Anthropomorphizing Dogs and Dog-Human Relationships
It is quite disturbing to me to think of all the abuse, mistreatment and confusing information which are doled out to many dogs for the reason that we, a “superior” and such intelligent specie presume that another specie must reflect our way of thinking. Dogs do not have the same complexity in their cognitive processing as we do. They have their own set of talents, which are much more complex than ours, such as their highly developed olfactory sense, their hearing along with other survival instincts; discernment of minute changes in their environment and subtle ways of communication. They do learn to make associations between cues and response but do not understand language as we do. They are not that abstract. Dogs are full of emotions, but because of their perception being different from ours, their emotions are not exactly the same. They do what they need to do to survive. All canines are opportunistic scavengers and hunters and hard wired to do what works to sustain them and their specie. They do not possess the ability to process “right and wrong” in the moral sense that we do. They do not share our value system or have the same experiences or method of processing information that we do. It is a fallacy that dogs do things to please their owner. They are amoral. They do not have the ability or innate need to please someone else other than how it affects them. If pleasing their owner pleases them, then they’ll please their owner. But as far as caring about what their owner’s internal emotional state of mind is, unless it relates to them, they don’t. They’re innocently selfish and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just how they are and how they evolved to have a synergistic relationship with us and how they’ve survived for thousands of years. They’re wonderful just the way they are and don’t need to be like humans.
One thing we’ve really got going for us is how dogs evolved by natural as well as artificial selection. The fittest survived. In the domestication process, the dogs that learned to work with man, who helped with hunting, who alerted man to danger were in turn taken in and provided for by man. This domestication enabled dogs to live healthier and longer lives than their wild counterparts and thus perpetuated this new domestic form of dog, canine familiaris. Because they, like we form strong social bonds, this further enabled them to live with us synergistically. (better together than seperately)
A common scenario with a lot of dog owners and traditional trainers is that they get a few or even several correct responses and they think their dog is adequately trained. Then their dog gives an incorrect response. “He knows. He’s just being stubborn or dominant,” hence, the collar correction or scolding. Imagine that you are taking piano lessons and you hit some incorrect notes after having gotten them right before. Is it going to make you hit those correct keys if you receive pain or get startled by your teacher? Or do you suppose that you need more practice? When a dog gets some of his responses to your cue correct, but misses some, he needs more training. He is not being stubborn or dominant or needing an attitude adjustment.
Dogs learn by operant and classical conditioning as we do, receiving reinforcements for responses. Unlike us, dogs do not learn well by imitation or observation. Dogs do not move forward and backward through time. If a dog is punished after the fact, that is abuse. Punishment for any reason is not needed to train a dog and can have some serious side effects. Dogs do not generalize well. If your dog sits at home when given a cue, but fails to sit in a crowded, hectic place, he is not being disobedient. He’s under trained in distractions. The competing motivator is stronger in these distractions than the motivator supplied by the owner. If a dog is to be reliable with correct responses to a cue, he needs to have a strong history of reinforcements to increase the probability of its reoccurring.
People love to dwell on “pack theory” to explain why their dog doesn’t have reliable responses to cues. In fact, they use it to explain every conceivable behavior in a dog. “Dogs misbehave because they haven’t been shown who’s boss.” “You must be the alpha in your pack.” It gets thrown around an awful lot when owners don’t want to spend the time developing correct responses through a sufficient volume of training. They get emotional and cut to the chase, “dominance and stubbornness, no leadership.” That, to them justifies the use of aversive treatment. Again, the competing motivator which is getting his attention is stronger than the trainer’s.
Here’s another myth: “Don’t let your dog go through doorways before you or he’s trying to exert dominance over you.” Isn’t it just possible that the dog’s reason for wanting to go outside is that he’s a dog and there’s lots of fun stuff out there and he’s excited to go play? The lowliest dog in a hierarchy, on par with simple protoplasm can still disobey, jump up, rush through a doorway before its owner and not sit when told. Why is everyone so desperately bent on finding answers which relate to all kinds of irrelevant sources, like pack theory or stubbornness? Couldn’t it be because the dog is being reinforced somewhere in the environment and because his owner never gives him a preferable alternative?
Then there is this one: “I want my dog to work for me, not for food.” So, praise is considered an adequate motivator. Where is the logic in this? Sure, being social and domestic creatures, dogs like interaction with their owners. But don’t they get any of that anyhow for free? I know mine do. So, in the absence of any interaction, praise is better than nothing. Praise also indicates to the traditionally, correction trained dog that an aversive is not likely to occur. That’s a relief. Praise and punishment at the same time rarely happens. So, praise is a marker or predictor of the unlikelihood of imminent punishment. It can also be a predictor or conditioned rein forcer of better things to come, food, if food rewards as a primary rein forcer are paired with praise. In that case, as a Pavlovian response, praise has some real meaning. Remember, dogs aren’t concerned with your state of mind other than how it affects them. Food generally has high value to a hunter-scavenger predator. Deprivation (Slightly hungry) will increase the value of the food reward. Some dogs love a special toy reserved for training and some playtime or a game of tug as an outlet for their prey drive. To increase the probability of a behavior repeating, a reinforcement that has high value to the dog needs to be given.
