Posted on 03/02/2015 10:55:47 AM PST by Red Badger
This is a false conclusion. Dogs know the reflection in the mirror is not another dog because it has no scent. Everything alive has a scent.
-PJ
Hey old Red, you are getting a little white around the muzzle there. What this article can’t evaluate is the hundreds of smells that dogs remember, often detecting no more than 1 ppb in the air. Dogs are really man’s best friend. Even if you don’t love them, they will still love you Red, even with all your faults, which they will completely ignore.
Never to attempt a change to a hungry cat's dinner schedule. Change the meal time instead.
I have to question the mirror being the proof of self knowledge. Not understanding reflection in a mirror is a bad test. As for memory, their memories are probably based on smell. When going to our home town my dog got excited about a mile from my mother’s and did the same at another town we had lived in for only a year. If you are going to test a dog, gear the test to the dogs mind and senses.
Not many psychologists look at life from the Creator’s point of view either. Man is fallen, animals are under a curse. The Garden of Eden was paradise and Jesus should be the standard of all human tests in my opinion, but what do I know. I know after the Messiah frees the world and it is once again under God’s control psych testing as we know it will be null and void.
I have read before that it is a deep seeded psychological function. Humans instinctively think in terms of the past and future and dogs instinctively think in terms of the present. They seem to lack in innate ability to think at all about what is going to happen tomorrow or what happened yesterday and their brains are wholly focused on right now. Sometimes I think that is something humans can very much learn from and indeed sometimes it is something they much need to learn from.
And excuses for more great canine pics are always welcome regardless of the discussion at hand.
In fact, dogs may be better at remembering and learning than many humans.
The writer is obviously not a dog person. I doubt if they ever owned one.
“My dogs know exactly what time dinner occurs, within minutes. Horses, cats, goats, and cattle do as well. Only the switch to daylight savings time trips them up. Don’t mess with dinner time. “
Funny. I started leaving food out at night for some raccoons, since I saw them eating from our cat’s bowl.
Now, every night at 6:30pm they are waiting for me on the porch. I feel like dr. Doolittle. They walk in front of the door and look in if I am late.
Dogs not only remember past events, they understand abstractions to a degree. Almost any dog will learn if you point in a direction to look in that direction. Most other animals just look at your finger if you use it to point. Understanding the meaning of pointing toward an object involves abstract thinking.
My dog always looks away. She is not willing to accept the fact that she is a dog.
Every animal on TV is real to her, though. She thinks the screen is a window to the side yard, and always runs out the back door and around to attack the elephants or giraffes she just saw there. :)
Dr. Ivan Pavlov, please pick up the white courtesy phone.
blurbsp!!!
There went my lunch...
(good one 8^))
Our golden retreivers remember places we haven’t for a year at a time, so I don’t buy the whole they don’t remember. We have a boat and after being away from it for four or five months, they hop out of the car when we get to the marina and walk down the dock and hop on the boat like it was yesterday.
I don’t believe this theory is correct because I have seen dogs have a concept of time. I had a dog that would great me differently depending on how long I had been away. If I had just come back from a semester of college, I he would whine and whine about how long I had been gone. Whereas when I bought a house nearby and would come and visit my folks every few weeks I would get a nice greeting but nothing like when I had been gone for months. That dog also learned routines so he didn’t get very excited at all when some of my siblings came home from college on the weekends because that was their normal routine.
At one time I had 3 cars and 3 sets of keys. Depending which set of keys I grabbed, my dog would instantly run to the front door, or the rear door, or not even move if I grabbed the keys to the nice car.
My dog knows what going in the car means. He gets excited and runs to the car every time I ask him to go for a ride. I only take him in the car five or six times a year but he remembers. He also remembers the people he doesn’t like. My sister in law teased him as a puppy and he never liked or trusted her.
That is a very good point; I agree they can understand abstractions to a point. I don’t believe trainers/breeders understand what intelligence means when they discuss “intelligent breeds” (they see it as ability to train, not capacity for abstract thought), but I have always thought the breeds closest to wolves have the greatest capacity for abstract thought. My smartest, a Chow Chow, could understand words contextually to a point. I once came home from a business trip, and she angrily grabbed my socks and started shaking them. I sarcastically said, “After being gone so long you are just going to get pissed and shake my socks? The least you could do is make yourself useful and fetch my slippers”. She had never been trained to fetch, and would never do what she was told at any rate, and had never been explicitly told what slippers were, but with a gleam in her eye, she dropped the socks and ran off and got a slipper from under the bed and dropped it at my feet, as I stood utterly amazed and dumbfounded. I’d swear she was smirking as she did it.
Positive and negative reinforcement worked with my dogs to alter their behavior or to learn tricks. I don’t think this would work if dogs had no memory.
If I say “roll over” and it’s a command my dog knows and he also knows comes the trick comes with a treat upon completion from day to day, this dog is remembering what roll over means and he’s looking for his treat when he obeys the order from what he learned in the past.
My Chihuahua knows MY keys VS My WIFE’S keys.
I shake MY keys, she is in the bedroom at the other end of the house, there is no response.
My wife shakes HER keys and she comes running because she knows she gets to go!..............................
Not buying. Our pup had just walked out on the deck to head downstairs to do his business when a gust of wind came of nowhere and slammed our glass topped table into the house ans shattered it. Pup wouldn’t go out on the deck for months and even now after a full year, he still looks at the table with his tail between his legs. He damned sure does remember the incident.
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