I've had my Labrador for 12 years, she was about 1 when we rescued her.
In the first week I was walking her and passed a bus stop mainly used by school kids. There's a small wall behind it and she dashed around and emerged with half a sausage roll hanging out of her mouth.
To this day, every time we pass that spot she enthusiastically pulls and goes round to inspect.
My parents dog tends to not eat his food unless they start pretending that his friend poppy, who died years ago and who used to love eating his food, is at the door. He panics and eats up his bowl, lifting his head up anxiously to look at the door every few mouthfuls.
That's kind of fucked up. They're reinforcing the fact that he should be worried about his food. They're training him to be anxious. If he doesn't want to eat, there's no reason to make him. He'll eat when he's hungry.
Dogs aren't exactly wild animals. They've picked up lots of bad habits along the way, due to selective breeding, not having to hunt for food, and whatnot. I used to have a caucasian shepherd, among other dogs we've had in our family, and as she started aging, it had become gradually quite difficult to keep her weight in check. "Forcing" her eat less and more frequently did the trick. She had hip dysplasia, so it was either this or put her to sleep. She got used to it eventually. Some dogs tend to overeat (apparently labradors have a problem here, some boxers too, from top of my head), some don't. Letting them choose may or may not be the right strategy. The owner should be smart and responsible enough to figure it out. But that's a different issue altogether.
All your examples were about dogs overeating, which I don't think anyone would disagree dogs can do. But I think it's pretty rare for dogs to under eat and to need to trick them into eating their food.
It's not uncommon at all. Take toothache, for example. The catch is they can't tell you, and we are terrible at reading the subtle signs.
Some dogs can communicate such things. Bunny (of What About Bunny) can vaguely, imprecisely, communicate "some kind of pain somewhere" using a button-activated buzzer system. She can sometimes name the approximate location of the pain after a minute or two of thought. (See https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=RN_ZpyS6Fkc&t=34 )
I have no idea how you'd get "I'm in pain" from the associated body language; but, then again, I'm not a dog. In this case there were behavioural cues, but I don't know how I'd tell if there weren't.
Pretty sure a dog will eat through a toothache too, but no one has mentioned anything remotely like this situation. You're bending over backwards to rationalize the really odd behavior of invoking a dead puppy friend to encourage a dog to eat. They will eat when they're hungry.
And in your strange example, if this dog wasn't eating due to a toothache, the parents are forcing the dog to anxiously eat through the pain of a toothache.
Perhaps once it's in the model, it's so hard to re-train that the animal will starve itself in service of the training data?
I'm pretty sure if you leave a dog alone with a bowl of food long enough, they'll eat it.
natural selection i think overrides that idea, but i also thought the same idea at first, and we have 5 rescues, so i should know better.
That's absurd. My dog likes to drink "outside water" so much to the point where he won't drink out of his bowl. After we come back for a walk he wants to run to the back yard and drink out of his puddle. I don't want him to do that. So I don't let him out. He'll whine a bit and paw at the door but eventually he gives up and drinks out of his bowl. Not dying from thirst or lack of food is an instinct that every living organism has.
I don't disagree, especially if they do that every day.
There are some times when as humans, we have knowledge that the dog needs to eat now, because they won't have a chance later, for example if going on some trip with the dog where feeding later would be inconvenient. In those cases it's useful to have this trick available.
Or, you just skip a meal. Dog won’t die from being hungry.
My dog (who recently passed away at the age of 13) used to do something similar. When she was a puppy, she spilled her food bowl and I swept it up with a broom. And since then, whenever we wanted her to eat her food, we'd just bring out the broom and start sweeping the kitchen floor - she'd immediately start eating her food, watching the broom nervously, because she's seen it eat her food before.
Why were you forcing your dog to eat food?
Condolences. Losing a dog of thirteen years is heartbreaking
"because she's seen it eat her food before" adorable!
Poppy's here!
It always bothers me how little intelligence we assume of and thus ascribe to the animal kingdom.
Especially to our mammalian brethren, who have many of the same underlying neurological mechanisms (though in differing quantities).
Dogs have co-evolved with humans for thousands of years.
Remembering names seems like a useful albeit unsurprising skill, especially when it comes to recognizing/avoiding danger.
“The bear/wolf/demon tribe is back!”
Will we ever stop looking down from our heavenly pedestal? Can we instead treat at our earthly contemporaries as different but equal?
Every time I encounter resistance to your points here, I feel like an alien among humans.
I think it cuts so deep into people's psychology, and frequently religion. The very notion that we are not the apex of anything. And that we no longer need to eat other animals to live and be healthy. Too much to bear for many, so it frequently results in low-quality conversation, laden with emotions.
The fact remains, however. Non-human animals are not that different from us. Pretty much all mental behavior is represented in the animal kingdom. They, in so many ways, are us. And we are them.
Why should it be otherwise, after all? It would be strange to have a quantum jump in mental behavior with humans, and only primitive behavior in all other animals.
It'll probably take some centuries for humans to see other animals as inherently worthy of respect.
never seen a dog using a computer
on the other hand, never seen a dog use javascript
you wouldn't, they tend to prefer Python
I am in no way religious, and I don't think we are fundamentally different than other animals, but I don't think it is surprising that most of us (myself included) think of human emotions and intelligence as being on a completely different level than animals.
