What is a Dog?
openlettersmonthly.com
openlettersmonthly.com
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.
only in it for the food.
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.
> But when they murmur and pump their legs while sleeping, they’re dreaming of freedom.
But ouch. That really hurts.
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/
joking 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.
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.
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.
Cats? They'll sit on your corpse to interview servants to replace you.
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.