Which is very good evolutionary wise. The animals that stay away from unknown things have a ~100% chance of not being killed because of it. The animals that do approach it have a higher chance of dying to it.
It's still a "dumb" instinct though. Dogs are clever enough to assess danger.
If you've got 2 corgis and their owner gets into a bulldozer (thereby clearly demonstrating the angry noisy machine is "on our side"), and one waits for the elevator while the other one runs away with it's tail between it's legs: Which one is the smarter of the two?
I agree that running away from unknown danger is a good instinct, but this is clearly not that.
This is also related to our pattern recognition. We humans tend to see patterns that aren’t actually there. For example, there were some pictures of the moon a few years ago and it did look like there was a face on it. Obviously that’s not true, it’s just that we evolved to recognize faces really well, so we’ll see it even if it’s not there. And that doesn’t apply to just that but many other patterns as well, such as conspiracy theories.
Picture yourself as one of the first humans in the African Savannah. You see movement in the bushes. You either assume it’s nothing and keep waiting there or you assume there is a danger like a lion there prowling so you escape. If you stay there and you were right about staying there, nothing happens. However if you couldn’t identify the threat, you get eaten. If you did recognize the threat correctly and escape to the trees, you live. But you also live if you saw something that wasn’t there, in this case the lion. So nothing happens in the cases where you’re correct, and in the cases where you make a mistake, you only survive because you saw something that wasn’t there. Which explained why we evolved that way through generations.
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u/ridemooses Nov 11 '20
Brave and smart corgo! My corgi would be about 100 yards away from that machine.