It is interesting how many people are absolutely convinced that Mr. Whiskers or Rex are peeing the rug or involved in other destructive behavior out of some punishment and/or revenge motivation, when in fact it’s nothing of the sort.
All you have to do is observe animals and you’ll see that they can’t be psychoanalyzed. Treat them like Pavlov’s dogs.
Cats even more than dogs. Dogs seem to be able to detect anger in their owners. Granted, they don’t understand anger as we do; they just know that a raised voice and tone of voice mean, “Oh oh, I’m going get punished!”
Cats don’t even pay attention to an angry voice. They might be confused if a human starts yelling real loud at them, but unless the person is habitually abusive, they don’t really see any relation between anger and subsequent behavior. Have you ever slapped a cat’s behind because it clawed you or something? It will see no connection between the two events, and just look at you somewhat confused. It might run off, but it certainly won’t “hold it against you.”
Ah, but what about the big guilt act dogs put on? They do this before you yell at them.
My dog thinks she’s not supposed to get on the couch (and I don’t know why, because I got her as a puppy and I have never cared if she got on the damn couch; I’ve kicked her off the bed but only because she became a 65-pound dog and gets in between my SO and I and takes all the covers). I would know that she’d had been on the couch even if (a) I hadn’t heard the thump as she got off and (b) there wasn’t a big warm patch on it, because she looks so guilty.
Now she has done other things that I will yell at her for. She looks guilty then, too.
Also she could not possibly be that happy to see me when I’ve only been out for a 30-minute walk, never mind at the end of the workday when I get home. It has to be an act. Why is she lying?
They know they’re going to get yelled at; I don’t think that’s psychologizing very hard. Whenever our dog chews up… whatever she’s chosen that morning, as soon as she knows you found it she wanders into her kennel.
My dog “tells on” the other pets. If the kitten is getting into something she’s not supposed to, the dog will come over to me and start acting all guilty. She does a very good non-barking version of “Timmy’s fallen in the well”!
I had a puppy last year that she’d do the same thing with (found an excellent home for him). Every single time without fail the other pet is indeed involved in something naughty.
I don’t know if that’s “thinking” or not, and I’m well aware that animals don’t think the way we do. But they do understand things beyond which they’re given credit for.
At any rate I agree with the OP. The things some people think are done because the animal is “mad at us” are really done out of anxiety, boredom or just excessive energy.
You can call it guilt, but probably it’s more a case of discomfiture. Dogs interpret vocalizations amongst themselves in very complex ways, and they can be confused/uncomfortable when humans raise their voices, etc. They also can read a human’s body language pretty well, and they can make basic associations between successive events. But to say “guilt” implies a moral sense, and I find it hard to believe that a dog would have a sense of morals.
I don’t think your dog is trying to “fool” you by jumping off the couch before you see her–it’s just as hard for me to believe a dog would have a concept of deceit, but the idea is funny, I must say. Your dog probably just has picked up an association with being on the things people recline on and some kind of negative response from you.
I guess it doesn’t really matter, as long as you don’t have problems such as those in the OP’s article. Go ahead: your dog is morally loose, and lies to you. Do you really want a dog like that?
I suppose the idea of a dog plotting revenge is stupider - but this guy is perfectly happy to make his own totally baseless, ridiculous assumptions, like:
What? Maybe a rock can’t tell the difference between 5 minutes and 5 hours - but an animal? So the ability to register the passage of time only evolved with the primates? I find that pretty unlikely. I’d definitely would like to see some evidence there.
Or:
His thesis is dogs operate on the simplest and most primal level, yet somehow this dog was anxious because he had difficulty accepting responsibility? It seems to me the crate only worked because it physically restrained the dog from tearing things up, not because it proved anything about the dogs primal desire for confinement. And his other solution - keeping the dog away from children - is another bit of behavioral genius nobody would have ever thought of.
And more to the point, while it’s all nice to say that dogs are predatory, instinctual and just creatures of habit - that doesn’t tell us they’re different from us. Because so are we, basically. We have our fill primal emotions and instincts too - attachment, jealousy, anger, hunger, fear, lust which we seem to share with any number of animals. So, frankly it makes perfect sense to project those onto dogs to some extent. Going by pure Holmesian logic is very nice, but it’s more efficient to try and empathize a bit. We’re both predatory mammals.
I don’t know. I think some pets are smarter than others. My in-laws used to have an orange sack that I think was a cat, and he was as dumb as a doornail. He seemed to register, “Someone is petting me, it feels good, I will purr”. And that was about it.
I’m positive my cat understands a good deal of what I say. She’ll come when I call her name, she’ll lie down if I tell her to. If I have to wash the sheets and she’s lying on the bed, I’ll ask her to move and she will.
