I do think though that dog's can pick up on their owners emotions. If you're thinking "Oh no, I'm going to leave Fido alone for three hours I'm really worried he's going to rip the house up or be really upset when I'm gone." rather than "I'm just nipping out. Fido sleeps most of the day anyway and will be fine." then the dog will pick up on that and become anxious.
Same reason why so many people do the same to children - they're set in their views and are unwilling accept that they might be wrong.
Also, it's less work (at lesst in the short term). All the more reason to continue.
The official word is that adopting a gentle and emotionally aware stance has to be paired with a strong sense of boundaries, but it’s often very unclear how to differentiate between which part of the response to a given situation should be the boundary (“we don’t speak like that in this family; I won’t be responding until you talk to me in a respectful way”) vs the emotional deep dive (“it sounds like you’re processing some big feelings right now, let’s talk about what’s going on for you”).
Instead of engaging with the truly challenging parts of the approach, a lot of advocates model kind of what’s in the parent post— condescension, dismissal, and an assumption that the other party is simply unable or unwilling to learn how to do something that’s obviously superior.
a gentle and emotionally aware stance has to be paired with a strong sense of boundaries,
To me, a strong sense of self if probably more useful.
Establishing boundaries presumes an expertise that doesn't exist.
Parenting is learned on the job.
Learned over the better part of a lifetime.
Or all of it since we learn parenting by being parented as children...from people who were learning on the job.
we don’t speak like that in this family; I won’t be responding until you talk to me in a respectful way
Are you prepared to walk the walk and kick your child out of the family for responding with "fuck you"?
Never mind that withholding conversation from a child is punishment?
"Please don't talk to me like that. I don't like it," is the simplest thing that might work. It's also a good way to talk to other people. Because human relationships boil down to a good will, negotiation, or violence.
Boundaries bound operating on goodwill.
I'd extend that to all humans and all animals.
Many people can't even wrap their heads around NOT using punishment to control behaviour and react very negatively to the idea of treatment or interventions that, in their mind, look like "rewarding" the "bad" behaviour.
I have a counter surfer at home, and we tried the negative reinforcement, time-outs, loud noises ect, and all it did was give her food aggression where she never had any before.
Training leave it and removing opportunities for her to steal worked out way better long term. Now if she finds a chicken bone or something on a walk I can just take it from her when before when she’d do her damndest to hide it.
They are failing to control their own emotions.
There are plenty who believe that withdrawing privileges is an entirely normal and appropriate response when children misbehave.
This isn't punishment, although some children consider it to be.
A corollary to this is that it's very hard to get a dog to unlearn something once it has learned it, especially if you can't remove the positive reward. For many dogs, behaviors like barking, chewing, and digging are self-soothing. That is to say the dog feels rewarded just for performing the actions when stressed. For this reason, battling entrenched separation anxiety is very difficult and takes many months, as the author experienced.
I wish this information was more well known. Dogs, as puppies, are very malleable, and you can raise a well adjusted dog pretty easily provided you're willing to put in a lot of work for the first few months of life. Once dogs reach adulthood, things become much harder as you're having to unlearn entrenched behaviors in addition to teaching new ones. This is especially important to understand if you're considering rescuing a dog. Rescuing adult dogs is noble, but you're basically playing the lottery with potential problematic behavioral issues.
In other words: by selecting for responsiveness to human emotions, to what degree have we made dogs' brains more like our own?
Now I'm going to cuddle my pup Henry.
If you're American there is a big chance that you're using the word pup for a dog of any age. This in itself is a tell-tale sign of the way many people - especially those who are wont to write or speak about their dogs in public places - think about them, as permanent juveniles who will never "grow up".
As for "pup" think of it like a term of endearment similar to sweetie, babe, honey, etc etc.
The removal of testes/ovaries before puberty has something to do with that.
Go to the third world and look at the dogs in the street. They have teats for nursing puppies and balls for making them, all plain as day. What dogs look like in developed countries isn't natural.
Yes, definitely. The cats sabotaged the economy to increase financial insecurity, and the dogs infiltrated r/Parenting to raise human parenting standards to unattainble levels. As a result, people are no longer willing to have babies, and both species have raised their living standards, enjoying the good life and laughing behind our backs. /s
Also, it’s important not to overly anthropomorphize evolution. It’s not as though animals are choosing their evolutionary strategy, so I find this language misleading.
Take care of your kid like you'd a long-lived dog, and that's enough attention for long enough. By the end of it, the kid has grown into an adult.
The problem is that parents are expected to parent too much. American car centric infrastructure affects this a lot. But, latch key kids turned out just fine, and there is nothing wrong with that model.
