Why does my dog tump over the trash?

Factual Questions
21

The problem with anecdotal evidence is that everyone tends to anthropomorphize their pets and attribute motives which weren’t actually present. Secondly, the owner isn’t able to observe their own behavior objectively.

Case in point: happywaffle said that he/she “looked her with no tension in my body - I was concerned, not angry . . .” Let’s focus on this statement for a moment.

Dogs, being relatively simple creatures, often aren’t able to seperate when their humans are displaying “concern” rather than “anger.” They just know that you’re staring at them. Eye contact has significant meaning to dogs. The only times humans usually stare at their dogs is when the dog has been given a command and we’re waiting for a respone or when the dog has done something wrong and we’re correcting them.

Try an experiement right now: turn around and just look at your dog. Stare right at him without doing anything. Your dog will react in several different ways, depending on their personality. He may wag his tail, get up and come over, expecting a pat on the head, or may get a toy to try to initiate a game. A dog with a submissive personality may put his ears back and hunch a little in a submissive posture. He may start looking very worried and try to appease you.

Now, on to body tension. The best actor in the world couldn’t fool a dog. When you’re trying to look casual, the dog can sense that and it can make them even more nervous. Witness people who claim their dog “knows” when they’re going to go to the vet’s office. No, the dog doesn’t know where they’re going, but they can sure as hell see from your too-casual demeanor that something’s up and it’s probably not going to be pleasant.

Sometimes, people are amazed when their dogs freak out when a visitor comes over. “Sparky never does this! He must have disliked Jim.” Well, not necessarily. Jim may have looked calm and self-assured to you, but he may have actually been a bit tense and nervous about coming over. The dog sensed it even though you couldn’t. It’s much like their sense of smell-- incredibly acute, picking up on things that humans cannot detect.

Let’s explore what happens in the OP. happywaffle comes home. For the past two days, the dog has been getting in the trash, so he/she is expecting that it might have happened again. He/she is alert for signs of trouble the moment he/she walks through the door, even if not conciously. The dog instantly recognizes that tension and goes into appeasement mode. Then happywaffle finds the mess and his/her suspicions that the appeasment behavior was “guilt” is confirmed.

Of course they’re able to learn. I didn’t suggest otherwise. Learning involves long-term memory. Very few dogs learn a trick instantly-- it usually takes many patient repetitions before the dog understands what behavior you want, and throughout its life, you have to keep repeating the trick, or the dog will forget.

What we’re talking about in this discussion is short-term associative memory. The anatomy of dogs’ brains shows us that they have very little capability of it. The neural connections necessary for such complex thoughts simply aren’t there. For a dog to connect a behavior with a consequence, the result must be immediate and they’ll likely need several repetitions before the lesson sinks in.

My dogs love to rip apart stuffed toys. I gotta watch them, though, because they’ll sometimes eat bits of the cloth or some of the stuffing. Then they’ll puke all over the rug. If they had the ability for short-term associative memory, you would think they would realize, “Every time I eat this, I get sick.” No-- they don’t have that ability. To them, the sickness has nothing to do with something that happened hours ago. If they have a memory of ripping up the toy, it’s a vague, foggy one at best and of no particular significance.

Now, if I corrected them every time I saw them eating a bit of cloth or stuffing, after a while, they would catch on that the action was forbidden, but I would have to be consistant, or the lesson would take a lot longer to sink in.

22

The dog in the OP gets bored when the pack leader is away.

Digging into garbage is fun. Even if there is nothing strictly edible (by human standards) there are nifty things to chew on and tear up. It is a smorgasbord of good times.

Find a way to block off the garbage. Berating the dog is almost certain to be futile. Buy it some more toys to play with.
Anecdotal evidence though it be, I am certain that dogs feel guilt and other “human” emotions they’re not supposed to have, even if it’s not anywhere near as complex as a human struggling with his/her conscience over a major dilemma. Dogs have lousy impulse control when it comes to temptation. They’ll tip over and rummage through the garbage or steal food off your plate. Hearing you come into the room or through the door likely triggers realization that the Pack Leader Will Be Pissed. Thus, the hiding or cowering, even before it picks up your “cues”.

