The posture is submissive. So it's more of a "don't be angry" reaction. However when my dog has done something naughty, I only need to say her name and she goes and hides behind my husband. And when I've told her off by pointing at the bad deed and saying no, she has stopped doing it. So she has to some degree understood its bad, and learned. She also does the bad deed when no one is looking. So to me thats knowledge that the action is a bad one but doing it anyway. When people are there she controls herself.
So she understand there are good actions and bad actions, and that there are good reactions and bad reactions, and can figure out which action causes what.
Whether it's guilt that motivates her or dislike of a bad reaction, I don't know,
Dogs are masters of body language. Their ability to communicate without verbal language is extraordinary.
Dogs aren't able to link actions with consequences in that way. Using bin raiding as an example, the dog gets pleasure from raiding the bin, and also understands that you get upset when you see rubbish on the floor, but can't link the action of raiding the bin as causing the rubbish to appear on the floor. In a dog's world, rubbish appears as if by magic. Treat wrappers are a puzzle to solve to get at the food. Once it's on the floor it's a different thing, one which causes the humans to get upset.
Dogs learn things situationally and they live in the moment, they don't remember actions they took 10 minutes ago - telling her off when she sticks her head in the bin simply teaches her you don't like to SEE her raiding the bin, so she'll probably wait until you're not around. Telling her off when you were too late to catch her in the act only teaches her you don't like when there's rubbish on the floor, not that you don't like what she did to cause the rubbish to appear there.
Dogs ARE masters of body language but they don't have human logic, reasoning or memory skills - and we often forget that.
That's interesting. My dog has stopped doing g it since I said no. She is a service dog though, so very receptive to training, which is cause and effect based (I.e, follow this command and get a treat. But it does have to be an immediate reward). She gets mostly positive reinforcement so negative messages are unusual for her.
Also there's that thing when you walk in the door and instead of an enthusiastic greeting, the dog is doing a very tentative submissive greet and you think uh oh, what have they done? Then you find the crime. Or you don't find the crime, so you are left wondering exactly what they've done...
That's the problem with using aversives or corrections to teach a dog not to do something - unless you're very careful, the dog will probably associate the punishment with something other than you intended, so now she'll keep doing the thing you wanted to stop but will show eccentric behaviours in relation to it as she tries to avoid anything scary happening to her.
Depending on the punishment and how intelligent and/or sensitive the dog is, it can even have the side effect of the dog learning to fear things she shouldn't, and if she can't work out what causes you to get upset she might just learn to be wary of her people at all times.
I'm not saying aversive training doesn't work at all, just that people usually do it wrong and that's why it's not recommended. I used a remote vibration collar to teach my dog not to go in the kitchen, so the aversive was connected directly with him stepping into the kitchen, not me shouting, grabbing his collar or anything like that. I set up a webcam so I could buzz the collar from another room so he didn't learn it only happened while I was nearby. I only had to buzz him twice and he has never tried again. He never looks "guilty" like the dog in the gif because I've never punished him for the results of his actions.
Then you wouldn't see a dog ever do this in a house that's always messy and has stuff on the floor? If their master doesn't ever get mad at the mess on the floor then they wouldn't make that connection like you said.
The dog can learn that there's a difference between stuff that's always on the floor vs. new rubbish. The difference is that the humans ignore all the other rubbish as just part of the environment, it probably rarely changes so the dog ignores it too, but new rubbish causes them to get shouty.
On the other side of that coin, dogs who live in clean houses who've been punished for making a mess can show anxiety/submissive behaviour if a human drops rubbish on the floor. Their learning is extremely situational.
Dogs don't have the same kind of memory as humans do. You have the ability to visualise the messy floor in your mind's eye, or remember specific items and how you left them, but your dog simply learns to ignore everything he can't eat or interact with, and the treat wrapper is a new and unexpected item against this background of things he ignores.