The complexity of human language, social structure, and technology is not even in the same ballpark as animals. Humans make iPhones and travel to space and write War and Peace. We dominate the world, changing its very climate and wiping countless species off the planet, and no other species even tries to stop us.
It seems a bigger stretch to think other animals have similar emotions to humans than the opposite.
The complexity of human language, social structure, and technology is not even in the same ballpark as animals. Humans make iPhones and travel to space and write War and Peace. We dominate the world, changing its very climate and wiping countless species off the planet, and no other species even tries to stop us.
That's true only for a small subset of humans. 99.9% of humans achieve no feat as you describe.
You can easily make the case for attributing these feats to smaller subsets. E.g., Africans, Native Americans do not make iPhones, travel to space, etc. And therefore its ok to colonize them. I think that sounds familiar to history.
If you go by this notion, it would rather make sense to attribute these feats to a small elite and not humans entirely. And by that logic, this elite is siphoning money, creating riches for their own benefit. Which is probably what is happening in most countries (more so if they are authoritarian).
I think its simply about a feeling of superiority, might makes right. If you can, you abuse others for your own benefit. Whether they are a human or another animal.
I sadly ascribe it to education.
People are wrongly taught when they're children that as a human they're special.
Mostly it's with good intentions (encouraging ethics and responsibility), but often the message is rudimentary or lost along the way.
It's almost as if we have some type of coping mechanism. If we recognized more of ourselves in our animals, we would need to treat them more humane.
Just look at all the cases in human history where other people were reduced to primitive beings and could be treated more cruelly. If we can rationalize these actions towards fellow humans, I assume that the barrier for accepting animal emotions is even harder to break
Didn’t you just describe several religions’ beliefs about humans and animals, where humans are claimed to be a priori more special in various ways (besides reading that they’re more special)?
I agree, I think there is a lot of intelligence around us, perhaps even in ways we don't fully see or imagine. One of the largest organisms on Earth is a mycelium network in Oregon, it's nearly 4 square miles in size.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...
Is it possible this mass of mycelium has some form of intelligence that is difficult for humans to measure? Maybe it "knows" things we can barely conceptualize. What about trees that stand in place for hundreds, or even thousands of years?
https://www.treehugger.com/the-worlds-oldest-living-trees-48...
Perhaps the trees experience time differently due to their slow growth, and they too have "witnessed" many different events in their environment over time, encapsulating them in the rings and structures within themselves.
We could write this off as non-sense as trees have no nervous system, but maybe a lack of such a system doesn't necessarily preclude some type of intelligence we just don't consider "intelligent".
I think you will enjoy the documentary The Hidden Life of Trees. It talks about trees and social networks of mycelium where trees share nutrients and information on threats (ant species X attacking, start chemical defenses) and mother trees prioritize their offspring over other neighbors when sharing nutrients.
There are whole worlds to be discovered yet here on our little blue dot of a planet
At work I often learned the full names and other details about dozens of coworkers, customers, whatever, even if I didn't need to know.
A few years after leaving wherever, I begin to forget even the simplest names, and I consider this as a blessing, as if Agent K set the flashy-thing in my eyes and I've returned to an ordinary life.
For me typically some attribute remains in memory after the name fades: "white-teeth marketing dude" or "guy obsessed with keyboards". I suppose that's how names started: Miller, Shepard, etc. As a corollary to this if I'm going into a business situation where I think it would be useful to be remembered, I'll try to wear something notable -- brightly colored shoes, something like that. Imagining the other parties discussing "that bloke, what was his name?? who? Um, the one with the orange shoes. Oh yes".
I once interviewed for a job with a small group of people, all at once. To keep them all straight in my head before I learned their names I gave each a mental nickname based on their appearance: Red Hair, Taller Than My Dad, Jack Sparrow (he had hollow cheeks and a dark unkempt beard).
Taller Than My Dad turned out to be comp.lang.c FAQ maintainer, Steve Summit.
This is straight out of The Office
Did you rename you Dad to half-way-to-Summit?
Official family names like Miller etc are a quite modern phenomenon for the majority of people, an aspect of a more formal and powerful state apparatus.
Traditional names are the first names, and these have been less direct for a very long time. First names are assigned in childhood and used for most of your life, so they are rarely related to your occupation. Much of Europe, America, and the Middle East of course use mostly the names of religious figures, but even in societies that didn't adopt foreign names, given names are typically words that evoke some positive aspiration, such as well liked/respected animals or plants.
Of course, sometimes people would be known by other names as well.
Nathan Whitetoothdouche, Jeff Analkeyboards. But isn't the orange shoes thing a classic spy tactic to get people to ignore your face? Now all they remember about you is your shoes. Wear different ones another time, and you're a stranger.
One of the guiding principles in my household is that people will generally forgive, but they will never forget the way you made them feel.
Not good with people, I had developed a facade full of weird coping mechanisms as I attempted to fake not being tremendously shy and avoidant of rejection. I was just into my twenties, working at a dating service as a kind of factotum (data entry, but also shooting and editing videos, networking, and reception). Inadvertently, the relevant details of all of our members just ... grafted themselves onto my hapless brain. Names, height, weight, job, member number, video number, and so forth. Employees began to call me rather than look people up in the directory, but I liked to greet people when they came in rather than having them fumble for their card. One conversation went like this:
Me: Hello, $Firstname! No need for the card, I know your number is seventeen forty-two. It's been about six months since you've been in, let me get into the computer and get your activity printed.
Him: You know me?
