positive attention was the absolute only way to mold behavior. Having had the GSD first, it took some adjustment for me to learn to train a dog that just didn’t care about food. The breeder later told me that was entirely typical of boxers.
Some dogs care more about food than others. There are lots of counterexamples.
I grew up with a boxer that was almost completely food motivated. The neighbor's GSD was almost completely play motivated, and would skip meals in the hopes that someone would just. throw. the. ball.
Your breeder's statement is like stereotyping human personalities by ethnicity or gender - something may show up strongly in the statistics, but it's a poor tool to apply when interacting with individuals.
I'm no expert either but my girlfriend works at a vet clinic (and is applying to animal behaviour PhD programs) and my impression from talking to the vets is that most dogs are very food motivated but they are also highly social. If you ignore the social aspects and view them as only food motivated their behaviour doesn't make as much sense (as you pointed out).
I never was a dog guy. Always had cats during childhood. I used to find dogs scary and stinky. But then, at 38, a few years ago, I suddenly needed a dog. What was it? The kids growing older? Me, getting older? I don't know. But I wanted a dog. I contemplated the idea for one year. And then I adopted a dog from a shelter. Greatest thing ever. A dog is such a great companion. They say that a dog will make you laugh once a day. It's 100% true based on my experience.
This was my experience as well. I disliked dogs all throughout my teens. I thought they were dirty, smelly, annoying, etc. Then during college, my dad and sister (who both love dogs) decided to get an Old English Sheepdog. He was the most in-your-face, helpless dog, always needing someone to wipe his chin or pay attention to him. He was incredibly affectionate, and would literally shove his snout under someone's arm to force them to pet/hug him. After him, I was sold.
It isn't wrong to project our desires and fantasy of engagement on to specific dogs, in as much as mutuality can exist between us as good source and them as consumers. Symbiosis takes many forms and to imagine the butterfly feels no pleasure as the plant releases a drop of nectar is to deny we could build a probe fine enough to find out. But so what? They go on sucking nectar, and our dogs go on making eyes at us and whining for food, which we willingly and happily comply with. There is nothing intrinsically wrong here. There is something intrinsically wrong in claiming to be objective and denying the possibility and it's wrong to attribute all species enhancing behaviours purely to genes and acquired traits. If dogs are capable of making choices and we are capable of making choices is there no room for a happy medium? An equitable, biologically deterministic mutuality?
PS not a dog owner but also not a dog hater. The book sounds like a good read.
Video games today are 1000000x more sophisticated, realistic than anything from the early 80s. Still 8 bit games were games, they had the same elements in them, except in low res, freq and count. The structure, the "quality", not the quantity. Same goes for computers. When I boot a win95 box, it's all there, minus the HTML5/CSS3 capable stack.
I do believe that most life forms, above a level of complexity have most of the things we think as human exclusive. Surely when an animal spent so much time and effort into finding a source of feeding, as the nutrient come in, his system reacts and communicate "satisfaction" in one form or another. The butterfly just don't write a song about it afterwards.
I think your analogy is good, but I do have some issues. The lower down the 8 bit scale you go, into greyscale graphics or black and white, the more it approaches the old cellular automata games, game of life. Which, we can show is turing complete now we have functioning instruction-set machine logic. But, GoL is not itself the turing, its the machine we build inside it.
In that sense, the pleasure a butterfly feels as a commanding thing, set against its overall brain function probably is more at the cellular automota end of the scale. The mouse we're trying to kill, before it gets our cheese is a couple or more orders of magnitude up the food chain. Its decidedly not monochrome.
Its where you draw the line which matters, in conversations about ethics and equity. Jains draw it a lot lower than I do.
I wouldn't consider insects so bare. Maybe a bacterium. These things are minuscule, but they're internals/system is not trivial. They have a potent visual system (http://farm1.staticflickr.com/21/29252954_1aa90a5c3d.jpg), which is already quite high level.