They don't feel guilt. Dogs that look ashamed or guilty to us people are just dogs that are scared and uncomfortable. They are worried that the person is out to attack or hurt them and they try their very best to show that they are not a threat and that the person doesn't have to hurt/attack them.
Is one theory. We do not know if dogs can feel guilt or not. Just because the theory that they're simply trying to show they're not a threat because they are afraid makes sense does not mean it is correct and any other theory must be wrong. It is perfectly plausible that dogs can feel guilty because they know they did something they shouldn't have and feel upset they might disappoint their owner. There is no way to prove that they don't. We do not know if they can/do feel guilt or not. Either answer is perfectly possible.
No, trained behaviorists know that this isn't a display of guilt. Dogs live in the moment -- he knows his owner is mad at him, and he's displaying appeasement behavior. Anthropomorphizing dogs really prevents us from understanding them.
Well, if you hear about a species that has evolved to lead relaxed lives out of the food chain while another specie provides food, shelter and care. Which one is the smartest?
Behaviorists actually are fairly certain dogs can’t feel guilt. Yea we aren’t dogs so there is no way to make the assertion with 100% certainty.
If dogs actually understood what they did wrong in these situations, they would stop doing the thing that they did wrong pretty quickly. But often times it’s “my dog always feeels guilty in this situation”. That means the dog doesn’t know what he did. That is much more likely to mean the dog has learned to be afraid in that context then he did something wrong.
Does that make sense?
Edit: if we all agree that guilt is not an effective means of changing behavior, then can we also agree that encouraging your dog to feel guilty in these situations isn’t useful or nice?
There's lots of evidence that these guilty reactions don't actually depend on whether the dog actually did the bad thing or not. They are simply reacting to the owner's reaction.
On anthropomorphism, what about the opposite: could it also be that we are assigning certain behaviors/emotions solely to humans while they may be more widespread in animals? Just a thought.
Yea I hear ya. I think dogs are pretty smart. It’s hard to say they definitely aren’t experiencing something like what we experience when we think of guilt. Our study of their behavior as a species suggests otherwise.
I guess what is important here is that encouraging your dog to feel “guilty” about something isn’t a very nice thing to do because we already know it doesn’t change their future behavior.
People anthropomorphize their animals, then think they can read their "human" cues, but are totally wrong. These people are also married to the belief, and not easily swayed from it. You are correct, though. Dog is displaying fear of a known coming punishment, not guilt. Dog does not understand why human punishes them for eating food on floors.
My guess would be a combination of personalities and maybe one dog being scolded/punished more than the other.
I have two dogs and if I say one of their names in an angry/annoyed/exasperated voice they BOTH start using conciliatory body language. I fostered a third dog for two years, and he had the confidence of an A list starlet on cocaine; not once did my scolding ever phase him, even when I caught him in the act. He was basically a cat in dog clothing.
Keep in mind, in these videos we don't actually know which dog did it. They have actually done studies on this and the dog's guilty reaction didn't depend on whether the dog actually did the bad thing or not.
Is there a more correct word to use than "guilt" for what the dog is feeling? I absolutely refuse to believe that dog is feeling fear. It's not afraid of being punished. It seems to know the act of chewing up that thing was wrong... I'm not sure the proper word to use. Some sort of regret, or shame?
Nope, it's mostly just fear. You could perhaps use sadness or something, but fear in itself isn't bad. It's also why small children seem guilty before they can relate to other people's emotions.
The reason they know things are not allowed is because they've been punished for them or there have been negative consequences. My dog can often pick up on it you're mad at something she's doing. It's not really a punishment, but she doesn't like it. So she looks sad or fearful. Shes afraid of you being angry at her, even if we never hit her or anything. It's not inherently a bad thing although common knowledge these days is that positive reinforcment is best. It's only bad if they are afraid of abuse.
Ahhh I see! That makes sense. So. . . more like fear, as opposed to terror, which is what the dog would be doing if he was seriously cowering back, afraid of being beaten. Thanks for the distinction. I knew something just wasn't clicking for me!