Me: Just by your picture. [idle chatter mode initiated as I wait for the printer]. Say, you've lost about ten pounds. That's down to one-sixty, right? I'll make a note to update your profile.
Him: [shifting uncomfortably] I was really one-eighty but I fudged it, so now it is accurate.
Me: So, how's the insurance business?
Him: You remember that?
Me: [continuing on like a chipper but oblivious robot] Our members are important!
Him: I'll buy you a steak dinner if you can tell me my birthday.
Me: July thirty-first, nineteen forty-four.
I let him off the steak dinner thing.
I am not good with people and it took me a long time to learn that, although people like to be recognized and known to some degree, huge amounts of detail retained over long periods, or remembering even singular encounters with high fidelity freaks some folks out. Somewhere along the line, I had mechanically applied the "remember people's names" advice from books like How to Win Friends and Influence People and must have figured if some is good, more is better, then used the few strengths I had, but instead ended up setting off people's "information asymmetry" threat detection and/or Who Is This Freak.
Now I clamp down and try not to blurt out recognizing someone from decades back, even though I am, like a puppy, happy to see a person from long ago once more. When I make jokes that I am like a golden retriever, I am kidding on the square.
Four-and-a-half years ago I started a new job and used Anki to learn all the names and faces of my ~100 coworkers, thankfully we had some internal directory that I did use as a data source. It worked great! Then the pandemic hit... I left the company three years ago and now could remember maybe five names if I met them.
Orwell wrote two books which purported to sketch different societies from his own mid-century english one:
In 1984, the inner party sell the story of "english socialism", although closer inspection reveals a tripartite distinction in which they (nomenklatura) derive most of the benefit from a system administered by the outer party (apparatchiks, kept on a tight leash) and staffed by the proles (who have more freedom than outer party members, because, well, they're harmless).
In Animal Farm, the pigs sell the story of "animalism", although closer inspection reveals a tripartite distinction in which they derive most of the benefit from a system administered by the dogs and staffed by the other animals.
In 1984, the distinction between inner and outer party is in theory not a matter of family background, but depends merely upon performance on standardised exams during adolescence.
If we can push the loose parallels between the two works, then we'd expect that according to Orwell's model of animals, while pigs are the brightest among the domesticated species, dogs are not far behind in intellect? Do we expect he'd have been surprised at TFA's reporting?
Lagniappe: https://ribbonfarm.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
(I know dogs buy into The House Rules so much that they can be remarkably guilty-looking if you run across clear evidence of them having done something they were supposed not to do; the question Venkatesh Rao might ask is if any dogs ever attempt to shift the blame onto another critter?)
In the case of animal farm, it’s not so much that the dogs are more intelligent than the other animals as that Napoleon takes advantage of their disposition to unshakeable loyalty and need for a master. Likewise, unfortunately, in life.
If you have to rank the animals by intelligence, second (or first, even?) is certainly Benjamin the donkey.
Looking through Rao's prism (in which disposition to unshakeable loyalty is a "clueless" trait), Benjamin is a clear "sociopath" candidate: he's (a) laconic, and (b) underperforming.
[In the 80s, Rabinovich was allowed a tour of Europe. He sent telegrams from everywhere: "Greetings from free Bulgaria. Rabinovich" "Greetings from free Romania. Rabinovich" "Greetings from free Hungary. Rabinovich" "Greetings from Austria. Free Rabinovich"]
In Rao’s model, the sociopaths and losers share an understanding that the organization exists for the benefit of the sociopaths, they just respond to it differently. It’s only the clueless who are bamboozled.
So idk if it’s a great lens for AF, where all the proletarian animals are more or less equally taken in.
But anyway, Benjamin is definitely a loser, not a sociopath! He comes closest to understanding what’s happening, and his response is to put his head down, so his job, and seek meaning outside the political game. A Ryan-type sociopath candidate would ditch work to make a political play. Benjamin is Stanley.
Tiny nitpick: Benjamin certainly would not want to become a sociopath, but the incumbent sociopaths would doubtlessly love to promote him into their ranks, surreptitiously. Confidence in the power of power to corrupt! (Usually misplaced, thankfully, despite media)
(To abuse a Ridley Scott favourite: slip a Marechal’s baton into his rucksack)
[this is opposite of the Rabinovich “strategy”, which hints that YC are not sociopaths]
EDIT: I dont think this is comparable to Steve Jobs’ 100-Person Retreat without more insider data, e.g.,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41416275
Would be interested to know if anybody got promoted as a result of these retreats, my hunch is, no, because everybody knows about the 100-person retreat.
EDIT 2: another system to compare with, kind of the opposite of Rao’s model, is the Lambeth race, thats more like openly favouring the tortoise? So that no rabbit would sign up in the first place. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41468567
Then again, in the universe of Benjamin/Squealer fanfic, who's to say we couldn't find the following convo?
— ... Ironic. He could save others from death, but not himself.
— Is it possible to learn this power?
— Not from a pig.
SPJ’s innovation, was to keep it bipartite and below— making sure type IIIs didnt feel like they were a higher class & everyone else was type II (Imagine an army with only NCOs and officers, but the NCOs are type IIIs) No proles (grunts) in the orgchart of a very large design agency..culturally, designers often happy to work like grunts anyway! (Painters = painters)
This trouble with the proles (app store, actual store, icloud, contractor relations, PR screwups.. ) ultimately stems from that failed pancreas transplant, so that they no longer had an IV to keep entropy in its place..
