I have had this on my mind for days, someone please help:
Why are dogs dogs?
I mean, how do we see a pug and then a husky and understand that both are dogs? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a picture of a breed of dog I hadn’t seen before and wondered what animal it was.
Do you want the Big Answer or the Small Answers cos I have a feeling this is about to get Intense
Oooh okay are YOU gonna answer this, hang on I need to get some snacks and make sure the phone is off.
The short answer is “because they’re statistically unlikely to be anything else.”
The long question is “given the extreme diversity of morphology in dogs, with many subsets of ‘dogs’ bearing no visual resemblance to each other, how am I able to intuit that they belong to the ‘dog’ set just by looking?”
The reason that this is a Good Big Question is because we are broadly used to categorising Things as related based on resemblances. Then everyone realized about genes and evolution and so on, and so now we have Fun Facts like “elephants are ACTUALLY closely related to rock hyraxes!! Even though they look nothing alike!!”
These Fun Facts are appealing because they’re not intuitive. So why is dog-sorting intuitive?
Well, because if you eliminate all the other possibilities, most dogs are dogs.
To process Things - whether animals, words, situations or experiences - our brains categorise the most important things about them, and then compare these to our memory banks. If we’ve experienced the same thing before - whether first-hand or through a story - then we know what’s happening, and we proceed accordingly.
If the New Thing is completely New, then the brain pings up a bunch of question marks, shunts into a different track, counts up all the Similar Traits, and assigns it a provisional category based on its similarity to other Things. We then experience the Thing, exploring it further, and gaining new knowledge. Our brain then categorises the New Thing based on the knowledge and traits. That is how humans experience the universe. We do our best, and we generally do it well.
This is the basis of stereotyping. It underlies some of our worst behaviours (racism), some of our most challenging problems (trauma), helps us survive (stories) and sharing the ability with things that don’t have it leads to some of our most whimsical creations (artificial intelligence.)
In fact, one reason that humans are so wonderfully successful is that we can effectively gain knowledge from experiences without having experienced them personally! You don’t have to eat all the berries to find the poisonous ones. You can just remember stories and descriptions of berries, and compare those to the ones you’ve just discovered. You can benefit from memories that aren’t your own!
On the other hand, if you had a terribly traumatic experience involving, say, an eagle, then your brain will try to protect you in every way possible from a similar experience. If you collect too many traumatic experiences with eagles, then your brain will not enjoy eagle-shaped New Things. In fact, if New Things match up to too many eagle-like categories, such as
* pointy * Specific!! Squawking noise!! * The hot Glare of the Yellow Eye * Patriotism?!? * CLAWS VERY BAD VERY BAD
Then the brain may shunt the train of thought back into trauma, and the person will actually experience the New Thing as trauma. Even if the New Thing was something apparently unrelated, like being generally pointy, or having a hot glare. (This is an overly simplistic explanation of how triggers work, but it’s the one most accessible to people.)
So the answer rests in how we categorise dogs, and what “dog” means to humans. Human brains associate dogs with universal categories, such as
* four legs * Meat Eater * Soft friend * Doggo-ness???? * Walkies * An Snout, * BORK BORK
Anything we have previously experienced and learned as A Dog gets added to the memory bank. Sometimes it brings new categories along with it. So a lifetime’s experience results in excellent dog-intuition.
And anything we experience with, say, a 90% match is officially a Dog.
Brains are super-good at eliminating things, too. So while the concept of physical doggo-ness is pretty nebulous, and has to include greyhounds and Pekingese and mastiffs, we know that even if an animal LOOKS like a bear, if the other categories don’t match up in context (bears are not usually soft friends, they don’t Bork Bork, they don’t have long tails to wag) then it is statistically more likely to be a Doggo. If it occupies a dog-shaped space then it is usually a dog.