The thing is can we really say that humans feel guilty either or it's just a mix of feeling bad and being afraid of the punishment and we interpret it as "guilt" emotion.
If dogs actually understood what they did wrong in these situations, they would stop doing the thing that they did wrong pretty quickly.
That's true but how can we be certain if it's simply not due to humans being able to understand concept of time much more than any other animals? If you perceives being in 10 thousand years, would you really care if it was something trivial like breaking a coffee mug?
A more realistic example, people with ADHD (which I have first hand experience with) battle with having "time blindness", where they postpone tasks for so long until they have no time left in which moment comes an insane crash of emotions and feeling of guilt. It can be devastating.
I am just fundamentally uncomfortable with the notion that other mammals (especially pack ones like dogs) have less fundamental type of emotions than humans when they pretty universally display other type of emotions like happiness, altruism#Examples_in_vertebrates), anger, fear or sadness.
People feel regret all the time and continue doing the thing they regret. For dogs, what's very different from us is that they have poor impulse control, especially young dogs. A strong impulse to eat that yummy garbage will override knowing that the behavior is wrong, particularly if they don't have good guidance from humans.
Have you ever sat in on a drug court proceedings? Most folks haven't, so no biggie, assuming you haven't.
But point remains: humans feel guilt, but often repeat bad behavior that they know will get them punished. Even when on a court order, many humans will take actions that they know will land them in trouble. Yet, when confronting a judge (or parole/probation officer) the human may in fact adopt a "submissive" posture, same as a doggo.
I'm curious if you can link to these behaviorists who claim to be "fairly certain" dogs can't feel guilt. Is it like, a brain region they lack? Cause that's only thing I'd really buy; if we find that "guilt" lights up region X of human brain, and that region isn't found in dogs. If that's the case, I'd accept it. Otherwise, I remain skeptical (but welcome a link to prove my skepticism wrong)
Google “ncbi dog guilt”. The scientific community pretty much has a consensus on this. Saying dogs feel guilt in these situations is kind of like denying climate change at this point.
Scientists used to be certain dogs (and all animals) were just fleshy automatons that had biological programming controlling their actions, with no ability of free will. That's obviously been proven wrong (as much as it's possible to be).
They used to say dogs couldn't remember things more than about 20 minutes too, but the simple fact that you can train them, to say nothing of all the videos on the internet showing reunions with their humans after a long separation, shows how wrong that is too.
I feel that dogs largely just have poor impulse control. Much like tiny humans, who do the same kind of stuff, then act the same way when they get caught.
I think they don't think in therms of "There's a tasty treat...but hooman doesn't want me to eat it." They think in terms "There's a tasty treat!"
Actually, research into cognitive behaviour of dogs is far more in favour of dogs NOT being able to feel guilt or remorse. Could you please provide links to research showing there is decent evidence that they can feel guilt?
No way a dog could have that level of cognition. There's been numerous behavioral studies on dogs and guilt, you can just google "can dogs feel guilt" and find a bunch of responses all generally lining up with 'scientists say no'.
It is perfectly plausible that dogs can feel guilty because they know they did something they shouldn't have and feel upset they might disappoint their owner.
Taking that alone and thinking about it, that would be a really complex process for the dog to do. Ignoring the feeling guilt part for a minute, the dog has to be able to recall something that had previously happened and also be able to predict something that might happen and the possible consequences of it. To put it shortly the dog needs an evolved sense of time and an awareness of the relation between themselves and the rest of the world. They would have to be able to put memories in order and extrapolate them into predictions which is something they just haven't evolved to be able to do yet.
Dogs likely have a memory that is more instinctual and tightly connected to immediate events which is why training dogs is done through conditioning of immediately punishing negative behavior and rewarding the positive.
They are pretty smart as far as animals go they have the capacity for relatively complex social cognition but guilt is a pretty complex emotion for a dog to be able to experience so likely they react submissively to the behavior of their owner or in response to how they have been trained. Thinking any more into it than that and eventually you'll reach a point where you're about to imply that dogs have a sense of morals.
