Dogs are good models for human psychiatric disorders, study argues
science.org
science.org
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.
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.
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".
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.
I really don’t understand dog ownership.
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.
> To pull the "children" card …
Children are seen as burdensome, but they are also seen as human, and eventually, will be human adults.
They also tend to not do things like eat your furniture, can be more regularly bathed, and smell a lot better, too.
Oh, and they’re humans. Did I mention that already? If a non-human animal is slotting itself into our biological drive to parent, that’s a parasite.
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.
It is.
> Children are seen as burdensome
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.
I think what parent was really asking is "why bother having a dog at all"?
That said, maybe that’s fun for you; everyone has their own preferences.
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]).
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human–canine_bond#Benefits
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dogs are pack animals, they are wired to integrate into the social fabric they find themselves in.
The two species have been co-developing together for 50,000 years, you might not get it, but others do.
Now, the reality is, the modern pathological, codependent, indoor dog ownership model did not exist in any significant prevalence until the past twenty years.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
My point is - an animal that sticks around is not necessarily a companion. It could just see you as a reliable source of food.
I hope I shouldn't be expected to starve her to test this theory!
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.
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.
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).
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.
If an animal evolves to exploit the parenting drive of a host species, that’s called a parasite.
There’s a reason why during/post-pregnant women have a strong (but not universal) tendency to reject the family dog(s).
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.
If you pay close attention, you'll realize that's exactly what humans are, too.
Dogs are wonderful.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Where are you from that dogs are not seen as family members?
Also what about children? They are not exactly known to be clean either.
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.
If this study has more details, it would be interesting to see what consequences it has for other theories of mind.
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.
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.
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.
Reality is shared consensus.
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.
Perhaps he dodged it because he thought the question about his dog seemed a bit searly.
> 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.
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.
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.
Animals live in the moment. They don’t think “will this food source be here tomorrow”, they just deal with it as it comes.
We probably have more stressors like imaginary ones and ones created just by society like reading news.
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.
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 even hear people say they can relate with their reptiles, but that seems harder for me to square.
- me
I think the opposite assumption would make more sense, that we're more alike than different
Animals are treated as automatons which is IMHO very wrong. But saying that there are no fundamental differences seems wrong too.
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.
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.
I’d argue we have pretty good evidence that the emotional processing of dogs has been dramatically altered by domestication.
https://www.insidescience.org/news/rare-human-syndrome-may-e...
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.
(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.")
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.
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.
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.
> "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"
i'm in this boat as well, and it's awesome!
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).
Just like humans.
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.
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.
Not any more. Take a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJYpXDMPlKA and others in the series.
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.
Just watch any video, it’s purely owner interpretation https://youtu.be/mhH2qIgrsi0
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.
Once the automatic cat feeder failed and The Cat had access to all it could eat. Had to take it to the vet to unjam its digestive tract.
> automatic cat feeder
> Had to take it to the vet
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.
Is it just because you believe something about dogs in general?
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.
Smiling during a deal might be seen as “friendly” in the West, while seen as “dumb” in the East.
If humans can’t even accurately judge the behavior of other humans why would they be able to judge that of another species?
Which contradicts your claim that "humans can’t even accurately judge the behavior of other humans “
And speaking of that. It's interesting to consider it taken to absurd yet utterly plausible levels.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...