I like the author's positive outlook on life. Because when I see a dog act like that, especially in a family where a child has taken focus, I mostly see a prisoner longing for freedom.
Me and my dog have been exclusive for almost a decade now. We have traveled across europe, always by my side. Off leash even, I have always wanted to give my dog the most freedom possible. To heck with human rules.
I've mostly worked remotely during my dog's entire life, so I've always been there, and we've always been able to take a long walk outside.
But at the end of the day we have to go home, and I have to fall asleep on the couch after dinner, and I have to work for hours and hours from home, or remote workspaces.
So even with all the freedom my dog enjoys, I still feel like it would want more. We have lived in houses with yards, and my dog has lazily spent every single moment outside, in the sun, in the grass. But I still feel like it's insufficient.
I have claimed this dog as mine, so it goes where I go, not where it wants to go.
If my dog could decide it would have probably died a harsh death in the streets a long time ago. But the dog doesn't understand that. I believe a dog values freedom more than its immediate personal safety.
rootusrootus 27 days ago [-]
> Off leash even, I have always wanted to give my dog the most freedom possible. To heck with human rules.
I regularly meet people like that when I'm camping. I find it pretty frustrating. So many rules like that have basis in reality, they are not just meant to annoy.
gretch 27 days ago [-]
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.
Fomite 27 days ago [-]
This. As a dog owner, my dog remains on a leash. I don't know you. I don't know your dog.
More than once, I've been put in the position where my dog is getting agitated because they're on leash, their dog can't be controlled because they're off leash, and we're rapidly approaching the "Swift kick or risk injury" stage.
"My dog is off leash because I want them to have freedom" is a profoundly selfish decision if you're in a place to encounter other dogs.
bartread 27 days ago [-]
> "My dog is off leash because I want them to have freedom" is a profoundly selfish decision if you're in a place to encounter other dogs.
This is cultural, I think. In the UK at least it’s often the norm for dogs to be off leash in open areas like commons (public land, usually grassy or wooded, or a mix of the two), or in other settings where they’re away from roads and won’t encounter livestock.
On public footpaths in the countryside farmers will put up signs indicating where livestock are and where dogs need to be kept on leash. The rest of the time, again, most dogs will be off leash.
Compliance is really high, with almost all dog owners I see following these rules.
There’s a deterrent as well: if your dog is bothering farm animals the farmer is within their rights to shoot the dog.
I do think the post you’re responding to has a very naive view of dog psychology though. Thousands of years of selective breeding means that dogs are fundamentally not wild animals, and as such their behaviours and needs are quite different from their wild relations, such as wolves. Many breeds of dog are so far removed that they would very likely be incapable of surviving in the wild: I’m thinking principally of designer breeds like pugs which, overall, I strongly disapprove of.
darby_nine 27 days ago [-]
Interesting that livestock is the primary concern—I'd imagine interactions with other dogs (which can be highly stressful, though this varies a lot from dog to dog) would be the primary issue these days.
wizzwizz4 27 days ago [-]
Livestock haven't gone away.
darby_nine 27 days ago [-]
Sure, but their dominance in culture compared to dogs certainly has.
bartread 27 days ago [-]
What is this world that some of you seem to live in where interactions with other dogs are, apparently, incredibly problematic?
Dogs encounter eachother all the time when you're out on a walk and it's... fine (again, I'm talking UK here). What's the worst thing that happens that you're all paranoid about your dog meeting, gasp, the horror... another dog?
This makes no sense to me.
darby_nine 27 days ago [-]
Yes. Dogs meeting other dogs can be extremely stressful. What is your confusion? Let me help you.
I assure you, even in the uk, dogs are still dogs.
cafard 26 days ago [-]
Depends on the dogs. There have been a few dogs in my neighborhood that have attacked other dogs, with the dog that came off worse requiring veterinary attention. In one case the dogs were on leash, but each probably outweighed the walker.
To be fair, I am talking about three or four incidents over twenty years.
That remains, in some ways, one of the funniest videos on the internet[0], but the dog owner was and is an absolute moron. Imagine letting your dog off the lead near a herd of deer. That incident took place in a literal deer park. They're not livestock, per se, but, no surprise, the outcome is about the same as letting your dog off the lead in a field of sheep, and the consequences could have been much more serious.
[0] To the point where we briefly considered naming a dog Fenton, but then realised the humour would wear off pretty quickly and it wouldn't really be fair on the dog.
mhb 27 days ago [-]
I realize this question is likely not to be appreciated by many, but do you not know whether your dog is male or female?
amanaplanacanal 27 days ago [-]
I must be stupid. Try as I might, I can’t figure out what prompted this question. What am I missing?
mhb 27 days ago [-]
The use of the gender-neutral plural pronoun to refer to the dog instead of he/she/him/her.