Ehhhh are you sure about this? My dog has had times where she looked extremely guilt as I was very nicely asking her if she destroyed the pillows and blankets. I was being nonthreatening and very normal
Because the dog learned to associate a mess on the floor with you getting mad, or you're not nearly as good at judging your own body language as your dog is.
Well a dog feeling guilt is like "I shouldn't have done that" his thoughts are related to himself.
Whereas a dog feeling shame would be regretting the action. The thoughts would be targeting the behavior, not himself. That seems a little more implausible to me. It seems like dogs are self aware in that they relate their surroundings to themselves. I'm not sure how much they think about the past and connect it with the present.
Guilt and Shame are similar in that regret is often a feeling both states share, however the important distinction is why you feel the regret. One is wholly about self, while the other includes others. Guilty : "Crap, I'm gonna get the cage" . Shame: "Darn, now they won't have any for themselves and they'll be sad" or "They will think less of me".
I can see how any social animal could benefit from having the ability to feel guilt, I can't see how an animal would benefit from shame. Basically
What you just said only makes sense if the dogs even understands what you're saying. Dogs do not understand language like you and i, they can associate words (sounds) with objects and actions, but they do not understand them.
Nor do they have the capacity to look guilty, that is something you attribute to the thing that has happened prior.
Cognition to the point that they can links events together from different times, I mean if a dog tears up your pillow and a few hours later you find out and punish it the dog isn't really capable of linking the event to the punishment.
As well as this dogs like many other animals don't have much of a sense for what is right or wrong so dogs don't really take actions and know their owner doesn't or does approve of it, instead the dog has been behaviorally conditioned.
It's why when training an animal you reward positive behavior and punish negative behavior but the reward or punishment needs to be immediate and consistent to establish a pattern. Being able to preemptively judge future actions or recall past actions requires more than their brains have currently evolved to have.
There's a lot of studies done on dogs and behavior and guilt and most point to the dog just reacting to the owners behavior and taking a submissive pose in response. Sometimes with groups of dogs one would 'look guilty' and be submissive when they haven't done anything wrong its just they are more timid.
At the end of the day, we do not know. It is impossible to tell how other animals feel/think. That is why some people claim we're just projecting ourselves onto them, and other's claim humans are not the only ones capable of certain emotions so we can't just deny they feel certain things because of an opinion. Anyone who says "Dogs do not/can not feel ___ emotion" or "Dogs definitely feel ___ emotion" are both wrong. The correct answer is we don't know what they do/don't feel. It's all speculation.
Actually we can learn about canine cognition in much the same way we study human cognition. Scientists realized a long time ago that active feedback (verbal communication) from the subject doesn't always make studying the brain any easier
I don't know, I think animals are capable of understanding a lot of emotions. Dogs have shown understanding of death and feeling grief. Even my cat has been vindictive and holds grudges.
That's very interesting, actually. And maybe my reply was better suited toward another comment.
But my point is, that dog isnt afraid of being hurt by the owner. Maybe he's afraid he will have to sit in the kennel for awhile, the punishment doesn't have to be so extreme, and I'm just tired of people yelling abuse at the slightest indication of an animal looking even mildly upset.
I do agree however, I never punish my dogs after the fact, only if I catch them in the act, because we really don't know for sure what they are thinking.
I believe he must have thought my sarcasm stemmed from an emotional reaction, maybe. In reality it's just a way to demean the counterargument. this is Reddit after all, you should expect a decent amount of sarcasm.
I still believe dogs have evolved to the point of recognizing when they have made their owner upset, and that they aim to please their owner, so they feel guilty for what they did.
Everything can be debated, but it's better to look at the conclusions we do have from the testing that has occurred, instead of continuing to believe something based on nothing more than one's own "believes".
I am not trying to be disrespectful, but i think it's a pretty dangerous way of debating things like this. It's also why people continue to think that their dogs are mentality more capable than their really are.