[plus maybe the programmers n ee types started to feel they werent fully designers (Bret Victor, later, pple like Lattner?)]
[Check out the wwdc videos.. the sw engineers dress like.. they havent read the canon]
https://culturology-journal.ru/en/article.php?id=309
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/À_la_maréchale
See cultural references in the less misogynistic (misandric?) en wiki
Equoid Lagniappe: the surnames 司馬 and Marshall have a common origin
the recipes in which are infamous for reducing the population of anarchist cooks
I then began thinking about the other aspects of the bizarre parasitic life-cycle of the unicorn
Contrast also the scale of the engineering consultancies/art/design coops that are purportedly the talent-dense equivalents of Mondragon, eg
So that no rabbit would sign up in the first place.
I liked Добро пожаловать, или Посторонним вход воспрещён (1964), in which the summer camp director plays a very soviet version of an Eric Berne Transactional Analysis* game, "Everything I do, I do it for you".
According to wikipedia, it's infamous in russian for the lines:
— Children, remember! You all are the owners of the camp. [All of] you! What do you all [therefore] need?
— [children in chorus] Di. Sci. Pline!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku_V2HgK6i8
Thx for Equoid! Not having started in on it yet, all I have for now is pedantry, for the commenters on Stross' blog who are making horse analogies (as well as the wonderful Unicorns From Hell vid) are way off base: horses are Perissodactyl, but unicorns are Artiodactyl.
* I'm not sold on TA, but learning to tune out as soon as you notice the opening moves of a TA game? That's sanity-preserving material right there.
PS. I've lost the source for the roman trichotomy; plz remind?
I don't believe it. Dogs' brain matter is a different shade of gray, which only remembers for six weeks.
That’s a clearly absurd proposition. My family’s dogs remember me when i haven’t been around for 6 months, let alone 6 weeks.
That’s a clearly absurd proposition.
Yes, that is the joke.
Terrible joke. "Lol"
The point is, why should it it be surprising.
My dog constantly surprises me and he's only 3.5 years old.
The first year I had him as a puppy, he could smell/hear (?) his best neighborhood buddy walking multiple buildings away from our apartment while the windows were closed. He'd run to the door and start crying and as soon as we got outside he knew the right path. And his friend hadn't even walked by our building yet, so it's not like there was a trail to sniff other than whatever may have been carried by breeze.
Dogs are incredibly smart.
There's also this experiment with dogs where they observed dogs getting up, walking to the front door, and waiting for their owner to come back home from work, as soon as the owner started heading home from the office. They somehow know, like they're telephatically connected.
I know the experiment you're referring to. It's been a long time since I've seen it, no idea how to find it now, but you're definitely misremembering some details. Dogs do have a sense of time, but in that experiment, it actually had to do with scent. As their owner was away, their scent would gradually dissipate throughout the day. At a certain point, the scent was weak enough that the dog knew it was about time for their owner to be home.
In the experiment, then they did everything they could to remove their owners scent from their home. The dog's owner came home at the usual time, but the dog wasn't expecting it this time because they had removed the owner's scent earlier, so the dog was clearly surprised and confused.
Dogs have a very strong sense of smell which we humans often fail to appreciate. It's not like dogs can smell their owner coming home from miles away, that's a little preposterous. But they can use their sense of smell in other ways, which are not so obvious to us, such as to maintain a sense of time.
Aha, interesting, I looked up some info about it and it seems that in another experiment the dogs also reacted when the owner went home at irregular times. Quite interesting:
https://www.sheldrake.org/research/animal-powers/a-dog-that-...
Our dog a shitzu cross can remember multiple toy names, and go find the specific one.
Dogs are the best man
What always surprises me is they remember places they haven't been at for many years as well. Not so much people in my experience. I guess we don't matter to them as much as we like to think we do :)
Remembering places is an interesting one, I’ve not experienced that with our little guy except he knows the vet and the kennel and not a fan of either. I suspect you’re right and we are not as important as we think we are to them but a wagging tail tells me all I need to know!
It's not too surprising as they (in movies and also my dog) respond well after years to just the call of names of people they had a deeper relationship with. So if we associate the name of a toy, eg. "go get the penguin" and they played with it for long period of time, it makes sense that they form a relationship with the toy as well and had memories of it. Dogs dream (I imagine the noise and movements they make while sleeping are dreams), and I won't doubt they dream about owners playing with them and calling out the toy's name and thus reinforcing the name in their memories.
I think the key difference isn't the memory, but the recall. Humans can recall memories at will, while dogs often require a prompt or stimulus, and there's not a clear indication that they're self-recalling information to think about things beyond a period of persistence.
That's not diminutive of them, more a reflection that we've been selecting dogs for this behavior and other "breed traits" (which I think of as specific hereditary OCD) for thousands of years, so it makes sense they're primed for this from a context- or direction-giver.
It's why if you teach a dog a trick that it's still able to recall years later, it won't go off and practice it on its own or teach it to other dogs.
Here I can barely remember the browser tab I was just working on.
I remember how happy our Golden Retriever was after digging up his Kong toy buried in the dirt in the backyard from eons ago. He liked hiding bones out there, and he had several Kong toys laying around the house and yard, but this dirty earthy Kong toy must have gone missing and when he dug it up it was like he struck oil.