...my dog is getting agitated because they're on leash...
amanaplanacanal 26 days ago [-]
Ahhh. I’m so used to that construction I didn’t even see it. If you have had the same experience with multiple dogs of both genders, how would you put it?
mhb 26 days ago [-]
I would use "he/him" because the convention of using he/him for singular, indeterminate gender is no more difficult to understand than that "they/them" is being used as singular, indeterminate.
Ideally, I would like the people for whom this is important to use a new unambiguous word. Though this ship seems to have sailed despite there apparently being a number of possible candidates.
That aside, the author of the post to which we are referring must know the sex of his dog so why be ambiguous?
amanaplanacanal 26 days ago [-]
Language changes. Trying to make it stop is like trying to sweep back the tide. Could go back to old English I guess, or proto-germanic, or proto-indo-European. Or whatever came before that.
And the singular usage of they/them has been going on since at least the 14th century.
mhb 26 days ago [-]
I know the argument about its historical usage which isn't a great one if you're also going to argue that language changes. In any case, I'd prefer that it change for the better. An optimist might even hope that it is discussions such as this one which influence how it changes.
Are you suggesting that we dispense with he/his/she/her in all cases? Like in this one to refer to a male or female dog?
amanaplanacanal 26 days ago [-]
No, I’m not suggesting that. Languages are gonna do whatever they are gonna do.
jjtheblunt 27 days ago [-]
My un-favorite is the people with dogs on the spring loaded extending leashes, who let their little crazy dog come running at my feral-parents dog from a distance, announcing "don't worry...my dog is friendly.".
The people _never_ ask if my dog on her 2 meter leash (the law in Arizona, btw) is friendly, dangerous, anything. They just announce that their dog isn't dangerous to us.
So often the small dog runs up to my dog's face full speed, centimeter from her nose, gets satan-barked at and driven away from us. she's sensibly trying to protect me and her from the little barely tethered full speed maniac.
The people ask if my dog was abused. Nope: had her since she was three months old, the feral mom and others were all adopted. They just don't seem to consider that _they_ were aggressive, in dog body language. And that's hopefully eye opening for them.
imoverclocked 27 days ago [-]
Just yell back “Mine isn’t!” Then you both get a little bit of an adrenaline rush…
On a serious note, I miss the wide open spaces I could bring my dogs to in AZ. Where I live in NorCal it’s practically impossible and even if I could let my dog off leash in some places, the poison oak often stops me from even considering it.
jjtheblunt 26 days ago [-]
Yeah, that's what works, even though she is friendly, just guards her pack. Like you surmised, it's often amusing watching the reactions.
Be glad in NorCal there aren't the ubiquitous rattlesnakes and babies this time of year. And of course the heat is an outdoors dealbreaker still for a few more weeks, except at dawn. Canine cabin fever. But i sure miss the more pleasant outdoorsy weather in NorCal.
cafard 26 days ago [-]
I get along with most of the many dogs in my neighborhood quite well. But my experience has said that there are owners whose confidence in a dog considerably outruns any basis for it.
UniverseHacker 27 days ago [-]
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.
carom 27 days ago [-]
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.
fyt2024 27 days ago [-]
"I go to campsites and wilderness areas where dogs are allowed off leash." In the US?
I move with my golden retriever back to the states. Should someone have a dog friendly place to rent in NJ close to NYC, Hoboken....
jxcl 27 days ago [-]
In the US, wilderness area is a specific legal term[1], which have very restrictive rules about what visitors are allowed to do. Very specifically, dogs are _not_ allowed off-leash in wilderness areas, because they can disturb the local wildlife, and the stated goal of wilderness areas is to protect the local wildlife to the highest extent possible.
The laws are more nuanced than you suggest. Here is a government website [1] that mentions dogs and says “Dogs must be under control at all times. Dogs can harass, stress, injure or kill wildlife; annoy fellow hikers and introduce disease. Some wilderness areas require dogs be leashed at all times.”
I have recently been in Mount Baker’s wilderness where dogs off leash away from trailheads are fine and also in Mount Shasta wilderness where pet dogs are not allowed even on leash. There is latitude for local tweaks to the rules in specific wilderness areas across the US. The US also has vast swaths of BLM and other lands where all kinds of fun recreation (hunting, dogs off leash, OHV’s, and all kinds of other things are allowed).
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.
mock-possum 27 days ago [-]
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 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.
jholman 27 days ago [-]
My sense is that dogs prioritize pack/family togetherness ahead of freedom. They don't value all other people (and to a dog, "people" means dogs, humans, and sometimes other species), but also they do not only value their "owner". They value their family, their pack. They want to be with those they want to be with, in action and in rest.