Pets may not be actively pursuing a parasitic relationship with humans, but it does appear to be manifesting in that form for certain lonely people.
Animals have a dual strategy.
They can be part of the family or they can be a working animal.
> Is there a direct connection between falling birth rates and treating animals as if they were beloved children?
I could see treating animals as children being caused by falling birth rates. The opposite seems unlikely, since people have kept pets for a very long time.
https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/welcome-to-search-engine
Edit: typo
I'm ok when seeing adults doing that to their kids (i.e. treating said kids as grown-ups), after all they're their kids and I don't have children of my own, but when I see the same sort of behaviour being transplanted to handling dogs (or pets, more generally), then I get really angry. Again, dogs, and animals, are not humans, applying "human-like treatment" to them means harming said dogs and said animals.
And more to the point of the article, as the owner of a very sensitive Border Collie myself the "secret" of avoiding separation anxiety for your dog is not to treat your every home departure like you're heading off to the Antarctic, treat it like it's nothing, like you're just going to get rid of the trash. No matter if you're gone for 5 minutes or for 4-5 hours. This applies for both leaving the house and getting back to the house.
he now knows that it means to not get up and start pacing anxiously to go with me or to try to follow me out the door. usually he just goes in his easychair (it's turned into his doggie daybed, basically) or lays down in the sunlight. my guest bath is also his little cave, since it's usually dark and the floor is cool. i've seen him on camera just hang out in these spots until i get back.
paired with the standard issue "let's go for a walk" or "let's go outside" it seems to really communicate what exactly is going on so he isn't confused. i've also added "peepee?" to ask if he wants to pee without making him think we're going for a long walk. this also works with food related words ... it's still kind of crazy to me he actually knows what i'm saying and will react according to what he actually wants at the moment. i just have to cycle through the words.
Millions of children on this planet are malnourished or suffering because of wars, climate change or just bad government. Is it ethical to pay a fortune for magnetic brain stimulation of your dog, if somewhere else in the world several people's lives could be saved with that money?
But if this is your acid test for ethical living then you’re going to quickly discover that everyone with disposable income lives unethically. Which is honestly probably true but nobody wants to hear it.
Unless you've optimized your life by going into the highest-paying career you can and giving virtually all of your money (minus the bare minimum you need to survive) to help those in need, I don't think this is a reasonable argument to be making.
One of the problem with this argument being that it's not the same set of people that can/will work on these separate issues, and solving one does not prevent solving the other one. Also, the money spent for one issue would not necessarily go to the other issue anyway: they are not linked.
Structural issues with our worldwide distribution of wealth system are causing climate change and poverty, not taking care of the dogs, and this is what needs to be fixed.
This assumes every child is a net positive for its immediate group, its local group, its country and the global world as a whole.
While you can argue for the first, the latter 3 are not evident.
> Is it ethical to pay a fortune for magnetic brain stimulation of your dog, if somewhere else in the world several people's lives could be saved with that money?
Is it ethical for you to be typing this comment, whereas you could be working instead to earn money to buy food to save several people's lives somewhere in the world?
I’ve always been weirdly frugal and I think this is the real reason that I don’t admit. Seems unfair to spend a lot of money on anything.
I would say that any kind of expense beyond what you’d pay as a poor college student would fall into this category, though, if you want to be consistent.
I’m not however donating much, though. My plan is to build a pile and donate it when I pass.
The reactions vary from, the dying child is thousands of miles away (and your unhappy dog is not), to, if you're not maximizing your life on donating every possible penny you can spare to charity, you have no right to post a thought like this. Is this really the common view on HN on how we should live our lives?
Just stop manufacturing them...
I was bitten by a dog once and the owners immediately started trying to explain to me why it was actually my fault that I, standing there minding my own business, made the dog bite me! They eventually remembered that I got bit and asked if I was hurt.
I lived in an apartment building next to some people with a new puppy who barked at night - when I complained to them about it I got an earful about how its ok for them to violate noise ordinances and disturb my sleep, it’s a puppy, it can’t control itself, how could I possibly be so mean!?
I refused an invitation to a party once because they had a lot of dogs and I’m very allergic - I was told I was being super rude and that I should just pop some meds and get over it. I asked them why they expected me to make myself miserable for the dogs sake when they could just kennel it for the weekend?
I own fish - the amount of times someone has told me that my pet is “lame” or “silly” or “boring” and that I should have gotten a dog is ridiculous. Like fuck off.
TL;DR Dog owners can be really obnoxious and self-righteous. There’s a mutual understanding that if people can’t control their children, they are bad parents. But not being able to control your dog is for some reason much more accepted.
I’ve always assumed it has nothing to do with me or my dog, but is to protect others from my dog.