One of my two dogs (a Lab) has been known to alert us by barking when the other dog gets into the trash or does another favorite nasty by grabbing the end of the toilet paper roll and unfurling it through the house. Am I anthropomorphizing by interpreting this behavior as tattling? :smiley:

23

Lissa, search these boards for evidence of how strongly I agree with you, in general.

However.

Over enough time, and enough repetitions, some dogs are indeed capable of putting not just two and two together, but two and two and two. I have trained many, many dogs, and have owned quite a few myself. Some are obviously smarter than others. The smartest dog I ever knew, my dog 99, eventually became perfectly capable of doing just what the OP has observed in his/her own dog. 99 times out of a hundred, when I came home, 99 would greet me joyously. Every once in a while, though, I’d come home to a quieter greeting, or none at all, and would look around the house to find her curled up in her bed, looking at me with sad eyes, and broadcasting “guilt” on all channels. On those occasions, all I’d have to do was look around the house, and I’d find a garbage can tumped or a turd dumped or a book or a pillow chewed. The correlation was 100% consistent: she only acted that way–in a manner that could easily be anthropomorphized as “guilt”–when she had done something that she knew she was gonna get yelled at for.

I don’t remember how old she was when she’d experienced the relatively abstracted cause and effect of these situations enough time to be conditioned to know that, if I came home to a house that contained a shredded book or a rifled garbage can, she was gonna hear about it. But the repetition was eventually sufficient to overcome the abstractness.

24

[hijack]

I am fifty years old and have lived in the United States of America my entire life.

I am pretty well read (if I do say so myself), and am a writer and editor by profession.

AFAIK, I had never heard or seen the word “tump” before 8:15 on 9/14/06.

I assumed it was a typo for “dump.”

As someone once said, to my extreme mortification, I grow wiser every day.

[/hijack]

25

Just to continue the hijack, I’m from Texas and all my life I’ve used the word “tump” to mean tipping over something such that the contents of whatever was tipped over fall out (as the word implies – it’s a combination of “tip” and “dump”). It also implies that the contents are solid, for some reason – I would say a trash can was tumped over, but not a bucket of water.

26

Alabamian by birth Georgia resident here chiming in to say that it is not specific to Texas. I have said for as long as I can remember. I think of it as somewhere between tip and dump – tump.

27

What is your part of America, if you don’t mind my asking? I’ve never heard that either, and I’m curious.

28

I too am a person obsessed with words. I read a LOT. I write a lot. I have worked as an editor, as a proofreader, and as a factchecker. I was born in Texas.

And I have never, ever heard that word before this thread.

29

I’ve used tump my entire life, I use it far more often than saying tipped. I can’t imagine saying, he tipped over the trash, for instance, it doesen’t sound right. It must be tumped. The difference in my mind comes down to the size and sturdiness of the thing being pushed over, with smaller and more delicate things being tipped and large and heavier items being tumped. I was born and raised in Texas.

30

Not to hijack the hijack but my dog ate ANOTHER slab of rib bones today after ‘tumping’ over the trash. I’m an idiot and forgot to secure it this morning. I really hope he pukes it up as it could be life threatening if he doesn’t. He eats the bones whole or close to it.
:frowning:

Also, so far ‘tump’ seems to be a southern word.

31

That is a mostly unfalsifiable claim and does not belong in GQ. You can only form hypothesis as to what dogs DO have the brain power to do, not what they cannot. Just like there is no true statement to the effect of “Humans simply do not have the brain power to _________”. I’m sorry, but things like that just grate me, you cannot use behavioral observation alone to make a generalized claim like that - it’s somewhat akin to claiming foreigners simply do not have the brain power to speak English because you have not observed some foreigners doing so.

