[HN Gopher] Dogs might be anxious for the same reasons as humans
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Dogs might be anxious for the same reasons as humans
Author : whack
Score : 42 points
Date : 2022-03-19 18:45 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| FredPret wrote:
| My dog has email and back-to-back meetings?!
| [deleted]
| marcodiego wrote:
| I don't think a dog is worried about losing his job or his
| significant other getting pregnant.
| ozim wrote:
| I bet a dog is terrified of losing food source so basically the
| same as losing job.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| Working dogs _definitely_ stress over losing their jobs. I 've
| had several herding dogs that spent far more energy than I ever
| would worrying about the state of the ranch, where each animal
| was, and the possibility of outside predators.
|
| The day I saw a 50 lb dog herd a 2,000 lb uncastrated bull into
| an unused pen, all on it's own initiative, while everyone else
| hid in the house was the day that I treated the dog as an equal
| coworker.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I'd bet most mammals have the same types of emotions, just tuned
| a bit differently for survival.
| [deleted]
| clairity wrote:
| my dog exhibits insecurity (as discussed in the article) mostly
| in relation to me, as well as some strangers who she deems to be
| sketchy in some way. the first months were spent working through
| severe anxiety (and cleaning up overnight fear diarrhea) while
| slowly building trust at home. she was hyper-sensitive to my
| moods and movements, and would hyperventilate if she thought i
| was even slightly upset with her. this is why i think she was
| probably abused by her previous caretaker(s).
|
| thankfully, she's gotten much better, and now enjoys a mostly
| carefree and social dog life, though she's still vigilant and
| standoffish at times with both humans and other dogs. i can
| definitely see parallels to human behaviors, and even use
| techniques you might use with people to build up her confidence
| (as well as curb unwanted behavior). she's been great overall,
| and i wouldn't trade her for the world.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| Overnight nervous diarrhea? In your _home_? Tons of effort to
| keep that from happening, and to have a pet that doesn't
| destroy your home?
|
| I really don't understand dog ownership.
| leetrout wrote:
| I was in a similar situation.
|
| My vet saw me on day 3 with my rescue and he warned me it
| would be months to years to correct. He advised me as a first
| time owner to return the dog and I did.
|
| Glad OP was a better person and had the time, patience and
| love to share.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Some dogs are easier than others. Don't worry about it. I
| also returned a dog where it just didn't work. Got a
| different one later and we bonded very well.
| amelius wrote:
| Well, if you anthropomorphize your dog, it's like having a
| little human in the house.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Do you have any kids? It's not much of a difference.
| gkop wrote:
| Not the norm
| markdown wrote:
| > I really don't understand dog ownership.
|
| Dogs are wonderful.
|
| What I don't understand is letting them into your home.
| Disgusting. Some people even let them on their beds, which is
| truly bonkers. Why anyone would let naked dog butt, complete
| with poopy fur, onto their bed, is beyond understanding.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Last time I checked the dog butt is covered in fur. Also
| dogs have a prolapsed anus...
|
| Where are you from that dogs are not seen as family
| members?
|
| Also what about children? They are not exactly known to be
| clean either.
| clairity wrote:
| it was stressful for the first few weeks, but that's
| adoption, even with other humans. she's much better, and it
| was a rewarding experience for me, so win-win in my book.
|
| she didn't want to poop uncontrollably, and knew it was
| 'bad', but she couldn't help it until she could get her own
| fear and anxiety under control. human babies poop
| uncontrollably too, for much longer even. eventually i
| learned to put pee pads everywhere in her (initial) sleeping
| area, and just threw out the ones that were soiled in the
| morning. it wasn't that big of a deal, and certainly didn't
| "destroy" anything.
| djsavvy wrote:
| How did you work through your dog's anxiety and build trust
| with her?
| clairity wrote:
| lots of love, playful interaction, encouragement... and
| chicken treats. but it was mostly time, i'd say. she needed
| to know for herself that her environment, and most
| importantly i, was safe. even though she was scared, she was
| a willing participant, which was crucial (she was always very
| attentive, like she was always trying very hard to understand
| what was going on). sometimes, it was just ignoring her while
| i did my usual activities. other times, it was exhibiting
| positive attention on her, and minimizing opportunities for
| the negative.
|
| i also worked on desensitizing her to certain triggers that
| would bring out fear aggression (which was rare, but as such,
| surprising when it happened), like reaching for her head, by
| doing it over and over at spontaneous moments to show her
| that it wasn't dangerous to her (and giving her treats for
| good behavior, and a tiny, gentle scolding for bad).
|
| mind you, she was a mild case as far as all this goes, but it
| still required focused and prolonged attention.