I had a GSD who remembered everyone who threw a tennis ball for her. To the point that I had to warn people that if they tossed it once, she'd be dropping a tennis ball in their laps for the foreseeable future.
I miss that girl.
Is it possible the names of the toys were fitting, like Kiki and Bouba? It would be interesting to see result where the toys had the same names but the dogs had never learned them.
I have a German shepherd. She’s 10. I’ve been buying the same toy for her for the last 10 years, jolly ball soccer ball in blue.
Probably average about 2 a year. My dog understands when it’s time for the new one. She’s ultra excited and all the sudden the old ball we have kicked and fetched every single day for 6 months, is non existent as we are on to the new one. I always get a kick out of it. She’s too funny about it.
Wow, now release the study on how to take over control of an animal remotely.
Why is this surprising? Dogs are frikkin clever.
Our old Collie could fetch different types of ball on command without really any intention training.
corollary: a toy cannot be disposed of whilst at least one dog holds a reference to it in memory.
I've had a Mal for a couple of years now; I find myself looking for new words to describe "go" and "walk" with my s/o. We can only use the new words for so long before he catches on and the old ones don't seem to fade away. It's almost a game between us now.
I used to watch a family member's dogs. One year one of the dogs got super obsessed with a toy I bought. As I was packing things up, the dog saw me put the toy in a drawer. A year later when dog was dropped off it immediately went to the room with the drawer and waited eagerly for me to open the drawer and retrieve the toy.
Remember names?
Dogs have egos!!
"...years after (last) seeing them", or "after years of not seeing them".
I've never understood people who say dogs are hard to train. They are SO motivated by food
Depends on the dog. I’ve trained two puppies this year.
The first one was stupid easy to train. Food motivated and could be refocused in every situation with food. Picked up commands quickly. Would do training basically any time of day.
Second dog just stares at me if she doesn’t want to be trained or feels the task is too hard. When she gets distracted, it doesn’t matter how high of a reward I give, she won’t take it if she doesn’t want it.
One trick that is popular in my family is to rest a treat on the tip of a dog's nose, tell them to wait, count silently for a few seconds, and then give them permission to eat it. (My sister's dog does it every day after his breakfast, and I recently had the pleasure of asking him to perform this trick for me when they visited. :)
Anyhow, my favorite of the dogs from my childhood was generally uninterested in what certain people wanted from her. She was more motivated by praise and the sheer joy of teamwork with her favorite people than by food.
So one day my mom (not one of this dog's favorites, through no fault of her own) sets her up to do the trick: she asks the dog to sit and places a treat on the dog's nose. The dog slowly decides she'd actually rather do something else. She tilts her head down towards the ground, the treat slides off her nose, and she leisurely walks away.
Yeah that is why I think dogs that don’t learn tricks are the smart ones not the ones who obey on the first ask.
But humans want obedient dogs not ones that have their own opinions :)
They're animals, you want predictable behavior (as much as is possible - because they're animals).
Eh, I had a Scottish terrier that was incredibly smart, learned every trick on practically the first attempt, then would just not do them again after mastery.
Independent, great explorer and hiker, hated clear objects like she had an intifada against them and never got into trouble or destroyed stuff.
She was a good dude and would have been less fun if she was more obsequious or eager to please and predictable.
I think both very adoring dogs and rather challenging or independent-minded dogs can be really precious in their own ways.
My mom had a boxer who was absolutely obsessed with her for his entire life. He was so eager to please her that she would often cue certain (benign) behaviors by accident, because he was always watching her to see if there was anything for him to do with her. He was so invested in figuring out what she wanted and in impressing her that the gentlest scolding would crush him— it could easily ruin a whole training session.
The things my mom (who is legally blind) got that dog to do were amazing. She (just a hobbyist) did dog sports with him (competitive obedience and rally) and got titles in advanced and intermediate levels. He did some 'American trick dog' stuff where he would do really gimmicky but pretty cute and impressive multi-step tricks, like going outside to fetch the mail and bring it back, or hopping into a suitcase, closing it on his own head, and lying down. He had some routine tricks that were pretty cool, like searching the house to collect all of his toys and put them away. He worked as a therapy dog in hospitals, where he was especially beloved by children, who were invariably amused and pleased that they could get a big, strange dog to do many tricks for them. He'd also do some little assistance things for my mom, like picm things up off fhe floor (if asked) so she didn't have to get down on her hands and knees and pat around to find them.
Unrelated to his training career, I'll never forget his watchfulness and sweetness toward my tiny old chihuahua. As you likely know, boxers can be extremely energetic dogs, but he was a calm soul as far as boxers go. While they didn't meet often, he had a special connection with my little < 5lbs chihuahua: she trusted his gentle nature and he sympathized with her frustration with the antics of my mom's younger boxer. When the young energetic one wouldn't stop following my little one around, he'd trot in between them and quietly create some distance. My little old lady evidently appreciated this quite a bit, so much so that it once caused my family a scare. We always kept the big dogs and small dogs separated if the big dogs were playing, or if we were out of the house, or no one was committed to supervising them. One day after an outing my mom panicked a little when she couldn't find my little old lady, and it turned out that she, not wanting to be alone for the long duration of a shopping trip and dinner, walked a couple steps down (at her age and size she was quite apprehensive about stairs, and typically would not cross even one or two steps) and thwn squeezed through the bars of a baby gate in order to nestle into a dog bed with my mom's dog. He was really an incredible dog, and his gentle, agreeable, social, other-oriented nature was certainly a big part of that.