Instead of giving your dog his meal in a bowl in it’s entirety, save some or all to be used as reward for easier skills or behaviors and reserve tastier treats for training more difficult skills where the dog is getting a strong environmental motivator which is competing with you. Vary the motivator when you train or want to reinforce a behavior to help keep the dog interested, guessing and having fun. There is often the objection, “My dog will only work for treats if I use them for reward.” When you learn more about the science of opernant conditioning training, there are ways to prevent that. In short, using a variable reward schedule when appropriate will eliminate that concern. The particulars of this training method are beyond the scope of this article. Free feeding, making food available at all times is a waste of a valuable training tool. Dogs are designed and love to work for their food. Let that natural trait work for you and your dog.
Give your dog a reason to engage in behaviors you like. Give up the notion that you need to have domination, coercion or intimidation over your dog in order to have a good relationship and a well trained dog. A stronger bond comes from a dog working with his owner for something he likes, clear signals and an owner who understands how dogs learn. Operant and classical conditioning works on all dogs because its how canine minds, in fact all mammalian minds operate. There is a condition and there is a response. Do this and that happens.
Using pack theory and dominance to explain away under training is incongruous because many of the behaviors which proponents of this philosophy of interacting with dogs will have you do are nothing more than operant conditioning. “Ignore the dog when he is too rowdy so that you are like the alpha wolf.” That’s simply not giving a rein forcer, your attention for an undesirable behavior. “Eat a cracker or something first before you feed your dog so you look more like an alpha since alphas eat first.” Who ever came up with that one? Is that not teaching a dog some manners by the simple act of rein forcing his waiting calmly by subsequently giving him his highly valued dinner? Your eating of something does not enhance the learning of this behavior.
We are not wolves. We cannot fool our canine friends. Why make our relationship with them more complicated than need be? They’re not as sophisticated intellectually as we are, but they’re not non perceptive.
Dog owners and trainers would do well to put away for good these outdated, traditional methods which show no understanding or compassion for dogs because they’re attributing human experience and human cognitive processing to dogs, or anthropomorphizing them. It’s time we get on the same page with our dogs.
By: Carrie
Permission to reproduce, provided credit is given to author
It is quite disturbing to me to think of all the abuse, mistreatment and confusing information which are doled out to many dogs for the reason that we, a “superior” and such intelligent specie presume that another specie must reflect our way of thinking. Dogs do not have the same complexity in their cognitive processing as we do. They have their own set of talents, which are much more complex than ours, such as their highly developed olfactory sense, their hearing along with other survival instincts; discernment of minute changes in their environment and subtle ways of communication. They do learn to make associations between cues and response but do not understand language as we do. They are not that abstract. Dogs are full of emotions, but because of their perception being different from ours, their emotions are not exactly the same. They do what they need to do to survive. All canines are opportunistic scavengers and hunters and hard wired to do what works to sustain them and their specie. They do not possess the ability to process “right and wrong” in the moral sense that we do. They do not share our value system or have the same experiences or method of processing information that we do. It is a fallacy that dogs do things to please their owner. They are amoral. They do not have the ability or innate need to please someone else other than how it affects them. If pleasing their owner pleases them, then they’ll please their owner. But as far as caring about what their owner’s internal emotional state of mind is, unless it relates to them, they don’t. They’re innocently selfish and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just how they are and how they evolved to have a synergistic relationship with us and how they’ve survived for thousands of years. They’re wonderful just the way they are and don’t need to be like humans.
One thing we’ve really got going for us is how dogs evolved by natural as well as artificial selection. The fittest survived. In the domestication process, the dogs that learned to work with man, who helped with hunting, who alerted man to danger were in turn taken in and provided for by man. This domestication enabled dogs to live healthier and longer lives than their wild counterparts and thus perpetuated this new domestic form of dog, canine familiaris. Because they, like we form strong social bonds, this further enabled them to live with us synergistically. (better together than seperately)
A common scenario with a lot of dog owners and traditional trainers is that they get a few or even several correct responses and they think their dog is adequately trained. Then their dog gives an incorrect response. “He knows. He’s just being stubborn or dominant,” hence, the collar correction or scolding. Imagine that you are taking piano lessons and you hit some incorrect notes after having gotten them right before. Is it going to make you hit those correct keys if you receive pain or get startled by your teacher? Or do you suppose that you need more practice? When a dog gets some of his responses to your cue correct, but misses some, he needs more training. He is not being stubborn or dominant or needing an attitude adjustment.