| technothrasher wrote:
| We had our pup on an SSRI for about eight months when she was
| a puppy. We got her at three months old and she had been born
| in rescue. So we knew her history from birth and knew she
| wasn't abused, she was just a naturally very anxiety prone
| dog. After a month of being with us and just not getting over
| her anxiety (she was basically miserable whenever any humans
| were around) the vet suggested the drugs. They worked
| wonders, and after she'd grown a bit and come to accept us as
| "her people", we weened her off the drugs and all went well.
|
| At four years old, she's still an anxious dog, and always
| will be, but she's content in her home life now and likes to
| be with us. She's still very wary of strangers, and really
| doesn't like being out in more human dense areas, but it's
| easy enough to keep her activities to things she likes.
| cercatrova wrote:
| I mean, we're both mammals with a somewhat recent common
| ancestor, I'd assume the brain doesn't change that much between
| such species.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I'd only disagree with the somewhat recent common ancestor
| since it was on the order of 60 million years ago. Even
| geologically speaking, that's a bit. But it's quite clear if
| you observe rats, dogs, and other mammals (especially social
| ones), they've got some of the same wiring. I'd go so far as to
| say that most human laws are just codified innate primate tribe
| dynamics.
|
| I even hear people say they can relate with their reptiles, but
| that seems harder for me to square.
| squishy47 wrote:
| i'm always surprised by these "we just discovered humans and
| animals are the same" articles, i've never understood the
| difference between humans and animals, i always believed we all
| shared similar fundamental bits, just didn't consider the brain
| bit but it makes sense.
| psyc wrote:
| "Hairless apes, not wingless angels."
|
| - me
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| Same here, people seem to have this strange assumption that
| humans are somehow fundamentally different from all other
| organisms.
|
| I think the opposite assumption would make more sense, that
| we're more alike than different
| Sharlin wrote:
| I'm always particularly befuddled by the idea that animals
| don't have emotions. I mean, emotions are based in the deepest,
| oldest, most lizard-brainy parts of our minds, it's everything
| _else_ that 's more recent.
| readhn wrote:
| dogs were built up by humans. dogs are connected to humans on
| emotional level, so this is not surprising.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Eh, it's extremely unlikely that dogs have developed any
| totally new types of emotions during the domestication
| process. More like they were easy and useful to domesticate
| because as intelligent, mammalian, social pack predators,
| their ancestors were already a good fit for humans, mentally.
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| There are papers/studies that show that dogs have facial
| muscles that wolves lack that effectively give them
| expressive eyebrows. You could argue this is the result of
| human selective breeding but it does allow them to portray
| emotion in a way wolves can't. Not sure how one would
| define "new emotion" but certainly their ability to
| communicate emotion to people at least has
| changed/increased.
| wswope wrote:
| Adding on to this, there's evidence that domestication
| involved selecting for genetic abnormalities in dogs that
| are analogous to Williams Syndrome in humans, a disorder
| which is known to cause pro-sociability, a strong sense
| of empathy, and relatedly, anxiety.
|
| I'd argue we have pretty good evidence that the emotional
| processing of dogs has been dramatically altered by
| domestication.
|
| https://www.insidescience.org/news/rare-human-syndrome-
| may-e...
| [deleted]
| alehlopeh wrote:
| In my experience, dog owners tend to anthropomorphize their dogs
| quite a bit. They'll dream up motivations for their dog's
| behaviors, often with very little basis in reality. Surveying dog
| owners about their dog's personality will tell you a lot more
| about the dog owners than the dog.
| Wistar wrote:
| I thought the same thing until my dog stole my car.
| peakaboo wrote:
| In my experience, people who never had dogs usually say things
| like that about dog owners. :)
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'm a lifelong dog owner and it's extremely true that people
| do this. They literally go as far as creating instagram
| accounts to role play as pets. They follow other people's
| pets who do the same. It's bonkers.
| swayvil wrote:
| The greater the ignorance of a subject, the greater the
| confidence of one's opinions about it. There's a name for
| this malady. It's on the tip of my tongue.
|
| And speaking of that. It's interesting to consider it taken
| to absurd yet utterly plausible levels.
