There is the idea that animals like dogs live in the present moment, hence can easily change owners as the present owner is the owner. This appears on the face of it right. Mist other domesticated animals like cows etc eat drink and sleep. Everything else is by instinct or habit.
On the other hand there are animals like squirrels, foxes, magpies etc store and hide food for the future. There is clear thought and effort in this activity.
My cat has demonstrated behavior that indicates future consideration. If I close a door she will let me know even if she doesn’t want to use that door at the moment that she wants it open. She will later use that door such as after her nap.
Also some animals are known to store food for later (big cats come to mind on this one, but squirrels bury food for later too). This indicates some future consideration. Beavers also will dig canals and get trees ready to fell incase extra wood in needed. So it does seem like future consideration is reasonable, and they don’t just live in the moment.
Like anything, sometimes we and they live in the moment, other times not.
Is the beaver thinking “I might need that wood later”, or “I need a surplus of wood right now”? Without being able to ask them, it’s tough to tell the difference.
Looking online, I’m finding that some chimpanzees have been able to pass the Marshmallow Test, but not much about any other animals. Surely, someone’s tried it with dogs?
Regarding dogs, I have plenty of evidence that my dog thinks of the future. For example, a visitor to the house once tricked him into going outside when his playfulness was getting disruptive. She got him to follow her out on the deck, then quickly dashed back in and closed the door. When she tried it again weeks later, he refused to follow her out – “I know how this game turns out”, he thought to himself.
Likewise he typically comes to his dish at dinnertime even when there’s no food there (how he knows what time it is I have no idea). If I’m busy with something and can’t feed him right then, he’ll go do something else for a while and come back later. And of course hearing “go for a walk” or “go to the park” causes the Doggy Dance of Joy in anticipation.
But I think it’s also true to say that dogs, and probably all sentient animals except humans, “live in the moment” in the sense that, although they’re aware of the concept of “future”, they’re not burdened with the emotional baggage of worrying about it, a point eloquently made by the novelist and essayist Wendell Berry. Worry seems to be a uniquely human curse.
Some can easily change owners. Others can’t. Some will go into depressions to the point of not eating. Some take weeks or months to trust a new human.
How they think about the future’s difficult to tell. But the cat who disappears when the cat carrier comes out clearly has some idea that in the near future the cat may be put in that box and taken somewhere; and the dog who waits licking her lips by the empty food dish, or the cat who’s sitting on the cat feeding table purring loudly as I open the refrigerator, clearly must in some fashion be thinking that food may be in the near future (the tone of the purr is also intended to remind me that the cat’s waiting for it.)
Does the old ill scrawny cat who despite plenty of food is getting even thinner think ‘I’m going to die soon’? That’s a different sort of question. I don’t think they do; but I might be wrong. I think it’s extremely unlikely that the bouncy lively six year old looks at the old cat and thinks ‘that’s going to happen to me too.’ But I don’t know how you’d tell. (Bouncy cat does recognize that something’s going on; he doesn’t bounce on the old cat any longer, and he did when that cat was healthier. It’s certainly not for lack of bounce, she says, inspecting scratches.)
One of my cats has had bad experiences at the vet, and is terrified of going there. When we put her in the carrier, she wets herself with anxiety. But as soon as the vet is done with the exam and releases her, she leaps into that same carried.
So it’s not just that she hates and fears the carrier.
But does she think “oh no, I’m going to the vet”, or is it more “this feels like a bad place”? It’s very hard to say.
Do you have a cite that the squirrel’s behavior is anything but instinct? What you are claiming shows “clear thought and effort” could also be explained as instinctual behavior.
I also agree about dogs, they absolutely think about the future, or at least act in ways by far most easily explained that way. The question would be how they think about it, in what terms, how far out, etc.
So for example you might distinguish considering things which might happen that the individual has never experienced, as opposed to predicting a near term future outcome based on what they remember having happened in a past episode. Like everybody else I can think can think of loads of cases where our dogs’ behavior seemed to be based on their idea what would happen using past experience of similar cases. It’s harder to say if they more generally ‘what if’ about the future.
Just to add, this is absolutely correct, and there is at least some level of correlation with breed. One of the endearing things about Bernese Mountain Dogs is that, like a faultlessly devoted and faithful spouse, when they bond to their owners, they bond for life.
One of the cats we had was really good about timing. She’d come into the bedroom at the same time each morning. She even automatically adjusted to DST changes which was always a mystery. (The only clock that auto changed then was on the cable boxes. Was she reading the time?)
Anyway, she’d head out ahead of time to greet FtGKid2 at the bus stop. Even if she was hearing the bus on the next block over, she was still clearly thinking ahead.
I think it’s really difficult to distinguish between thinking about the future and plain conditioning from past experiences. Were Pavlov’s dogs thinking about the meal to come when he rang the bell? I often watch TV with my pet rats on the couch with me. They run around and play while the show is on. As soon as I reach for the remote, the run over to me and jump in my lap, because they “know” that I’m going to turn off the TV, take them back to their cage, and feed them. How much cognition is happening when they see me reach for the remote? Are they thinking about the future? Or is it a simpler connection they’ve made between my arm movement and what always happens next?
Well they don’t stack it, they just naw though most of the tree and leave it standing, they do that with many trees in the area. If needed it is much easer to get lots of logs quickly this way.
The way you phase it seems two sides of the same coin, as in I need this later, I get it ready now. Where one crosses into the other IDK.
In one of Steven Pinker’s books, he discussed why hens sit on eggs. Are they thinking “if I keep this egg warm, eventually it will hatch and I’ll have a cute baby chick”? No, they’re thinking “look at that nice round white thing. I’d really like to sit on it.” Similarly a beaver might have a bunch of instincts that look like planning. “Tall tree – must chew on it.”
Sure, but that’s not really what I meant. Associating precursors with events the dog doesn’t like is a fairly immediate, triggered reaction. What I’m describing about “living in the moment” is the lack of the kind of existential angst about hypothetical futures that seems to plague humans. And I’m convinced that this is due to more than differences in level of intelligence, but to fundamentally different psyches.
Here’s the Wendell Berry quote I was thinking of before:
“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and I am free.” ― Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community
This, I believe, is the world that dogs are privileged to inhabit.
Of course they think about the future. What else is there to think about? In the final analysis, the only thing a brain does is manipulate the future. Like the stomach is about food, the brain is about the future.
You could question how far into the future, and how well it works, sure. I have to question that about our own species, too. There wouldn’t be credit cards, if we did that well all the time.
Probably not; because, as puzzlegal pointed out, the cat that doesn’t want to go into the carrier at home is nearly always very willing to get back into that same carrier at the vet’s.
IME they also act differently on the way back home than on the way there. A cat that wails all the way there or even one who fights the carrier en route to the vet will often quietly settle down in it on the way home.