Maybe the signal they get from satisfaction is very low but it's still something.. and probably not a one bit thing.
This doesn't seem quite right. My Shiba Inu (her name is Doge, check her out: https://www.instagram.com/brndnmtthws/) is generally quite disinterested in food. I often have to trick her or keep her leash on and attach it near her bowl to make her eat. When she gets excited, she can't be bribed with treats (she just ignores them).
She likes food, but it seems like her main interest is playing. She'd rather run around in circles or play fetch than eat most of the time.
Our Shiba, Kubo, loves human food and treats, and will bark and get up on his hind legs to try to get bits of our meals, but he's not super excited about dog food and we have to leave it out all day for him to eventually get around to eating it (he will though).
At first we actually thought he wasn't food motivated, but that was before we started feeding him human food. He goes into full scavenger/hunter mode whenever he's outside too, and manages to find all sorts of junk on the ground that I swear isn't there until he has it in his mouth.
He actually slipped his harness and ran away for a week earlier this year, and we were able to catch him again with the help of hot dogs and fried chicken (and a lot of hard work and a lot of help from local volunteer organizations).
I think a lot of people who interact with dogs in a regular basis will disagree too. My girlfriend has a little female Chihuahua, and even though I never feed her she will go crazy every time I enter the house. Why would she do that if I'm not a food source?
I find it funnier the outrage of those who can’t bear to think of their dog’s love as contingent upon food. “But I need unconditional love from my pet!”
It's traumatic for the dog, too. Often, when someone with a dog is found dead, the dog will have bitten (or eaten) their face, in the hopes of waking up their owner.
> The dogs start biting and eating as a form of animal instinct. They notice you’re dead by your smell and lack of reaction, and they come and lick the unclothed areas to wake you up. If you’re dead and there’s no reaction, they switch and enter the next level—from licking to biting. That’s all. It is not a matter of hunger.
But there is also the possibility that your dog will guard your corpse and not let strangers or other animals near it (like Talero). And a lesser possibility that your dog will guard your grave until it dies [0].
Cats? They'll sit on your corpse to interview servants to replace you.
Curiously I went to school around the corner from the Greyfriars church yard and must have walked past the statue thousands of times. I noticed that the statue has been defaced in recent years by tourists touching its nose for good luck.
I have two cats. My two year old maine coon is the most playful, intelligent cat I have ever met, and he knows when I'm sad. He runs to the door when I come home (and then pretends that he wasn't actually there to see me). The only time he wants food is when I take it out of the cupboard. Yes, he's manipulative, but he's so god-damned smart about it, even I get tricked. He mostly manipulates the other cat to leave the room so that he can get more attention.
I think cats get way more flak than is deserved. My friend has a very intelligent Siberian. When that fucking cat looks at you, you know it can see into your fucking soul, I don't know how to describe it. And the way they play with lasers, it's amazing how quick they are. I mean, they know it's just a laser, but they put all their skills into hunting it down.
The argument against this article reminds me of the notoriously tear-jerking Futurama episode in which Fry tells his dog to wait outside the building for a moment. Fry accidentally cryogenically freezes himself while in the building and wakes up in the future, but his dog had waited there for his owner for the rest of his life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XECQApj9IJs
Yeah, I teared up like crazy during that episode. So sad yet so loyal. Kind of like the legendary dog Hachiko in Japan that waited every day for his dead owner to return, for many years.
That is likely based on the Japanese story of the dog Hachiko, (sort of the Japanese version of Lassie) the dog who waited for his master at the train station every day. And when the master, a university professor, died while at school, the dog continued to go to the station every day until his death. There is a statue outside the train station where he waited. There were two movies made about the story, the Japanese original reduces everyone to tears. The American one with Richard Gere, not so much.
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[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadjoking aside; in light of the text, I could imagine one dog defending a turf against intruding dogs would be a huge driver to their adoption.
