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Comment by alehlopeh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.")

The article describes a study that was conducted by surveying dog owners.

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.

I fail to see any significant difference between that and the explanations for the misbehaviours of children. Or adults, for that matter.

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 love dogs.

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"

i'm in this boat as well, and it's awesome!

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)

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.

There are two possible things going on:

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).

Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with us observing and communicating with dogs every day for decades.

Maybe dogs aren't actually self-aware. They're just emulating how a self-aware creature would behave.

Just like humans.

How would you tell the difference?

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.

Because humans are not automatons of eating and reproducing?

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.

>They’ll dream up motivations for their dog’s behaviors, often with very little basis in reality.

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.

…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.

Just watch any video, it’s purely owner interpretation https://youtu.be/mhH2qIgrsi0

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.

I thought the same thing until my dog stole my car.

In my years with The Cat, I'm convinced the only thought in its tiny brain 24/7 is "I want food".

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.

> its tiny brain

> 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 Cat gets plenty of affection.

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.

How are you more familiar with these dogs than the owners, who probably spends dozens of hours per week with them?

Is it just because you believe something about dogs in general?

As a dog owner, I agree with the OP.

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.

Human behavior is strongly driven by cultural aspects.

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?

But you just made the claim that you can identify the behavior of eastern people vs western people through education.

Which contradicts your claim that "humans can’t even accurately judge the behavior of other humans “

Through education - language mostly. When your dog speaks to you and explains his behavior, please get back to me.

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.

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.

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.

Until you see a labrador pup makes big sad eyes because you puting him back in the car because he was jumping around too much.

In my experience, people who never had dogs usually say things like that about dog owners. :)

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.

I assume you’re referring to the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

I reckon you're looking for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...

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.

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