On the other hand, thst little old lady of a Chihuahua, when I met her, didn't know how to walk on a leash, resource guarded laps and bit about it, and didn't respond to my stupid attempts to scold her except by mistrusting me and avoiding me. Learning how to communicate her and win her over was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. By the end of her life she was a dog I could trust around strangers, dog and human, of all sizes and personalities, who I could take offleash anywhere, who would eait for my signal at a crosswalk, who I could have lay down on some blankets on a table where I was eating and trust her when I walked out of the room, and whom I learned to read for the tiniest signals: eye contact, pointing at what she wanted with her eyes, inaudible growls/whines I could only feel because she was in my lap, the 10 kinds of trembling that comprise key terms in the Chihuahua language... and I probably wouldn't have learned much of anything from her if she hadn't demanded that I come to her and understand her perspective and needs and wants first.
What has food motivation or desire to please have to do with intelligence? I view them as completely orthogonal. A dog can be an idiot and not be food motivated or have a desire to please and conversely a dog can be really smart and be food motivated and eager to please.
Just like parent poster story - dog did not want treat from person it did not like.
That's a smart dog, while I can imagine someone observing such occurence calling the dog dumb.
A rule of thumb we were taught is half the food comes from training (not to the point of cruelty, adjust the training to be easier if needed so they get enough). You can adjust per dog, but many people treat training rewards as "treats" which are surplus to their needs, so greedy or food-loving dogs (I would be one, as is our first dog) will take it but others won't care.
High stress or emotional arousal or a distracting environment will supersede this but it's a decent starting point which people often miss. Luckily our second dog likes play and praise so that gives us more options.
We used that for dog #1. Works great to be able to dole out kibble for training.
Dog #2 just doesn't care. She eats the recommended daily amount, but will take hours to finish a meal. Walking away and coming back later. She just doesn't care about food.
Yes the idea that all dogs are equal and it’s just a mattering of training is a very harmful idea. People get soft about it though because they hit some cute/fuzzy dopamine thing in their brain and don’t take that reality seriously.
This is essentially the nature vs nurture debate, but for dogs.
We have 2 french bulldogs. They're loosely related. one is smart as a whip. One is dumb as hell.
The former, I'm not sure they'd remember toy names from 10 years ago but I've been impressed time after time after time at her ability to understand the world around her.
THe latter, he's just lucky to remember how to walk down the hall.
Sometimes it is the luck of the draw.
Which is depressingly animalistic.
What do you mean by that?
Of course sharing food is a way to build social bonding and positively motivate social conformance. It is with people too, which is why it's so natural for us to carry it over to our relationship with dogs.
How or why is that depressing?
It's good that we crave what helps us thrive and that we can recognize who makes it easy for us to have more, and there's a beautiful elegance to that fact that so many creatures share the trait, across such diverse lineages as birds, reptiles, fish, arthropods, mammals, etc
Isn't that inspiring, rather than depressing?
I ride a lot of bike. I love it when dog owners see someone approaching on a bike, tell their dog to sit and give him a treat. These dogs will then stop when they notice a bike approaching while the owner is distracted. I am always so grateful that I say thank you to the owners.
Then there are those who just don't care to train their dogs.
There is a worse option.
The thin extending dog lead at maximum extension while walking the dog in twilight on a cycle path. What could go wrong?
I tripped over one of these in central London where it abruptly started raining heavily and the owner ran off in one direction while the dog went in another.
Got some doubts about the value of those leads in general; surely it just means the dog has no gauge at all in how far they can go in any direction?
I assumed someone was doing this to me on a sunset run along a paved path. Human standing on one side of the path, small dog in the grass on the side, so I cut my running closer to the dog.
It wasn't a dog, it was a skunk. Fortunately it didn't seem threatened and just waddled away.
How so? Humans are very much the same way in many years, particularly as children.
Food is a primary reinforcers for all species. Neither humans nor dogs are special in that respect. I don't see why anyone should find that depressing.
Spend some time training dogs and you'll also find both that food motivation can vary quite a bit (some dogs are more interested in toys than food, for instance) and also that it's quite possible to train dogs without always relying on a food reward.
Generally the deeper you go with understanding and training dog behavior, the more you realize how the same learning theory that informs scientific dog training also describes human behavior. (Imo it also reveals deficiencies in thinking in terms of learning theory/behaviorism alone; idk how you could work closely with animals and seriously believe they lack cognition.)
We are also the same. We are out for food, the rest is just talk..
Not all dogs are motivated by food.
Our high energy, water-loving, labradoodle is only motivated by one thing: frisbee.
IME all are...
Labradoodles are loopy, like most of the bred-for-instagram breeds. Got to expect the abnormal
Some generations of labradoodles are hypoallergenic from my understanding.
There are no hypoallergenic dogs. There are degrees to which dogs shed, but it's not specific to any one breed and can vary wildly.
https://www.akc.org/dog-breeds/hypoallergenic-dogs/
Pretty much every dog trainer in the world will tell you different dogs are motivated to different degrees by different things. Very weird point to argue on.
I have two purebred poodles (not bred for Instagram) and one is highly motivated by food, the other will decline treats pretty often, even treats we know he really loves. This is not super atypical of poodles.
And to put another layer of complication on your dismissal of other people's challenges training dogs: the not food-motivated one is way easier to train.