After that, they value things like food, exercise, curiousity, and the absence of immediate pain.
Most dogs, that haven't been traumatized, seem to have a pretty reasonable attitude toward personal safety: you mustn't let fear rule you. But some dogs, that have been traumatized, can be inordinately concerned with what they perceive to be their personal safety, in some cases to the point of (understandable, tragic) derangement.
onlyrealcuzzo 27 days ago [-]
> I believe a dog values freedom more than its immediate personal safety
Think you're underestimating how much your dog probably likes you...
Dogs have a different relationship to their owner than people do with their best friends or parents.
It's like the best parts of each relationship wrapped into one for dogs.
amrocha 27 days ago [-]
And sometimes relationships are toxic. Yes, the dog stays with its owner, most times at a detriment to its own health.
MissPinocchio 27 days ago [-]
[dead]
itishappy 27 days ago [-]
> Off leash even, I have always wanted to give my dog the most freedom possible.
> I believe a dog values freedom more than its immediate personal safety.
I'm sure you're convinced your dog would never hurt anyone, but are you really sure everyone else you encounter will feel the same? That's a huge amount of trust to put on both strangers and your dog, and I'd argue it has not been earned. I've never encountered an out of control dog, and I pray I don't have to, but I have friends who have. They broke ribs. Eyes would have been next. Please don't make me or anybody else hurt your dog.
UniverseHacker 27 days ago [-]
I doubt your dog actually values or desires unlimited freedom in that way… most dogs seem to value family connection and are comforted by an owner calmly directing them and spending time with them. They usually prefer exploring outdoors with their family rather than alone.
A lot of country/ farm dogs for example, who have limitless land to explore, will still follow their owners all day, and if the owner is gone tend to just sleep until they return.
Satam 27 days ago [-]
I think you're right that for a dog to live its best life it needs the ability to spend a lot of time outdoors with relative freedom. Our labrador had the chance to live like that in an excessively very large garden for his last 4 years. I'm glad he got that, I think it made his life much better. Looking back, when he stayed with us in an apartment he must've been depressed.
gretch 27 days ago [-]
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.
vundercind 27 days ago [-]
Totally normal in the country, in the US. No fence or anything, either, if you’ve got enough land.
mejutoco 27 days ago [-]
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.
grahamjameson 27 days ago [-]
I would like to expand on this and suggest that this applies to humans as well.
zoklet-enjoyer 27 days ago [-]
My roommates' dog got attacked by the neighbor dog 2 days ago. The dog ran across the street into our yard to attack him. There's a reason for leashes.
spike021 27 days ago [-]
> Off leash even, I have always wanted to give my dog the most freedom possible. To heck with human rules.
All it takes is one time to ruin that for you and probably other people too.
dyauspitr 27 days ago [-]
>I mostly see a prisoner longing for freedom.
Honestly, I think the dog would rather have a pack in a family (wife, kids etc.) than a single person to essentially spend the rest of their life with. My dog has so much more energy when the whole family is in the same room.
pdonis 27 days ago [-]
> I believe a dog values freedom more than its immediate personal safety.
Why do you believe that? Bear in mind that our domesticated dogs of today are very different from their wild ancestors (or from wolves, their closest wild relatives).
yencabulator 25 days ago [-]
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.
omayomay 27 days ago [-]
Do you, by any chance, deep down, feel like a prisoner longing for freedom? reflecting your internal state in the dog?
BatFastard 27 days ago [-]
I believe you are projecting your feeling onto the dog. My dogs(2) favorite place in the world is curled up in the crook of my legs. But I do think solo dogs are lonely.
amrocha 27 days ago [-]
How is the original comment projecting, but yours isn’t?
ecshafer 27 days ago [-]
> Off leash even, I have always wanted to give my dog the most freedom possible. To heck with human rules.
Having dogs off of leashes is incredibly dangerous and irresponsible. The amount of children killed or injured by poorly restrained dogs is very high. A dog should be fenced in or on a leash if they are outside, full stop. Dog ownership should really have a license requirement.
jholman 27 days ago [-]
> 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?
vundercind 27 days ago [-]
Injuries are way more common than death.
[edit] Forbes: an estimated 800,000 people each year must seek medical attention after a bite. Hospital bills can be very expensive, and an ER visit could necessitate a dog bite lawsuit in order to recover monetary compensation for damages.
My sister in law was one of them, when she was five or so. Unprovoked run-up-and-bite from an off-leash dog. Had to have a tear duct rerouted and other work on her face. Messed up their finances really bad for a couple years, like “parents not eating dinner tonight, because there’s only one can of spaghetti-o’s” bad (they were fairly poor to begin with)
jholman 27 days ago [-]
Yikes, that's a grim story.