> But when they murmur and pump their legs while sleeping, they’re dreaming of freedom.
But ouch. That really hurts.
My dog will hide behind me if he's scared, and enjoys attention from people he doesn't know - irrespective of whether they provide food for him or not. And he'll cry and ignore food from others for hours if I'm separated from him. Maybe this is just anecdotal data, but seems doubtful.
Or, going one step further, universal optimization by means of more efficient use of energy. The end game is the heat death of the universe (maximum entropy, no more energy differentials), after all ;)
Which is very reductionist yet has a shadow of truth behind it.
My German Shepherd would do anything for a piece of chicken. He would suddenly seem to understand English. My boxer couldn’t care less for treats as a motivator - positive attention was the absolute only way to mold behavior. Having had the GSD first, it took some adjustment for me to learn to train a dog that just didn’t care about food. The breeder later told me that was entirely typical of boxers.
Great read for people looking for a more rigorous treatment of dog behavior and psychology.
I grew up with a boxer that was almost completely food motivated. The neighbor's GSD was almost completely play motivated, and would skip meals in the hopes that someone would just. throw. the. ball.
Your breeder's statement is like stereotyping human personalities by ethnicity or gender - something may show up strongly in the statistics, but it's a poor tool to apply when interacting with individuals.
Dogs that are not only in it for the food are a useful counterexample, because it trumps the sweeping “only.”
That -some- dogs are in it for the food doesn’t move the needle in the debate one way or the other.
PS not a dog owner but also not a dog hater. The book sounds like a good read.
Video games today are 1000000x more sophisticated, realistic than anything from the early 80s. Still 8 bit games were games, they had the same elements in them, except in low res, freq and count. The structure, the "quality", not the quantity. Same goes for computers. When I boot a win95 box, it's all there, minus the HTML5/CSS3 capable stack.
I do believe that most life forms, above a level of complexity have most of the things we think as human exclusive. Surely when an animal spent so much time and effort into finding a source of feeding, as the nutrient come in, his system reacts and communicate "satisfaction" in one form or another. The butterfly just don't write a song about it afterwards.
In that sense, the pleasure a butterfly feels as a commanding thing, set against its overall brain function probably is more at the cellular automota end of the scale. The mouse we're trying to kill, before it gets our cheese is a couple or more orders of magnitude up the food chain. Its decidedly not monochrome.
Its where you draw the line which matters, in conversations about ethics and equity. Jains draw it a lot lower than I do.
Maybe the signal they get from satisfaction is very low but it's still something.. and probably not a one bit thing.
She likes food, but it seems like her main interest is playing. She'd rather run around in circles or play fetch than eat most of the time.
At first we actually thought he wasn't food motivated, but that was before we started feeding him human food. He goes into full scavenger/hunter mode whenever he's outside too, and manages to find all sorts of junk on the ground that I swear isn't there until he has it in his mouth.
He actually slipped his harness and ran away for a week earlier this year, and we were able to catch him again with the help of hot dogs and fried chicken (and a lot of hard work and a lot of help from local volunteer organizations).
You can check him out here: https://www.instagram.com/kubotheshiba/
Although they will eat you if you die and they have access to your corpse..
Although it is more traumatic for whoever has to deal with the body.
> The dogs start biting and eating as a form of animal instinct. They notice you’re dead by your smell and lack of reaction, and they come and lick the unclothed areas to wake you up. If you’re dead and there’s no reaction, they switch and enter the next level—from licking to biting. That’s all. It is not a matter of hunger.
Quite sad, really.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21533604
Cats? They'll sit on your corpse to interview servants to replace you.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Bobby
I think cats get way more flak than is deserved. My friend has a very intelligent Siberian. When that fucking cat looks at you, you know it can see into your fucking soul, I don't know how to describe it. And the way they play with lasers, it's amazing how quick they are. I mean, they know it's just a laser, but they put all their skills into hunting it down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachik%C5%8D