32

My statement was not based on assumptions gleaned from observing dog behavior. It was based on research I have seen done by scientists who were looking at the neural connections in dogs’ brains. The areas which control short-term associative memory are very weak.

33

My statement was based on mathematical analysis of abstract neural networks and the result that between two networks, if analyzed as approximations of the same f(), the entropy, complexity, size and node speed cannot be correlated to accuracy at approximation of f() without referncing specific properties of f(). Assuming a mammalian brain, f() is by definition non-deterministic, and the only lower limit that is put on the neural system is that it must have entropy greater than the observed data set for that individual. The practical ramifications of that is that there is absolutely no reason to believe that given two similar neural sections in two networks that seem to roughly calculate the same subcomponent in the approximation of f(), that their size in any way correlates with their accuracy or speed.

In simple terms, measuring brain size, complexity and activity only works until it doesn’t, and then it doesn’t. I recommend this book as a good primer on the subject. Specifically the sections about Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimensions and feature extraction. Bishop does not really talk about any ramifications outside of artificial neural network theory since it’s just a computation model and is not meant to be representative of a biological model, which has significantly more complexity per node and significantly larger sizes than possible for practical network analysis.

34

I have lived in: South Dakota, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, New Hampshire, Florida, Utah and Colorado. I have never heard of this American slang.

35

I do see your point. Size doesn’t necessarily matter. My brain, size-wize is smaller than my husband’s but I think even he would admit I’m smarter than he is. :wink:

However, I think it’s a safe bet to say that the statement: “Birds can’t do calculus” is true. Why? Their brains are not “wired” for it and no scientist has ever observed a bird doing calculus.

Likewise, the combination of (1)the “wiring” in a dog’s brain and (2) that the experiments done to study dog behavior have shown a poor ability in short-term associative memory and (3) that dogs lack the same moral sense as humans make it a pretty safe bet to say that they are not displaying “guilt.”

36

That would be… Let me see here… Zero? Selective memory would only work here if “the dog’s acting funny for no particular reason” was unremarkable. But “dog acting funny” is so often correlated with “dog did something bad while humans were gone” that in fact, “dog acting funny for no particular reason” would be grounds for at least a few days of sporadic discussion: “Say, did you notice the dog’s been acting funny lately? Do you think there might be something wrong?”.

And you can say that dogs inherently can’t feel guilt. But they feel something, which manifests in the same behaviours a human would manifest if feeling guilty, and under the same circumstances under which a human would feel guilty. Occam’s Razor tells me what I’ll call that phenomenon.

37

I’ll have to take your word for it. I have three dogs and they act weird all the time. You are lucky.

In 1994, I saw a UFO. Looking out my bedroom window, I saw something hovering over the field across the road from my house. It was hat-shaped and had two rows of big, square lights that lit up in a counter-clockwise patter. It hovered for a moment, zoomed to a nearby house, hovered there and then shot away at an amazing pace. Never have I seen a picture of a terrestrial aircraft that looked like that.

The simplest explanation would be that I really did see a UFO. It’s always simple just to say, “There must be more than meets the eye.” But the rational side of me says that a more complex answer is likely the right one: that I had either dreamed it, thinking I was awake, or my sleep-fogged mind misinterpreted what I saw. It could have been a reflection from some far-off lights. And I just could be that I’m lying or exaggerating and I’ve thought about it so much that I’ve convinced myself.

My “simple explanation” of my UFO encounter really isn’t all that simple, is it? To believe that I actually saw the object I described, you would have to believe in advanced extra-terrestrial life and all explain away all of the logistical problems of space travel. Either that, or you’d have to believe our government is making odd-shaped aircraft that are bizarrely ostentatious and flying them at low altitudes above civilian areas.

Likewise, the “simple” explanation that if it looks like guilt, it is guilt also has complications. First of all, you have to assume that the mapping and study of dog brains has somehow missed complex neural connections, and that dog behavior researchers have somehow failed to notice this phenomenon. Lastly, though certainly not of least importance, you have to give greater credence to anecdotal data than scientific research.