Yeah, the injury stats are way higher than death. I just couldn't find a fast way to disambiguate serious injuries from not-so-serious-but-we-still-care injuries from the sort of bite that really just merits a fake apology and everyone gets on with their lives.
At the other extreme, I've had first-hand knowledge of a case where someone taunted a dog repeatedly over many months (stupid kid, stupid dog-owners, lots of mistakes were made), eventually the kid got bit, didn't even need stitches, but they called animal control.
So. Non-fatal dog-attacks have a very wide range of impact, and I had no idea how to disentangle those.
Oh, after all that writing I just did, I went back and re-read your source. In 2022 there were 17,500 home insurance claims related to dog bites, at an average cost of $64k. That sounds like a pretty reasonable proxy for serious injury due to injuries from dog bites from pets, the sort of pets that could plausibly have been inappropriately not-on-leash (remember we're discussing whether or not it's "incredibly dangerous and irresponsible" to ever have your dog unrestrained).
vundercind 27 days ago [-]
Sure, I agree that 800,000-hospital-visits number isn’t really a great picture of what’s going on. The deaths number was just so very far under what I was sure was the serious-harm figure that I thought it worth bringing in the non-death attacks, and a (probably reasonable-ish) estimate of cases that prompted treatment was first thing I saw that looked close to what I was looking for.
The 17.5k stat’s interesting—I think you’re right that it may at least be in the ballpark for an estimate of unrestrained dog attacks. Some would generate a claim, some wouldn’t, some claims wouldn’t be for unrestrained dogs… yeah, probably a good starting point. I like that one, good eye.
I’d guess most attacks of that 800k aren’t from strangers’ dogs at all, but friends and family’s dogs. Simple matter of opportunity and time exposed.
snozolli 27 days ago [-]
I'm not the other guy, and I don't have data, but the risk might be far higher outside the US.
These days, Americans mostly treat their dog like a family member. If you travel to developing nations, you're far more likely to run into packs of dogs roaming around. Packs of dogs will do things that a solo dog might never consider.
It still happens in developed countries, but it's far more common these days to see it in poor, developing countries. They probably don't have the infrastructure to collect relevant statistics, either.
jholman 27 days ago [-]
Yes, I agree with you, and poorly-fed dogs might do things that a privileged pet might never consider. And, a fortiori, packs of poorly-fed dogs.
But the comment I was responding to was from a commenter whose bio says they're in Philidelphia, responding to a comment that I think was probably pretty developed-country, on a story from a Brit living in America. So I think we're talking about the developed-country context.
I'm not disagreeing with the text of what you wrote, though.
chucksta 27 days ago [-]
What would a license solve?
ttctciyf 27 days ago [-]
Somehow this piece manages to avoid mention of both Diogenes, famed admirer of dogs for whom his philosphical school, Cynicism[0], is named, and Kafka, whose Investigations of a Dog is an essential short fiction about a genius dog philosopher[2].
I would just like to comment that if you love animals, you should hate pets. The amount of animal factory farming (killing of animals often more intelligent than your canine) required to nourish a domesticated animal over the course of their lives is gross in all senses of the word gross.
Alternatively, if you love animals, you should also love pets but not necessarily have one or support the concept.
dbg31415 27 days ago [-]
Mate, if ever there was someone who needed to spend an hour rolling around with a bunch of puppies, it's you. (=
I hope you can at least understand that pets bring joy into the lives of their owners. It doesn't all have to make perfect sense.
In the grand scheme of things, we're all just temporary cosmic dust, right? And dogs are a great daily reminder to focus on the small moments of happiness whenever you can find one.
causasui 27 days ago [-]
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?
DaoVeles 27 days ago [-]
> What else would you be able to justify using this platitude?
Have you been reading Earthly Ed's books? ;)
Yeah, that justification taken to its extremes goes down a VERY dark path.
financetechbro 26 days ago [-]
This is a philosophical question I hadn’t considered. Although, I eat meat, so under that umbrella I can’t hate my dog for also doing the same.
I think another perspective to consider here is how this applies to rescue dogs. I rescued my dog, but from your pov it would’ve been a better idea to euthanize her to spare the lives of all the other animals she would’ve consumed in her lifetime.
Few more things that come to mind:
1. Nature does not reward for smartest, but for the fittest. Which is interesting in itself
2. Argument could be made the same for humans (there are some people that are not worth the life of a farm animal, for example). But also one could say that the summed intellect of all animals that have been killed for consumption for one person in their life time may be net more than that person’s intelligence
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.
financetechbro 25 days ago [-]
In your mind, where is the line drawn between consumption for survival and gluttony?
