I see the beginning of a beautiful friendship!
That shows that half of the people on this board haven’t had their tummies patted.
Maybe, but if you were hoping to hump my leg and get some Beggin’ Strips ahead of the dog, no dice.
Maybe it’s his girlfriend?
Hmmm…gimmee a minute, and I’ll get back w/you.
But they can at least imagine the idea.
Yeah, if you say so. I haven’t seen the evidence of it.
That was exactly my point. I would not mourn the death of a human who was willing to brutalise anyone he was pointed at because he was “just following orders”, and I would not go to the funeral of a beast trained to do the same thing.
There’s just a little bit of a difference between a human “following orders” and a dog doing what he has been trained to do.
I generally prefer the company of animals over that of humans, but I do recognize that dogs are not people and cannot always be compared on an equal basis.
Yeah, trolling…
I’m not insulted. If loving my dog makes me a goober, then come down to the fillin’ station and say “hey” to Cousin Gomer. 
Isn’t Gomer also your uncle, son, brother and nephew?
Hey even Hitler loved his dogs who were willing to kill for him. 
I get the irony, but I worry a little about this. Fact is, the US spends far more on its pets than it does on third world aid. (AFAIK: we can dig if somebody wants to.) Now that doesn’t really prove anything in and of itself, but the idea that more empathy towards dogs encourages more empathy for the most vulnerable humans of our planet is an hypothesis in need of evidence. Q: Do dog owners give more to charity for the poor? Less? Beats me.
Well… I say it truly is symbiotic. Do the math. There are 400 million dogs in the world. The Grey Wolf population is 2 or 3 magnitudes below that. I doubt whether there is any non-human mammal carnivore with a higher population, but would be happy to be corrected on this point.
I recognize that you are making a point about dog psychology though.
There has been the suggestion that dogs first approached us (as wolves, originally) and lived much like feral dogs do now before being adopted by humans. I don’t know how plausible this hypothesis is, but if true, dogs needed us more than we needed them in the past, and certainly now.
I wonder what the correlation between the presence of dogs and human success has been throughout our history. Perhaps someone here knows something about it? It would be especially interesting to know if there were groups of humans for whom the loss of dogs would have been catastrophic.
That seems like a hard thing to study, since dogs were far more central to human hunting than the more recent human agriculture. Meaning, we’re discussing small roaming human societies, not larger settled ones. Also I wonder about measurement: while some stone age societies buried their dogs, I don’t know whether this practice is believed to be universal. I’m guessing not.
I did find an interesting hypothesis online. I’m not aware of the quality of the evidence though. [INDENT]Dogs are generally ubiquitous in archaeological contexts, and they are the first domesticates,who came under the selective hand of humans thousands of years before any hoofed animals. …
Several interesting perspectives on the co-evolutionary relationship of humans and dogs havesurfaced, particularly the notion that canids domesticated humans. This is based on the idea that the domestication process began before humans truly occupied habitations in the form of a’domus’, while canids had already been living in dens. It is even argued that wolves were the first mammalian pastoralists, keeping pace with migrating herds of ungulates (Schleidt and Shalter 2003). Schleiedt (1998) asks if humans learned what we would consider “classic human behavior” from packs of wolves, including true friendship, idealism, and kindness. This wide range of perspectives on human-canid interactions speaks to how much we have yet to learn about this relationship. [/INDENT] (PDF) Preliminary analysis of dog remains in proximity with human burials at DgRv-006, Dionisio Point locality | Matthew Marino, M.A., RPA - Academia.edu
Recall claims that humans were neurologically very different when they commenced the homo-canine partnership.
You’re the one who’s trolling now…knock off the shit. It’s been addressed. Act as an adult would act. Be a dildo all you want, just don’t start lying about something that has been covered.
This has nothing to do with MY OP, just in case that’s what you’re referencing.
Hunh??? Lying? No. Opinion.
I know it took me ages to get back to this, but I will give you the explanation you so less than richly deserve.
Your question is stupid the same way Creationism is stupid. Intelligence didn’t just appear out of nowhere. It evolved. A brain isn’t a uniquely human trait. A human is going to use the brain that evolved for it to be a hairless ape, a dog is going to use the brain it evolved to be a dog, and a carrier pigeon is going to use the brain it evolved to be a carrier pigeon. To think that think that dogs and carrier pigeons think the same way is just fucking stupid.
Likewise, unless you’re a creationist, the idea that mankind is unique among the animals by the lack of instinct is also stupid. If you think that evolution robbed humans of “instinct” or that it robbed all other species of “higher thought”, you’re stupid.
The reason why I dismissed your question out of hand, is that that it is only not stupid to someone who, like a Creationist, knows nothing about evolution.