Well, I have a lab that is not. She is however motivated by fetch. She is not very smart as labs go, but she would move a mountain for you if it means one more toss of a toy. If you have a toy food does not exist. She will still do things for treats, but will also just decide not to if it suits her :)
I have a xolo that has been diagnosed anorectic by a veterinary. I'll agree it's not common tho, I didn't know dogs could get such a diagnosis until my own dog got it
I have a German Shepherd who isn’t toy motivated, but will climb mountains to play tug.
Don’t assume your experience is universal, especially when there’s a lot of people telling you it isn’t.
You have limited experience. Mine couldn't care less about food if a ball was near it. We also missed her feeding a few times and she never begged or reminded about the food. I usually carry a bag of treats (her favourite) but sometimes she refuses to eat them.
Wolves naturally don't usually eat everyday either, we just make dogs do it because we do it.
My dog must have missed the memo. He'll come over at EXACTLY 6 o'clock (to the minute) to remind you about dinner if it hasn't yet been served. He used to do the same in the morning but eventually we reached a truce on the concept of sleeping in from time to time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning
That's why you never feed them at an exact time.
We have a time frame of roughly 3 hours in which we feed the dog.
That way we can have a nice dinner too, go to a musical etc. pp.
A friend of ours made the same mistake as you. His dog becomes a real diva after 6pm, if she hasn't eaten
Wolves can eat 20lbs of meat in one meal. They’re hunters that eat their fill when food is present because there’s no guarantee they’ll catch prey later. Not really a reasonable comparison to a domesticated animal that’s not designed for feast/famine living.
Most dogs are, yes. I train dogs at an animal shelter, and I can tell you that not all dogs are motivated by food. Some will just turn their nose up at even the tastiest of treats. Some of those dogs might rather have a pet on the head or some praise. A rare few don’t seem motivated by much of anything.
But for the 80% case, yeah, grab some string cheese and a clicker.[0]
[0] https://www.rover.com/blog/clicker-training-dogs/
Perhaps overfed? Have owned dogs all my life, also trained 4 rescues, and various friends' dogs and never yet met one who can resist chicken. Relativity small sample size of about 20 dogs I admit
Perhaps all yours were underfed?
My dog is far more motivated by human attention than food. There’s only one food that he’ll do anything for - freeze dried chicken hearts.
I have a dog who is so food-motivated that he gets distracted by the chance of a treat and won't learn anything.
Neither did I, until I got this lovely idiot who's probably bipolar and probably on the spectrum. They're motivated by food, yes; and we're motivated by unconditional love.
Being motivated to learn isn't equal to being effective at learning. Not all dogs are prone to "understand" what the training is about. Sometimes, they seem like they are eager and ready to engage with your training, but then at the end of the day, not really having learned anything.
Heck, I’ve got a food-motivated cat and I’ve trained her to do all kinds of tricks.
We had a Samoyed who was completely uninterested in food. We tried everything including treats, meat, peanut butter, what not. It would not even touch that food and only eat when he was hungry. He did love combing his hair a lot, walkies and frisbee. So, in the first couple of months, we actually used combing his hair and frisbee as a prize, despite our reservations because his hair would develop knots. But he learned extremely quickly and then we could let it go.
Dogs actually don’t need food for training. It’s an effective, but “lazy” way to train dogs. The best practice is behavioral, to show you are the leader in the dog’s pack. Then you won’t need to ever give a treat for good behaviour. And even in my case where I do give a treat some times, my dog completely obeys me “organically”. PS.: I’m a veterinarian.
I agree, most dogs are not hard to train, but also not all of them are motivated by food. We accidentally got a Kuvasz (probably a mix, with 50cm at the shoulder she is a little short for a pure breed) puppy eight years ago. That's a LGD from Hungary. By "accidentally" I mean nobody in the shelter knew what kind this white fuzzball was, but she liked us, we liked her, so we took her home. It was quite the surprise when we found out what we got there.
Anyhow, like many of her kind she is NOT into food. That made training her in the beginning very difficult, because we knew no other way back than. Even today, I always have to chuckle when I try to give her a treat and she takes the treat very gently from my hand and puts it down on the floor, like saying "let me put it there for you." Of course, sometimes she just eats it but you never know.
Food, but play is better...
In many cases it's the owners fault, not being able to train well
That poor dog will be perpetually disappointed. You should hide some sausage there every once in a while before your walks.
Reminds me of the search and rescue dogs used for finding people in collapsed buildings after, say, an earthquake. Apparently the dogs get depressed after finding nothing but dead people, so the humans seed the rubble once in a while with a live human for the dogs to find.
https://allcreatureslargeandsmall.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/t...
"As time passes without survivors found, search-and-rescue dogs — especially those trained to find living people — experience increased stress and depression. One way this is mitigated is for handlers and trainers to stage mock “finds” so that the dogs can feel successful."
The way I've heard avalanche dogs are trained here is that they are rewarded for accurate information, so in principle they ought to be as satisfied with their job after finding "no people" or "dead person" as well as "live person".
Dogs are social creatures. These dogs are well aware of humans as fellow social creatures. Constantly finding dead people might be inherently distressing, in the same way it'd be distressing to constantly find dead dogs.
There's funny things at play even beyond training effects, most likely. Even leaving aside that finding a dead person might be something that inherently triggers avoidance.