DaoVeles 27 days ago [-]
This was the argument I had with my wife over getting a cat. Eventually she decided ended up with a stray off the street. But there is always that element of, as Joe Rogan called it, "opening a can of murder" every time you feed them.
I am not for pet owner ship as a broad concept because of this feeding pattern but there is that issue of once they are here - then what? So long as we can get their numbers down then that is a good start. At the moment we are in a predicament, with a solution a while off.
4ggr0 27 days ago [-]
then buy a vegetarian/vegan pet :) rabbits, mice, hamsters etc.
konfusinomicon 27 days ago [-]
with a name such as nirmel it sounds a bit like your just salty because garfield has tried to mail you to abu dhabi like 100 times
Imagine you life for a pack, and to defend that pack, you have to bring the part that is most sensitive - your noose, towards the enemy and bite it. And its okay- you are living the rocket life anyway. Fast in, fast out, all for one, one for all.
Dogs derive much of their meaning and satisfaction in life from their humans. I know that when my wife and I leave ours in the house for too long, they start to become agitated; upon our return one of them, a Catahoula, has made a habit of complaining loudly, as is typical of her breed, as if to say "Where have you been? You belong here with us!" Oh, and a minute can count as "too long".
Shadow gets excited upon hearing "do you want to come with?" because the repetitiveness of the outing doesn't matter. It's time spent with his human and that is more than enough. It's literally what he was made to do: in need of a faithful companion (other humans being too dodgy) we took one of nature's finest predators and engineered it over millennia, bending its will to need our companionship to the point of utter emotional dependency. Dogs, compared to wolves, even have extra muscles around their eyes whose sole purpose appears to be to enable them to emote to humans more effectively.
Furthermore, dogs have the approximate intelligence of a human toddler... do any of you remember being three or four years old, and every single ride in the car was a new adventure to look forward to? I know that half of Hackernews considers it a biological impossibility to remember anything before about age seven, if that, but maybe when you have a toddler-level brain, things are still full of wonder that might be mundane or forgettable to adult humans.
LeifCarrotson 27 days ago [-]
The post contains a pretty strong assertion that dogs cannot perform mental reflection:
> In the authentic happiness Shadow finds in the most banal of activities, his commitment to life and action is one that we humans find so hard to emulate. This is because of something that happened to us: a great schism in consciousness that we know as reflection. We humans are the world heavyweight champions of thinking about ourselves, scrutinising and evaluating what we do and why we do it.
> This schism breaks us in two. Henceforth we are all divided into one who thinks and one who is thought about; one who sees and one who is seen; one who reflects and one who is reflected upon. This bifurcation in our consciousness robs us of the possibility of a certain type of happiness, the happiness that accompanies being whole. Shadow is whole in a way that a human can never be.
...
> Being undivided by reflection, being whole and entire, a dog has only one life to live, whereas we – in whom reflection’s canyon is deepest – have two. For us, there is both the life that we live and the life that we think about, scrutinise, evaluate and judge.
It's one thing to assert that a philosophy of living in the moment may be good for people, something completely different to assert that dogs are incapable of living otherwise.
pdonis 27 days ago [-]
Is there any evidence that dogs can perform mental reflection?
IncreasePosts 27 days ago [-]
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.
sorokod 27 days ago [-]
"What would dog mental reflection even look like?"
Maybe "I acted in a way that displeased my owner, next time I will not act that way".
pdonis 27 days ago [-]
> "I acted in a way that displeased my owner, next time I will not act that way"
This kind of conditioning can take place without any mental reflection--we know this because humans can be conditioned this way without even being consciously aware of it.
This is not to say that the dog is unaware of having displeased their owner (which, as another poster pointed out, is in itself a form of mental reflection, although, as I responded, a very rudimentary one). It's just to say that the dog can be conditioned by this experience to not act that way next time, without being aware of it and without doing any mental reflection.
sorokod 27 days ago [-]
Yes, could. Doesn't mean it must.
Your use of the word rudimentary implies some sort of spectrum, that makes sense to me.
pdonis 27 days ago [-]
> Your use of the word rudimentary implies some sort of spectrum
Yes, it does. See my reply to abainbridge downthread.
jacobmidtlyng 27 days ago [-]
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.
abainbridge 27 days ago [-]
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.
Mali- 27 days ago [-]
Pavlovian response. The dog associates pooing on the carpet with you punishing it/being upset with it.
pdonis 27 days ago [-]
> 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.
This shows that the dog knows it did something you didn't want it to do, yes. I'm not sure it shows "thinking about ourselves, scrutinising and evaluating what we do and why we do it", which is how the article this discussion is about described "mental reflection". Our dogs have made messes in our house and have shown evidence that they know they're not supposed to, but I see no evidence that they have done any reflection on why they did it.