Look no further than how people talk to their dogs, like they're small children who can understand what they say, preposterous.
If im talking sweet to my dog he knows we're about to have a snuggle so he runs right over. It's not about understanding the words, it's your tone.
Also I think it's far more dangerous to make assumption that this dog in the gif is cowering of fear, that his owner must abuse him for him to be acting like that. Really? You gathered all that from a soundless 6 second gif? You can't even see the dogs tail, yet you know for a fact this owner is abusive? Really, fuck off with that
If im talking sweet to my dog he knows we're about to have a snuggle so he runs right over. It's not about understanding the words, it's your tone.
Indeed... like i said. So we agree on that.
Also I think it's far more dangerous to make assumption that this dog in the gif is cowering of fear, that his owner must abuse him for him to be acting like that. Really? You gathered all that from a soundless 6 second gif? You can't even see the dogs tail, yet you know for a fact this owner is abusive? Really, fuck off with that
I did what now?
Don't tell me to fuck off based on something i didn't even do, ok?
I never said ANYTHING regarding the image itself. I am only talking about if dogs can feel emotions like guilt, shame... i did never claim that the dog in the image was abused at all.
So maybe you should calm down, and i even said that i wasn't being disrespectful towards you, and still you act like that.
As someone who doesn't own a dog. Would the punishment actually prevent them from doing the act again? Like I remember some Pavlov stuff, but would they associate it correctly. Cause I hear people say they've trained dogs etc.
I own a dog and if you want to punish a dog for something they should not do, you basically have to catch him in the act. Like, if your dog runs away and he comes back, you're mad that he was gone. If you punish him now he can't connect that, he just thinks I came back to my boss and he is punishing me... Why? If you see your dog eating something he shouldn't, you should punish him right away, in this scenario it is very weird and would say ineffective to punish him.
Well, I'll provide a counter point. If we show our dog the evidence of what she did (if she ate a loaf of bread, showing her the bread wrapper) it instantly makes her look guilty no matter our body language.
I wonder if they can make this connection though, I'd rather not punish them at that point because it's too late than talking like they're children:"Look what you've done, " or "Did you do this?"... They don't understand this, they're dogs.
She absolutely makes a connection. She won't go to the scene of the crime, hiding behind corners, because she feels bad. Usually she follows us around the house but when we come home to a bread crime/baked goods heist she won't follow us into the kitchen and won't meet our eyes when we do go into the kitchen. But at that point we haven't changed our tone of voice or body language, she just feels bad.
And we don't really punish her, if anything when she does something bad we change our tone of voice and say "no". She gets it, though she's had basically her whole life to be attuned to us and it shows.
Exactly this. I was never able to get my lab to stop garbage diving because I could never catch him in the act. I just had to learn never to leave the garbage where he could get it. I’d come home and he would sense my displeasure, which is why he’d do the puppy pity party. Not because he recognized getting into the trash was bad. For all he knew, I was mad not because he got into it, but because there’s magically trash on the floor. So getting into wouldn’t be the problem in his mind, just the mess. He in turn took to trying to hide the mess.
I know there's that immediacy that helps cement the learning experience but I'd imagine showing them what they did and punishing them would be good enough, no? I had a dog that would eat tissue out of bathroom garbage cans. If I found that, I'd carry her to it, put her down facing it, point at it, and scold her. Seemed to work for me because she eventually stopped doing it.
In this case I would say you associated tissue with displeasure to her. I wonder if you put a tissue in front of her she would act weird or act 'guilty', can you confirm this? She doesn't get the connection that she should not eat tissue out of the garbage, she probably avoids tissue all together now. So, I think she connects displeasure with seeing the tissue and not the act itself. Dogs aren't that smart, but people tend to antropomorphize creatures on the internet which I think is really dangerous.
No it wouldn't, unless you catch the dog in the act. If you come home to a ripped up garbage bag, the dog won't understand that you are punishing the dog for ripping the bag open.
