I wag, therefore I am: the philosophy of dogs(theguardian.com) |
I wag, therefore I am: the philosophy of dogs(theguardian.com) |
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
> 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.
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?
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.
Have you been reading Earthly Ed's books? ;)
Yeah, that justification taken to its extremes goes down a VERY dark path.
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.
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....
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...
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?
[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://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/woman-drowns-kings-ri...
Yes, it does. See my reply to abainbridge downthread.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
...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?