Of course "mental reflection" is not an all or nothing thing, obviously there is a continuum of possibilities. So a more precise phrasing of my question might be: is there any evidence that dogs can perform mental reflection at a point on that continuum anywhere near the point where humans do it? Or are they only capable of it at a point on the continuum much, much closer to the other end, the "no reflection at all" end?
sorokod 27 days ago [-]
What would a metric for measuring distance on this continuum look like?
pdonis 27 days ago [-]
I'm not sure since we don't have any good way of quantifying "amount of mental reflection". But that doesn't mean there isn't a large difference between dogs and humans in this regard.
littlekey 27 days ago [-]
Seems like a fair assertion to me, accepting the fact that we have no way (yet?) of proving it one way or the other. Just from observing any animal I think the default assumption is that we're the only ones who ruminate about our own selves the way we do.
Me and my dog have been exclusive for almost a decade now. We have traveled across europe, always by my side. Off leash even, I have always wanted to give my dog the most freedom possible. To heck with human rules.
I've mostly worked remotely during my dog's entire life, so I've always been there, and we've always been able to take a long walk outside.
But at the end of the day we have to go home, and I have to fall asleep on the couch after dinner, and I have to work for hours and hours from home, or remote workspaces.
So even with all the freedom my dog enjoys, I still feel like it would want more. We have lived in houses with yards, and my dog has lazily spent every single moment outside, in the sun, in the grass. But I still feel like it's insufficient.
I have claimed this dog as mine, so it goes where I go, not where it wants to go.
If my dog could decide it would have probably died a harsh death in the streets a long time ago. But the dog doesn't understand that. I believe a dog values freedom more than its immediate personal safety.
I regularly meet people like that when I'm camping. I find it pretty frustrating. So many rules like that have basis in reality, they are not just meant to annoy.
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.
More than once, I've been put in the position where my dog is getting agitated because they're on leash, their dog can't be controlled because they're off leash, and we're rapidly approaching the "Swift kick or risk injury" stage.
"My dog is off leash because I want them to have freedom" is a profoundly selfish decision if you're in a place to encounter other dogs.
This is cultural, I think. In the UK at least it’s often the norm for dogs to be off leash in open areas like commons (public land, usually grassy or wooded, or a mix of the two), or in other settings where they’re away from roads and won’t encounter livestock.
On public footpaths in the countryside farmers will put up signs indicating where livestock are and where dogs need to be kept on leash. The rest of the time, again, most dogs will be off leash.
Compliance is really high, with almost all dog owners I see following these rules.
There’s a deterrent as well: if your dog is bothering farm animals the farmer is within their rights to shoot the dog.
I do think the post you’re responding to has a very naive view of dog psychology though. Thousands of years of selective breeding means that dogs are fundamentally not wild animals, and as such their behaviours and needs are quite different from their wild relations, such as wolves. Many breeds of dog are so far removed that they would very likely be incapable of surviving in the wild: I’m thinking principally of designer breeds like pugs which, overall, I strongly disapprove of.
Dogs encounter eachother all the time when you're out on a walk and it's... fine (again, I'm talking UK here). What's the worst thing that happens that you're all paranoid about your dog meeting, gasp, the horror... another dog?
This makes no sense to me.
I assure you, even in the uk, dogs are still dogs.
To be fair, I am talking about three or four incidents over twenty years.
https://youtu.be/3GRSbr0EYYU?si=Q15kFkFBE-aW2ail
[0] To the point where we briefly considered naming a dog Fenton, but then realised the humour would wear off pretty quickly and it wouldn't really be fair on the dog.
...my dog is getting agitated because they're on leash...
Ideally, I would like the people for whom this is important to use a new unambiguous word. Though this ship seems to have sailed despite there apparently being a number of possible candidates.
That aside, the author of the post to which we are referring must know the sex of his dog so why be ambiguous?
And the singular usage of they/them has been going on since at least the 14th century.
Are you suggesting that we dispense with he/his/she/her in all cases? Like in this one to refer to a male or female dog?
The people _never_ ask if my dog on her 2 meter leash (the law in Arizona, btw) is friendly, dangerous, anything. They just announce that their dog isn't dangerous to us.
So often the small dog runs up to my dog's face full speed, centimeter from her nose, gets satan-barked at and driven away from us. she's sensibly trying to protect me and her from the little barely tethered full speed maniac.
The people ask if my dog was abused. Nope: had her since she was three months old, the feral mom and others were all adopted. They just don't seem to consider that _they_ were aggressive, in dog body language. And that's hopefully eye opening for them.
On a serious note, I miss the wide open spaces I could bring my dogs to in AZ. Where I live in NorCal it’s practically impossible and even if I could let my dog off leash in some places, the poison oak often stops me from even considering it.