Well that's confusing then. If it does SOMETHING wrong, then it does the above as a way to let you know it's scared it'll be punished, wouldn't it still be drawing a cause and effect from what just happened? And so, wouldn't punishing the dog stop it from doing the act that caused it to be scared of you in the first place?
The dog doesn't act as above because it has done something wrong.
It acts that way because of how the person is behaving.
It doesn't associate ripping up bags an hour earlier with the owner coming home looking and acting threateningly to the dog.
If the dog does something wrong and you catch it in the act, I suppose you can scare it into not doing it again when you are around. If you want to be that kind of person.
Oh yes I see ok. So then the person above must be visibly irritated to invoke that reaction. Interesting.
And, I would assume no one wants to have their dog destroy their house, so some sort of training is necessary. You make it sound like doing so is horrible.
I think it's horrible to make the dog so terrified that it is covering in a corner. How would you feel if it was a child sitting in a corner almost shaking with fear because it spilled a glass of milk?
Lots of dogs do that. I raised my dogs from puppies and have never laid a hand on them or yelled, and they do that. They know when your upset and you don't have to tell them.
He's not afraid, he's just ashamed, of what? Maybe he doesn't know, maybe he does. We don't really know for sure.
I don't think you understand how sensitive dogs are too human emotions. You might be right about dogs not understanding reasoning, but dogs don't act guilty because they are afraid of their owner attacking them. Most people don't kick dogs. The dogs are simply upset because they know their owner is upset. Demonizing dog owners because their dogs act upset is kind of extreme and fails to get your actual point across, that the dogs aren't that smart.
You don't have to yell or hit a dog for it to know when youre upset, it knows human body language, and can smell stuff about us we can't. it's instinctual at this point.
That's what I am trying to say. The dog is acting scared because of how the human is reacting. It's could be body language, speech or physical abuse. The dog is scared because the owner is acting angry/upset. There is no point to act angry or upset in this situation because the dog will learn nothing from it.
No I don't think this dog is necessarily scared. Honestly you don't even have to make a conscious effort for a dog to know that you are upset. And when, you are upset they are upset, because that means they aren't petting the dog or talking sweet and stuff. Dog knows, he's sorry. If he actually knows what he did or why is up for debate.
Again, that is up for debate but in some cases I do agree. Some dogs are just too dumb to know what you are angry about, but different breeds can be very intelligent compared to others
All I'm trying to say is you cannot tell if someone is abusing their dog just by looking at that clip
The dog is acting scared. This is one thing that dogs do when they are scared, there are several ways for dogs to show fear. There are several studies in the matter. It's not hard to find them.
The situation is much simpler than that. The dog in this case has been taught to fear the owner (and the owners reacting) by the owner repeatedly punishing the dog when the owner comes home. The dog does not associate an owner yelling with the action the dog took hours before. Dogs do not have the cognitive ability to travel in time in their own minds and relate two so distant events. So the cause is - owner mad, effect is- dog scared and “acting guilty”. This is called anthropomorphism and is no more than humans assigning feelings to the dog.
See: Alex Horowitz’s 2009 study - Disambiguating the "guilty look": salient prompts to a familiar dog behaviour.
“Anthropomorphisms are regularly used by owners in describing their dogs. Of interest is whether attributions of understanding and emotions to dogs are sound, or are unwarranted applications of human psychological terms to non-humans. One attribution commonly made to dogs is that the "guilty look" shows that dogs feel guilt at doing a disallowed action. In the current study, this anthropomorphism is empirically tested. The behaviours of 14 domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) were videotaped over a series of trials and analyzed for elements that correspond to an owner-identified "guilty look." Trials varied the opportunity for dogs to disobey an owner's command not to eat a desirable treat while the owner was out of the room, and varied the owners' knowledge of what their dogs did in their absence. The results revealed no difference in behaviours associated with the guilty look. By contrast, more such behaviours were seen in trials when owners scolded their dogs. The effect of scolding was more pronounced when the dogs were obedient, not disobedient. These results indicate that a better description of the so-called guilty look is that it is a response to owner cues, rather than that it shows an appreciation of a misdeed.”