People screening luggage for bombs/knives/etc do significantly better if you show them a picture of a bad bag every now and then. Often these systems are used to monitor screener performance, but even if you just show them the picture now and then with "this is a test, no action is required" they do better.
Being primed with things relative to the task improves human performance, and I'd expect it would work in smarter animals, too.
But in their training they find living people. During real disasters, there might not be time to focus on rewarding the dog.
Just like me when I fix a bug within a minute by pure chance... I need those easy wins.
Ha yeah seriously.
That makes me think of a managerial strategy that involves feeding a low performing employee softball tasks and praising them for completing them. Once they are convinced they are highly competent slowly start ramping up the complexity.
I do this with new people. Being new somewhere is a skill a lot of people I’ve hired don’t have. I toss them some meatballs so they can get a couple of quick, visible wins. You figure you hired them because they know what they’re doing, so help them establish their confidence early on. I highly recommend doing this.
I am half serious and wondering if they do the same for drug-sniffing dogs.
When I'm banging my head against a problem too long I'll do a small task to have a small success. Same thing I guess.
While this is all cute, dogs should be discouraged from eating food they find in the street! It could be poisoned. You never know whether there's someone who really hates dogs in the neighborhood, or if someone tries to solve problems with rats. Unfortunately, my friend lost a dog that way.
No doubt this happens, it must be so rare for someone to put out poisoned half-eaten sausage rolls with the aim of killing a random dog that finds it, I think this is perhaps a teensy bit paranoid.
It's so rare, but it actually does happen, and the people doing it actually try to conceal it like a half eaten sausage that "just fell".
But this isn't even about this particular half eaten sausage. A dog doesn't know the difference between a pristine sausage and a half eaten one, to them it's just meat. And the point is that dogs should be taught to never eat any meat on the street - because they can't think "uh, looks half eaten, probably fine".
It does happen. My sister lost two dogs from poisoned meat someone put in their local park. They ran into the bushes, must have eaten something, started frothing at the mouth, and 15 minutes later both were dead. Apparently a number of other dogs died near that location the same way.
We've had this problem in Malmö, Sweden recently: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/nya-hundbullar-hitta...
Bread rolls with bits of glass or metal in them, found in parks or along other pedestrian paths. They caught one woman doing it, but it is believed the news might have inspired other nutjobs.
#embed "whaleeyes.jpg"
All food must go to the lab for testing!
Oh she's never encouraged. But, Labs being Labs, she'd find a crisp in a field given two minutes.
If you search "magic pie bush" you can find other similar stories :)
That has NSFW written all over it.
I read "had" instead of "has" and spent too much time trying to find another explanation to the completely SFW I found.
I didn't realize how it sounded without context until it was too late.
It's just people talking about (a screenshot of) a Twitter post, quote:
Mostly Reddit and one or two blog posts.
That felt like a dangerous Web query but I did it anyways and that little story and the others people shared in comments sections are great. Dogs are so wonderfully complexly simple.
That's cool but dogs remembering names is more insightful in an exciting way, let me elucidate on why it's pretty fascinating!
We know how place memories work quite well, Place and Grid cells specifically. There is a natural and almost physical level of 1:1 mapping at various scales[1] from location (based on different tracking systems - point integration, landmarks, your own steps) to activating cells in your brain. Simple co-activation alongside reward, like a literal map, sets down "good stuff here" signs in your brain.
Once attenuated and activated by Dopamine, the place cells to triangulate (at different "distances") that position have basically fewer mechanims and binding opportunities for neurotransmitters to change upon other interaction(they have little input beside place + pleasure + pain), so they do not result in loss of their attenuation or association (part of why place stays longest in Alhzeimers patients association).
Memory of sounds however, isn't so clearly mappable, there is no obvious grid/comparable formulation of sound memories in any kind of "order" like there is with location and places in Place Cells. And clearly we humans forget many of the sounds we have heard (e.g. songs, lyrics). That's why it's quite interesting that dogs remember toys names for a long time. It makes you ask questions like "If we had less sounds/named things to remember, could we remember the ones we do remember for much longer, with less forgetting?". "What is the difference between permanent, event and temporal memories?", "Could we resolve neurodegenerative diseases by modifying neurons to be longer lasting or impervious to future modification in strategic areas of the brain? Could be retain some learning?"
[1] http://www.rsb.org.uk/images/biologist/Features/Grid_mouse_d...
This is all fascinating stuff. I love the idea behind memory palaces, and this stuff about place/grid cells sounds like the explanatory science behind it. Any reading you'd recommend?
> And clearly we humans forget many of the sounds we have heard (e.g. songs, lyrics).>
It's true we forget many sounds, but songs and lyrics is a curious example. I'd guess those were high on the list of things humans are good at remembering… maybe #4 behind places, faces, and language in general? I've had pop lyrics and commercial jingles and theme songs rattling around in my head for decades, and I can easily sing them word for word. Something about a sequence of words put to a beat and a melody just seems to stick.
This one break area at work had some cookies sitting out one time for people to grab. That was 6 months ago, but I still check every time I pass it...
My grandfather's dog (some bastardized belgium shepherd) was annoyed at some electric cable hanging too low in some place where he would go for a walk ; after a storm the pylon fell a bit and he would jump up and bite the cable (which was isolated of course), and bark a lot at it.
Years later after everything was fixed, going to walk in this area the dog would always look up at this exact spot and bark a few times. Like "heck don't you dare coming low again I'm watching you".