Be glad in NorCal there aren't the ubiquitous rattlesnakes and babies this time of year. And of course the heat is an outdoors dealbreaker still for a few more weeks, except at dawn. Canine cabin fever. But i sure miss the more pleasant outdoorsy weather in NorCal.
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 move with my golden retriever back to the states. Should someone have a dog friendly place to rent in NJ close to NYC, Hoboken....
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilderness#United_States
I have recently been in Mount Baker’s wilderness where dogs off leash away from trailheads are fine and also in Mount Shasta wilderness where pet dogs are not allowed even on leash. There is latitude for local tweaks to the rules in specific wilderness areas across the US. The US also has vast swaths of BLM and other lands where all kinds of fun recreation (hunting, dogs off leash, OHV’s, and all kinds of other things are allowed).
[1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/psicc/specialplaces/?cid=stel...
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/woman-drowns-kings-ri...
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.
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.
c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Bark
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.
After that, they value things like food, exercise, curiousity, and the absence of immediate pain.
Most dogs, that haven't been traumatized, seem to have a pretty reasonable attitude toward personal safety: you mustn't let fear rule you. But some dogs, that have been traumatized, can be inordinately concerned with what they perceive to be their personal safety, in some cases to the point of (understandable, tragic) derangement.
Think you're underestimating how much your dog probably likes you...
Dogs have a different relationship to their owner than people do with their best friends or parents.
It's like the best parts of each relationship wrapped into one for dogs.
> I believe a dog values freedom more than its immediate personal safety.
I'm sure you're convinced your dog would never hurt anyone, but are you really sure everyone else you encounter will feel the same? That's a huge amount of trust to put on both strangers and your dog, and I'd argue it has not been earned. I've never encountered an out of control dog, and I pray I don't have to, but I have friends who have. They broke ribs. Eyes would have been next. Please don't make me or anybody else hurt your dog.
A lot of country/ farm dogs for example, who have limitless land to explore, will still follow their owners all day, and if the owner is gone tend to just sleep until they return.
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.
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.
All it takes is one time to ruin that for you and probably other people too.
Honestly, I think the dog would rather have a pack in a family (wife, kids etc.) than a single person to essentially spend the rest of their life with. My dog has so much more energy when the whole family is in the same room.
Why do you believe that? Bear in mind that our domesticated dogs of today are very different from their wild ancestors (or from wolves, their closest wild relatives).
Having dogs off of leashes is incredibly dangerous and irresponsible. The amount of children killed or injured by poorly restrained dogs is very high. A dog should be fenced in or on a leash if they are outside, full stop. Dog ownership should really have a license requirement.
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?
[edit] Forbes: an estimated 800,000 people each year must seek medical attention after a bite. Hospital bills can be very expensive, and an ER visit could necessitate a dog bite lawsuit in order to recover monetary compensation for damages.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/dog-attack-statistics-b...
My sister in law was one of them, when she was five or so. Unprovoked run-up-and-bite from an off-leash dog. Had to have a tear duct rerouted and other work on her face. Messed up their finances really bad for a couple years, like “parents not eating dinner tonight, because there’s only one can of spaghetti-o’s” bad (they were fairly poor to begin with)
Yeah, the injury stats are way higher than death. I just couldn't find a fast way to disambiguate serious injuries from not-so-serious-but-we-still-care injuries from the sort of bite that really just merits a fake apology and everyone gets on with their lives.
At the other extreme, I've had first-hand knowledge of a case where someone taunted a dog repeatedly over many months (stupid kid, stupid dog-owners, lots of mistakes were made), eventually the kid got bit, didn't even need stitches, but they called animal control.
So. Non-fatal dog-attacks have a very wide range of impact, and I had no idea how to disentangle those.
Oh, after all that writing I just did, I went back and re-read your source. In 2022 there were 17,500 home insurance claims related to dog bites, at an average cost of $64k. That sounds like a pretty reasonable proxy for serious injury due to injuries from dog bites from pets, the sort of pets that could plausibly have been inappropriately not-on-leash (remember we're discussing whether or not it's "incredibly dangerous and irresponsible" to ever have your dog unrestrained).
The 17.5k stat’s interesting—I think you’re right that it may at least be in the ballpark for an estimate of unrestrained dog attacks. Some would generate a claim, some wouldn’t, some claims wouldn’t be for unrestrained dogs… yeah, probably a good starting point. I like that one, good eye.
I’d guess most attacks of that 800k aren’t from strangers’ dogs at all, but friends and family’s dogs. Simple matter of opportunity and time exposed.
