I wag, therefore I am: the philosophy of dogs

Wolves value their pack too. The only lone wolves tend to be young males that were pushed out of their pack and are looking to find/start a new pack. Wolf pack is family, and stays together.

And sometimes relationships are toxic. Yes, the dog stays with its owner, most times at a detriment to its own health.

I would like to expand on this and suggest that this applies to humans as well.

In the US, people tend to look at me weird when I tell them my dog lives outside. Some of them probably think I’m a heartless or uncaring dog owner.

When I first adopted him, I tried inside first, and he was unhappy and anxious, and so much of that went away when he was chillin outside.

I think humans often wrongly project their own preferences onto dogs.

Not saying it is your case, but I want to add:

I think it also depends on the mental stimulation. Hiking I see many country houses big gardens. The dogs in them are rarely walked, and bark at anything that passes in ftont of the house all day long.

I think a dog that lives in a house but gets proper stimulation and walks is happier that thosr garden dogs.

As a dog owner, I agree with you.

I KNOW that my dog would never hurt anyone.

But I also know that no one else in the world has spent hundreds of hours with my dog, and to them he is a strange and large animal. Inevitably some of these ppl probably have some kind of childhood trauma related to dogs.

So I always have him leashed where the rules are to have a leash.

I go to campsites and wilderness areas where dogs are allowed off leash. It is pretty much the best thing I can do for my dog. She mostly sleeps in the dirt all day after a morning hike when we are camping. I have a radio collar and a directional antenna so I can find her if she runs off, but she never has. Even on long backpacking trips she has always been within a few hundred feet. Obviously, make sure your dog's temperament is correct for the situation, but camping and hiking with a dog off leash is a joy.

Unfortunately these rules punish dogs and good owners, while they’re smugly ignored by bad owners.

A well behaved dog off-leash is not a problem - but the rule isn’t against badly behaved dogs or inattentive owners - the rule is against off-leash, period. It isn’t fair to the good ones.

I adopt older rescue dogs which tend to be anxious and reactive with strange dogs. Sometimes when I go to a public place where dogs are required to be leashed, an unleashed dog will charge or approach my leashed dog who reacts violently and I have to intervene- often lifting my dog in the air while trying to fight off the unleashed dog with my legs. These off leash dog people are creating a huge hazard, and making it unsafe for people to walk reactive or anxious dogs. There are also many people that are terrified of even a “friendly” off leash dog, and are being terrorized and unable to escape. They will chant “he’s friendly, he’s friendly” instead of getting control of their dog.

Even the most friendly and easygoing dog becomes violent when they approach another dog and it lashes out.

If I have to kill or harm your “friendly” illegally unleashed dog to keep me and my dog safe I will- luckily I have not had to. Please leash your dog.

I think we treat dogs wrong. Dogs are capable of resolving out most situations on their own, unless they're leashed. The leash changes everything and makes dogs more aggressive. Probably because they're scared about being attached to something when encountering a stressful situation like meeting other dogs.

The only reason we emphasize the leash is because any idiot is allowed to get a dog and mistreat it. So we leash them for the owner's sake really, not for any inherent fault of the dog.

So I can't argue with the rules to keep dogs leashed, I just refuse to do it.

Mine is tiny, it flies in the cabin on planes even because it's under 8kg.

But I've seen people with huge belgian malonois off leash, and they make a point of showing everyone around them how well trained it is. It walks next to them the whole time, they regularly give it commands to follow on their walk. So you have a responsibility with a big dog, because it can do more damage, and I think it's a good idea to demonstrate to any doubters around you that you can control it.

But if you just let a pittie go and then stare at your phone, you shouldn't be allowed to handle an animal.

But yeah this is a very hot topic because why should responsible people and good dogs be punished collectively because there are morons? I want more regulations in getting an animal. I see sooo many of them mistreated, neglected, when a child is born for example, now they're just being dragged along after the pram. Common human condition to be short sighted and get a dog as a fun item, but it lives for maybe 15 years. It's a huge commitment.

I just spent two weeks in Germany and noticed that almost nobody there keeps their dog on a leash. Dogs are loose on city streets, in open parks, pretty much everywhere. No one seemed to have an issue with it, and none of the dogs were misbehaving -- all of them were keeping up with their owners and not disturbing anyone else.

Maybe this is a cultural thing, both in terms of people's expectations of encountering dogs in public places, and in terms of the way dogs are trained and conditioned to respond to stimuli. Maybe keeping dogs on leashes prevents them from learning the skills they need to be off-leash reliably.

> The amount of children killed or injured by poorly restrained dogs is very high.

This claim is interesting, if true. Can you back it up? I spent 15 minutes on research, and my preliminary findings, using US statistics (I'm not American but it's just easier to google American stuff) suggest that:

a) about 42 Americans die to dog attacks per year (about 0.13 per 100k population) (very high confidence)

b) it looks like about half of those are kids under 17, with ages 1-4 over-represented (very high confidence)

c) most of those kids-dying-to-dogs deaths are not due to unrestrained dogs in public, but rather infants in their family homes, dying to dogs owned by the child's parents (low to medium confidence)

For example, WP gathers media/journal reports on dog fatalities, and has 16 records for 2023 (so presumably about 1/3 of the fatalities for that year). 6 of those are children. Of those 6 children, 4 died to the family pet, the other 2 died to neighbours' dogs while in their own home. Extrapolating from that that suggests that the number of American children killed by poorly restrained dogs, other than their own family, is roughly 6. Out of around 10k child fatalities per year in the US.

That doesn't seem "very high" to me, but that's just a matter of opinion. Do you have data that shows a different pattern?

What would a license solve?

How is the original comment projecting, but yours isn’t?

This response to the point made by the person to whom you're responding is the philosophical equivalent of plugging your ears and going "la la la can't hear you".

> In the grand scheme of things, we're all just temporary cosmic dust, right?

What else would you be able to justify using this platitude?

Yes, rescue makes no difference. I don’t know that nature rewards anything. But with our power to make moral judgments comes a response to do so. Yes, you could make the same argument for humans. I’m an antinatalist and so should everyone be too.

Or you could just feed your dog a vegan dog food, which is perfectly healthy. I've been doing that with my 11 year old Border Collie since he's been a puppy. Here's one example: https://www.naturalbalanceinc.com/dog-recipes/dry/limited-in...

What would dog mental reflection even look like? "I should have chosen a different route when chasing that rabbit?"

I don't think there is any evidence for mental reflection at this moment, but the nature of reflection is that is entirely internal, and we don't really know in what manner dogs have cognition.

But, the trend seems to be that we only learn more about the inner lives of animals as time goes on. 100 years ago it was accepted that non-human animals were essentially automatons that didn't feel feelings or have emotions, or engage in any kind of thought, which we know now is not true.

Yep. When I walk into a room containing my dog and the poo it did on the carpet two hours earlier, it is sorry about what it did.

Anecdote but my dog dreams a lot and sometimes mimics the sounds and motions she makes when we play together. Other times mimics chasing things. Seems like reliving her favorite activities. Might not be intentional but its a form of reflection.