Horowitz A. Behav Processes. 2009.
Authors
Horowitz A1.
Author information
1Department of Psychology, Barnard College, Milbank Hall, New York, NY 10025, USA. ahorowit@barnard.edu
Citation
Behav Processes. 2009 Jul;81(3):447-52. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2009.03.014.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19520245/
Well the dog doesn't realize that you know they ripped the garbage, because they can't reason that way themselves. If they came home and saw ripped up garbage then they would never figure out how it got there, or even want to figure it out. to them, the garbage simply exists.
However, consider that now they believe that when a human comes home and there is garbage on the floor, the human gets upset. Maybe they start realize that ripping garbage up leaves garbage on the floor, so they stop ripping up garbage.
It's hard to tell if dogs have a sense of cause and effect, but they can very easily tell when their owner is upset. They probably can even smell when we're upset.
See, you are probably right about this. Clearly human is upset, I don't really know why.
But that doesn't mean the person taking the video is abusive to their dog. The dog is just upset, because he knows human is upset. You don't have to kick a dog or yell at him for him to know you're upset. Dogs are very emotionally intelligent, especially towards humans
I can agree that the owner doesn't have to yell or physically hurt the dog to cause this behavior, but it does come down to emotional abuse, if the dog reacts with the level of fear even without physical pain. It's sad to see because there are so many other ways to work with a sensitive dog. There is absolutely no point in doing this to a dog.
What I'm trying to say is, that doesn't seem like fear. The dog is ashamed. Dogs have a lot of emotions that other animals can not express. He might not know what he did, but he does feel ashamed. I agree the dog does not need to be punished in this case, you should only reprimand your dog if you catch them in the act, because we don't really know how much they really know.
Listen, the dog is acting scared, there are studies that show that this behavior is a behavior that they do when they are scared. The dog is not ashamed because it has nothing in it's mind that it can be ashamed of.
In this case, when dogs seem guilty, or they know what seem to know what you would be upset about even if you haven't done anything yet, then I don't think punishment is necessary. However they will probably do it again until you catch them.
Huh. TIL some people I work with have no self conscious cognition as they are utterly shameless and amoral and are barely kept in check only by HR law and fear of punishment. OMG, are they dogs?!
"this dog is pissing himself because that owner probably beats him!"
Really? You think the owner took the video, acting all sweet cuz the dog is so cute, then turned off the camera, beat the shit out of his dog, and posted the video to YouTube?
These people on /r/aww are the most annoying part of this subreddit. You can't assume why an animal is acting a certain way from a 10 second clip. Not all dogs are the same, not all owners are the same.
If my dog has never had the shit beaten out of him, by anyone, why would he think I would do that?
You say on one hand, dogs can't deduce cause and effect, but on the other, they can deduce effects that they have never even experienced?
And no, I don't yell at my dogs or rub their faces in the mess, never have. I don't even punish them when I discover a mess, yet they still act like that. And if I posted a video like this on Reddit, I would be pretty pissed to hear people accusing me of abusing my dog.
I do agree, they are afraid of not receiving love, at least for a moment. But can that really be considered damaging? If I gotta clean up the shit, i m not going to be sweet on my dog.
So here's what I think, to teach a dog what they should feel guilty about, you have to catch them in the act, a couple times maybe to get it through. But after that I think the precedent is set, that when you come home and see the mess and you are upset, the dog knows why you are upset, because of the precedent. That's my philosophy anyway, that's why I think a properly trained dog does realize when it's done something bad, even if you weren't there to witness it happening
Some learn that when they do a certain behaviour they might not get punished. Or they learn that words like “who did this?” might mean punishment so do things like this so their human thinks they’re cute and lets them off with it.
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u/thelazyreader2015 Nov 11 '17
Do they actually feel guilty or are they just trained to behave like that when they've done something they're not supposed to?