I’d just got a new canvas one day and had propped it up against the couch - she was examining it and decided it would be a good place to sharpen her claws. I saw her and yelled, “Emma!”. She looked at me, and I said, “If you ruin that, you’ll be the first cat on the moon.”
She turned around and walked off, and didn’t try to touch it again.
I think a lot of hatred towards cats comes from people assigning human traits to them. They are no more capable of arrogance than the proverbial rock.
That is not to say they don’t feel certain emotions but their thought processes are very limited.
I read an article about someone getting emotionally attached to her Roomba after a while, and assigning animal qualities to it even though she knew it was just a bunch of microchips. I’ll have a look for it.
You have been misinformed. To train a cat or dog, when they are doing something wrong, first you yell in an angry voice at them, and then you smack them with something good and hard. The yelling is the warning you see, it’s the difference between discipline and abuse; it’s the very condition that gives them the chance to avoid being hit. And it works.
…You will probably never teach a pet to understand English, but you can sure teach them to recognize your pissed-off tone of voice, and to stop what they’re doing and run for cover when they hear it.
~
You don’t know our cats. When she pees in the wrong place, we don’t even have to yell --m we just say her name in an angry fashion and she immediately runs and hides. Our cats certainly do know what an angry voice is, and what it implies.
While I’ll grant that the aerticle is correct that dogs and cats don’t think the way we do (Midnight isn’t feeling guilt when she runs from the angry voice, but she does know that we’re not happy, and doesn’t want t experience what that might entail), I think it’s wrong to say that they don’t think. I’m undecided about the extent of animal cognition, but I’m very hard pressed to explain some animal behavior if it didn’t exist. And, like the medieval theologians, I’m impressed by apparent exercises of animal logic.
There is a school of thought among behavoral psychologists that treats animals as biological machines. It really doesn’t make much sense, but there it is.
I know dogs can reason. I’ve seen it. I know they can feel emotion, as well as I know another human can. I know they don’t think like humans, but they do have their own ways of thought.
I also know they can watch TV, form hypothesis about what they see, and react to it. Admittedly, they may not quite ‘get’ it, but they do react.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I don’t think it’s unreasonible that a dog does not comprehend the passage of time as we do. They do not think “Masters coming back in 5 minutes”. What’s a “minute” to a dog? They understand “master is here” / “master is not here”. Does a dog comprehend time of day? Or do they just react to “I’m sleepy” or "it’s dark = “nap time”?
While I have not performed a controlled experiment, ancedotal and personal evidence does suggest that dogs have some awareness of time. Vis: dogs going to the door to await their master about the time they should come home.
If you argue that they are sensing some vibration of a car, one notes that there are many common stories of dogs doing this after the master dies, or going to a location from a distance, or any number of variants on the theme, such that they are at an expected position at an expected time.
I assert from my own experience that dogs do indeed have a very good sense of time. I do not need an alarm clock because Idol tells me when it’s time to get up. He’s accurate to within 10 minutes, regardless of the time of year or how light it is outside. He only messes up for a couple of days around the time change. He has incentive to do this - he gets to eat and go outside at that time. He also knows when it’s time to eat his evening meal and when it’s time to go for a walk. He knows the approximate time of day we get home - our arrival time varies anywhere from 4 pm to 5:30 pm, and both dogs will start to listen carefully for our vehicles. They are on a heightened state of alert until both of us are home.
People who have unpredictable schedules may not notice this about their dogs. I think dogs like to be able to predict when things are going to happen - it seems to make them calmer and happier, and we oblige as much as possible.
I disagree about the angry voice. Pixel is my naughty cat. She’s always doing things she shouldn’t do. She knows what she’s not supposed to do. I know this becuause she flees the scene when I yell at her while she’s doing the bad things, but doesn’t flee when I yell at the other cats, or the dog. She will also flee faster and farther the worse the bad thing is. Example: Pixel climbing on top of closed fish tank = jumps off tank onto nearby chair. Pixel pawing into open fish tank while I am changing water = tears at full speed into the next room.
I also disagree with the “hitting” bit. Dot likes to chew fingers. When she was a kitten I would try to break her of the habit. Every time she started to chew on me I would tap her little nose to startle her. She never stopped chewing entirely, but she would give a little nip and then flinch, waiting for the nose tap. I realized she was only chewing to show love and it wasn’t gonna stop, so I stopped tapping her and she’s gone back to chewing with no flinch.
I think both of these examples show cognition on the parts of my cats. They can see a cause and effect in their behaviors and will modify their behavior to suit. I’m not saying that they think just like people, but they certainly are thinking.