Dogs learn by operant and classical conditioning as we do, receiving reinforcements for responses. Unlike us, dogs do not learn well by imitation or observation. Dogs do not move forward and backward through time. If a dog is punished after the fact, that is abuse. Punishment for any reason is not needed to train a dog and can have some serious side effects. Dogs do not generalize well. If your dog sits at home when given a cue, but fails to sit in a crowded, hectic place, he is not being disobedient. He’s under trained in distractions. The competing motivator is stronger in these distractions than the motivator supplied by the owner. If a dog is to be reliable with correct responses to a cue, he needs to have a strong history of reinforcements to increase the probability of its reoccurring.
People love to dwell on “pack theory” to explain why their dog doesn’t have reliable responses to cues. In fact, they use it to explain every conceivable behavior in a dog. “Dogs misbehave because they haven’t been shown who’s boss.” “You must be the alpha in your pack.” It gets thrown around an awful lot when owners don’t want to spend the time developing correct responses through a sufficient volume of training. They get emotional and cut to the chase, “dominance and stubbornness, no leadership.” That, to them justifies the use of aversive treatment. Again, the competing motivator which is getting his attention is stronger than the trainer’s.
Here’s another myth: “Don’t let your dog go through doorways before you or he’s trying to exert dominance over you.” Isn’t it just possible that the dog’s reason for wanting to go outside is that he’s a dog and there’s lots of fun stuff out there and he’s excited to go play? The lowliest dog in a hierarchy, on par with simple protoplasm can still disobey, jump up, rush through a doorway before its owner and not sit when told. Why is everyone so desperately bent on finding answers which relate to all kinds of irrelevant sources, like pack theory or stubbornness? Couldn’t it be because the dog is being reinforced somewhere in the environment and because his owner never gives him a preferable alternative?
Then there is this one: “I want my dog to work for me, not for food.” So, praise is considered an adequate motivator. Where is the logic in this? Sure, being social and domestic creatures, dogs like interaction with their owners. But don’t they get any of that anyhow for free? I know mine do. So, in the absence of any interaction, praise is better than nothing. Praise also indicates to the traditionally, correction trained dog that an aversive is not likely to occur. That’s a relief. Praise and punishment at the same time rarely happens. So, praise is a marker or predictor of the unlikelihood of imminent punishment. It can also be a predictor or conditioned rein forcer of better things to come, food, if food rewards as a primary rein forcer are paired with praise. In that case, as a Pavlovian response, praise has some real meaning. Remember, dogs aren’t concerned with your state of mind other than how it affects them. Food generally has high value to a hunter-scavenger predator. Deprivation (Slightly hungry) will increase the value of the food reward. Some dogs love a special toy reserved for training and some playtime or a game of tug as an outlet for their prey drive. To increase the probability of a behavior repeating, a reinforcement that has high value to the dog needs to be given.
Instead of giving your dog his meal in a bowl in it’s entirety, save some or all to be used as reward for easier skills or behaviors and reserve tastier treats for training more difficult skills where the dog is getting a strong environmental motivator which is competing with you. Vary the motivator when you train or want to reinforce a behavior to help keep the dog interested, guessing and having fun. There is often the objection, “My dog will only work for treats if I use them for reward.” When you learn more about the science of opernant conditioning training, there are ways to prevent that. In short, using a variable reward schedule when appropriate will eliminate that concern. The particulars of this training method are beyond the scope of this article. Free feeding, making food available at all times is a waste of a valuable training tool. Dogs are designed and love to work for their food. Let that natural trait work for you and your dog.
Give your dog a reason to engage in behaviors you like. Give up the notion that you need to have domination, coercion or intimidation over your dog in order to have a good relationship and a well trained dog. A stronger bond comes from a dog working with his owner for something he likes, clear signals and an owner who understands how dogs learn. Operant and classical conditioning works on all dogs because its how canine minds, in fact all mammalian minds operate. There is a condition and there is a response. Do this and that happens.
Using pack theory and dominance to explain away under training is incongruous because many of the behaviors which proponents of this philosophy of interacting with dogs will have you do are nothing more than operant conditioning. “Ignore the dog when he is too rowdy so that you are like the alpha wolf.” That’s simply not giving a rein forcer, your attention for an undesirable behavior. “Eat a cracker or something first before you feed your dog so you look more like an alpha since alphas eat first.” Who ever came up with that one? Is that not teaching a dog some manners by the simple act of rein forcing his waiting calmly by subsequently giving him his highly valued dinner? Your eating of something does not enhance the learning of this behavior.
We are not wolves. We cannot fool our canine friends. Why make our relationship with them more complicated than need be? They’re not as sophisticated intellectually as we are, but they’re not non perceptive.
Dog owners and trainers would do well to put away for good these outdated, traditional methods which show no understanding or compassion for dogs because they’re attributing human experience and human cognitive processing to dogs, or anthropomorphizing them. It’s time we get on the same page with our dogs.
By: Carrie
Permission to reproduce, provided credit is given to author
Last edited:
Fabulous post.