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| I assume you're referring to the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| I reckon you're looking for the _Dunning-Kruger effect_.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effe
| c...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There are two possible things going on:
|
| 1. actual anthropomorphizing, that is ascribing distinctly
| human motivation to a non-human actor
|
| 2. in Dennett's words, "taking the intentional stance", that is
| choosing to describe and understand an active entity in the
| world as if it had intentions.
|
| We do (2) with other people all the time, without much to
| really back it up. I don't consider such a bad thing to do it
| with dogs (or other animals).
| WalterBright wrote:
| In my years with The Cat, I'm convinced the only thought in its
| tiny brain 24/7 is "I want food".
|
| Once the automatic cat feeder failed and The Cat had access to
| all it could eat. Had to take it to the vet to unjam its
| digestive tract.
| majormajor wrote:
| Is that more or less sensible than the position of "here's
| another social land mammal of roughly similar size that evolved
| on the same planet, yet I'm going to assume they are completely
| different and inscrutable and don't have any real sort of
| consciousness or emotion"?
|
| (Especially in response to an article about academics studying
| animal emotion and mental states. If you want to disagree,
| let's not anecdotally say "dog owners are silly lol", let's
| rebut "Twenty years ago, Overall and other experts began to
| suggest the dog be used as a model for human psychiatry. The
| same types of mental illness don't occur naturally in rodents;
| researchers have to induce them.")
| alehlopeh wrote:
| The article describes a study that was conducted by surveying
| dog owners.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| How are you more familiar with these dogs than the owners, who
| probably spends dozens of hours per week with them?
|
| Is it just because you believe something about dogs in general?
| Jensson wrote:
| There have been real scientific experiments done on pets,
| their remarkable abilities disappear once you remove the
| owner from the picture.
|
| What dogs and other social animals are great at is reading
| humans and acting accordingly. So what happens is that the
| owner is unknowingly instructing their pet to behave in a
| certain way in certain situations and the pet just acts
| accordingly. The pet doesn't know X, the owner knows X and
| signals that to the pet.
| metadat wrote:
| As a dog owner, I agree with the OP.
|
| Humans tend to anthropomorphize the heck out of virtually all
| of their pets. The more emotional the bond, the higher the
| expected rate of anthropomorphization will be.
|
| _Anthropomorphize - verb_
|
| Attribute human characteristics or behaviors to an animal,
| god, or even an object.
| elliekelly wrote:
| How do we know which behaviors or characteristics are
| uniquely "human"? Maybe humans and animals have more
| behaviors and characteristics in common than a lot of
| people would like to admit.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Sure. I wouldn't argue that people don't make silly claims
| about their pets. At the same time, historically scientists
| have made what now seem to be silly claims about pets in
| the other direction. Regarding anthropomorphization, what
| are "human characteristics"? Are those characteristics that
| _can only_ be found in humans? Or is it just
| characteristics that we commonly see in humans, but which
| may be present in other animals as well? Because that list
| of characteristics was much larger even 20 years ago than
| it is today.
| blowski wrote:
| We have a 2 year old lab that constantly digs up any plants we
| put in the garden. My wife has come up with lots of reasons for
| this behaviour, but none of her solutions have made any
| difference. I suspect the dog enjoys digging up plants and
| doesn't understand that we'd prefer she didn't. In short, from
| my limited experience, I think you're right.
| [deleted]
| nanomonkey wrote:
| Likely the dog instinctively believes that it has a higher
| chance of finding something interesting in a hole that
| someone else filled in, than another spot. You won't get it
| to stop this behavior unless you fulfill it's needs to dig
| and find stuff, plus give it a reason why it shouldn't be
| digging up certain items. The later is done with negative
| reinforcement, which is not acceptable to some dog trainers
| these days, despite being sometimes necessary.
| cwillu wrote:
| I fail to see any significant difference between that and the
| explanations for the misbehaviours of children. Or adults,
| for that matter.
| callmeal wrote:
| >They'll dream up motivations for their dog's behaviors, often
| with very little basis in reality.
|
| Not any more. Take a look at this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJYpXDMPlKA and others in the
| series.
|
| This dog and the whole process of teaching is fascinating
| because it highlights how much we depend on verbal
| communications and easily discount other types.
| swayvil wrote:
| On the other hand, nobody has a greater wealth of intimate
| experience with a dog than his owner. So in this case the owner
| is the authority. Overwhelmingly so. So we would do well to
| listen to what he says.
| rpmisms wrote:
| They have the same basic motivations as us: food, sex, shelter,
| affection. My dog lies about the mailman walking by in order to
| go scare him. They're also self-aware, to a degree.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| psyc wrote:
| Couldn't possibly have anything to do with us observing and
| communicating with dogs every day for decades.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Maybe dogs aren't actually self-aware. They're just emulating
| how a self-aware creature would behave.
|
| Just like humans.
| RobertMiller wrote:
| No of course not, animals are soulless automatons without any
| relatable emotion or reason that humans could ever perceive
| let alone understand. Anybody who thinks otherwise is just
| deluded by anthropomorphization and overzealous pattern
| matching.
|
| An angry dog? No such thing, anger is a human emotion. A
| happy dog? Again, no such thing. A sad dog? Never existed,
| sadness is uniquely human.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Because humans are not automatons of eating and
| reproducing?
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