I’m perfectly willing to agree with lissener that there’s a reason why a dog might display a behavior that might be* interpreted* as guilt. If I come home six days in a row and yell at my dog for getting into the trash, yes, she’s likely to cower when she sees me walking toward the kitchen because she’s been trained by past experience to know what’s coming. However, this is conditioning, not guilt. If I just yelled at her for no reason six days in a row, she’d display the same behavior.

She doesn’t “feel bad” for getting into the trash. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Trash is not “yucky” to a dog, nor do they understand that it’s dangerous. The only thing keeping them from pigging out every time you throw something away is that you’re conditioned the dog that if they get into that container, you will punish them.

Guilt is actually a complex social construct. You feel guilty when you do actions which violate your society’s norms because you were* taught *to feel guilty. A human infant has no guilt-- it will cheerfully pull its mother’s hair or urinate on her. It isn’t until around age two that children start understanding that others have thoughts and feelings, too. They learn to see their actions through the eyes of others (“How would you feel if Jimmy pinched your arm?”) Some people actually miss this crucial stage and so as adults, they don’t feel guilt. No matter how horrible others view their actions, they have no sense of shame over what they did. They were never taught to feel that way.

So, is it really the simplest explanation to say if it looks like guilt, it must be guilt? Given that you have to assume that they actually do have the brain-power when everything I’ve read suggests otherwise and that they’re somehow acquiring human moral values with which to judge their actions, I’d say it’s actually more complex than saying that the behavior likely has other explanations.

38

I’ve had to put those kiddie locks on all my cupboards containing trash cans (and the one where I keep the dog food). My dogs are pretty well behaved, but I came home too many times to find evidence that a doggie trash party had occurred.

And, yes, they always acted very suspiciously when I came home before I realized what had happend. I’ve also read 1000 times that “dogs can’t feel guilt.” My theory is that they may not feel guilty or even remember that they were responsible for knocking the trash all over, however, they probably do know that trash all over = very upset human! So, when I walk through the door, they know there’s trash all over, they know I’m going to discover it, and they act accordingly.

39

The idea of guilt as a “complex social construct” in humans can be exaggerated.

Frequently human guilt seems to take the form of “I screwed up, I’m gonna be punished/someone’s gonna be mad at me”. Complex deliberations with one’s conscience are often absent.

The resemblance to dog guilt is striking.

My dog takes great pleasure in catching Identifiable Flying Objects and manifests excitement when she sees me take them out of the drawer. Or at least that’s the hypothesis I entertain in lieu of large-scale controlled experiments. :smiley:

40

Lissa, I too, usually agree with you, but do you have a cite for the studies on dog neurology and the behavior studies? I have always been under the impression that brains were extremely complex things that we don’t fully understand, and that we don’t know exactly what parts of the human brain are responsible for all the functions/feelings, but I haven’t looked into it in a few years. If our knowledge of the human brain is limited, I doubt more research has gone into mapping the canine brain.

You’re misinterpreting what were saying here. In my case, maybe 6 times a year I would come home to completely, totally different behavior from my dog. Night and day. Every other time I came home, regardless of my mood (my dogs never cared what kind of mood I was in, they wanted to play whether I’d had a bad day or not) dogs were thrilled to see me. On the rare occasion that something had “happened” while I was away, the behavior was completely different. If my dogs were acting guilty (again, I don’t equate this with human guilt, more like “I’m gonna get in trouble” behavior) and I didn’t find anything wrong, I would have been very concerned and would have taken them to the vet if it had continued.

I think we can agree that dog neurology is not a major field of scientific inquiry. If enough people’s experiences contradict scientific research, especially if it is something that hasn’t been researched all that extensively, I think it’s fair to question the conclusions of that research. We aren’t questioning evolution or anything here. This isn’t a field with thousands of scientists working around the clock.