These days, Americans mostly treat their dog like a family member. If you travel to developing nations, you're far more likely to run into packs of dogs roaming around. Packs of dogs will do things that a solo dog might never consider.
It still happens in developed countries, but it's far more common these days to see it in poor, developing countries. They probably don't have the infrastructure to collect relevant statistics, either.
But the comment I was responding to was from a commenter whose bio says they're in Philidelphia, responding to a comment that I think was probably pretty developed-country, on a story from a Brit living in America. So I think we're talking about the developed-country context.
I'm not disagreeing with the text of what you wrote, though.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes#Philosophy :
> asked why he was called a dog [Diogenes] replied, "I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals."
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_of_a_Dog
I hope you can at least understand that pets bring joy into the lives of their owners. It doesn't all have to make perfect sense.
In the grand scheme of things, we're all just temporary cosmic dust, right? And dogs are a great daily reminder to focus on the small moments of happiness whenever you can find one.
> 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?
Have you been reading Earthly Ed's books? ;)
Yeah, that justification taken to its extremes goes down a VERY dark path.
I think another perspective to consider here is how this applies to rescue dogs. I rescued my dog, but from your pov it would’ve been a better idea to euthanize her to spare the lives of all the other animals she would’ve consumed in her lifetime.
Few more things that come to mind:
1. Nature does not reward for smartest, but for the fittest. Which is interesting in itself
2. Argument could be made the same for humans (there are some people that are not worth the life of a farm animal, for example). But also one could say that the summed intellect of all animals that have been killed for consumption for one person in their life time may be net more than that person’s intelligence
I am not for pet owner ship as a broad concept because of this feeding pattern but there is that issue of once they are here - then what? So long as we can get their numbers down then that is a good start. At the moment we are in a predicament, with a solution a while off.
Shadow gets excited upon hearing "do you want to come with?" because the repetitiveness of the outing doesn't matter. It's time spent with his human and that is more than enough. It's literally what he was made to do: in need of a faithful companion (other humans being too dodgy) we took one of nature's finest predators and engineered it over millennia, bending its will to need our companionship to the point of utter emotional dependency. Dogs, compared to wolves, even have extra muscles around their eyes whose sole purpose appears to be to enable them to emote to humans more effectively.
Furthermore, dogs have the approximate intelligence of a human toddler... do any of you remember being three or four years old, and every single ride in the car was a new adventure to look forward to? I know that half of Hackernews considers it a biological impossibility to remember anything before about age seven, if that, but maybe when you have a toddler-level brain, things are still full of wonder that might be mundane or forgettable to adult humans.
> In the authentic happiness Shadow finds in the most banal of activities, his commitment to life and action is one that we humans find so hard to emulate. This is because of something that happened to us: a great schism in consciousness that we know as reflection. We humans are the world heavyweight champions of thinking about ourselves, scrutinising and evaluating what we do and why we do it.
> This schism breaks us in two. Henceforth we are all divided into one who thinks and one who is thought about; one who sees and one who is seen; one who reflects and one who is reflected upon. This bifurcation in our consciousness robs us of the possibility of a certain type of happiness, the happiness that accompanies being whole. Shadow is whole in a way that a human can never be.
...
> Being undivided by reflection, being whole and entire, a dog has only one life to live, whereas we – in whom reflection’s canyon is deepest – have two. For us, there is both the life that we live and the life that we think about, scrutinise, evaluate and judge.
It's one thing to assert that a philosophy of living in the moment may be good for people, something completely different to assert that dogs are incapable of living otherwise.
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.
Maybe "I acted in a way that displeased my owner, next time I will not act that way".
This kind of conditioning can take place without any mental reflection--we know this because humans can be conditioned this way without even being consciously aware of it.
This is not to say that the dog is unaware of having displeased their owner (which, as another poster pointed out, is in itself a form of mental reflection, although, as I responded, a very rudimentary one). It's just to say that the dog can be conditioned by this experience to not act that way next time, without being aware of it and without doing any mental reflection.
Your use of the word rudimentary implies some sort of spectrum, that makes sense to me.
Yes, it does. See my reply to abainbridge downthread.
This shows that the dog knows it did something you didn't want it to do, yes. I'm not sure it shows "thinking about ourselves, scrutinising and evaluating what we do and why we do it", which is how the article this discussion is about described "mental reflection". Our dogs have made messes in our house and have shown evidence that they know they're not supposed to, but I see no evidence that they have done any reflection on why they did it.
Of course "mental reflection" is not an all or nothing thing, obviously there is a continuum of possibilities. So a more precise phrasing of my question might be: is there any evidence that dogs can perform mental reflection at a point on that continuum anywhere near the point where humans do it? Or are they only capable of it at a point on the continuum much, much closer to the other end, the "no reflection at all" end?