So if you see someone dragging a fluffy whatnot along on a string, you will go,
* Mop?? (Unlikely - seems to be self-propelled.) * Alien? (Unlikely - no real alien ever experienced.) * Threat? (Vastly unlikely in context.) * Rabbit? (No. Rabbits hop, and this appears to scurry.) (Brains are very keen on categorising movement patterns. This is why lurching zombies and bad CGI are so uncomfortable to experience, brains just go “INCORRECT!! That is WRONG!” Without consciously knowing why. Anyway, very few animals move like domestic dogs!) * Very fluffy cat? (Maybe - but not quite. Shares many characteristics, though!) * Eldritch horror? (No, it is obviously a soft friend of unknown type) * Robotic toy? (Unlikely - too complex and convincing.) * alert: amusing animal detected!!! This is a good animal!! This is pleasing!! It may be appropriate to laugh at this animal, because we have just realized that it is probably a … * DOG!!!! Soft friend, alive, walks on leash. It had a low doggo-ness quotient! and a confusing Snout, but it is NOT those other Known Things, and it occupies a dog-shaped space! * Hahahaha!!! It is extra funny and appealing, because it made us guess!!!! We love playing that game. * Best doggo. * PING! NEW CATEGORIES ADDED TO “Doggo” set: mopness, floof, confusing Snout.
And that’s why most dogs are dogs. You’re so good at identifying dog-shaped spaces that they can’t be anything else!
today at work a man brought a pug in on a leash and that pug was so excited and happy to see me it was as if we were old friends who havent been in contact in 7 years i felt so loved in that moment
today a bassett hound came in and wagged her tail so furiously all of her loose skin started to jiggle and she was so pumped to see me i want more dogs to come into my store they make my life whole and worthwhile
I’m so glad this came back cause a golden retriever named Milly came in today who put her paws on my register counter and wanted to say hi to me and I loved her so much and I scratched her ears and she gave me that classic dopey dog smile
yesterday a girl came in with her boyfriend and in her hand was a tiny tan colored dog that she told me was a chihuahua/pekingese mix and he had a severe underbite and one little canine tooth was poking out and his ears were like bent at the tips and i immediately commented on how amazing he was and she goes omg thanks do you wanna pet him and i was like there is literally nothing more i want to do while being on the clock right now than to pet this incredible tiny dog and he was so sweet and licked my hand and his name was spike
yesterday these people came in and put a blanket into one of our shopping baskets and it started to move and i was like omg whats in there and they set it down on the counter and the blanket kept moving and the suspense was so good like is it gonna be a cat is it gonna be a ferret maybe a lizard and then the smallest chihuahua ive ever seen in my life popped her little head out and licked my finger and i died
A baby german shepherd named Jonathan came in tonight and since i was on the sales floor and not behind a counter i say to the owner omg can i pet this angel and they were like yeah of course and i crouched down and Jonathan ran into my arms and almost tripped over his puppy feet it was 12/10
TODAY a german shepherd named london grabbed one of our lanterns off the shelf and was carrying it around and the owner was like, “london no, we’re not getting that” and gave him the merchandise she was buying instead and he carried it to me and dropped it on the counter at my register and i could have cried
I want everyone to know both London and Jonathan (Jonnie) came in the other day on the same day. Jonnie is much larger since the last time I saw him but still sweet and still acts like a pup, he barked at something in our footwear department. London still likes to carry things and put his paws up on my register to say hello, he carried the insoles his owner bought out the door for her. Also thanks for the notes, it’s nice to see so many people appreciate dogs on here. Another reminder, I see a lot of dogs because I work in a sporting goods store in a strip mall next door to a Petco and we absolutely allow dogs in our store. I live in a mountain town in Colorado and dogs are common here because there are lots of fun outdoor stuff to do with them.
A sheltie in a Petco shopping cart came in yesterday and her name was Sadie and she was so excited to say hi that she jumped out of the cart, onto my register counter, but she missed and Mufasa’d her way to the floor, but she was okay. The owner just let her sit on the counter and she was very well behaved and she gently smelled every item I scanned and also my hand. She was obsessed with her neck being scratched.
today a black lab name paxton came in off leash and he jiggled his way into our back room because the door was open and i yelled He Is Employed! and told his owner that we’d be happy to hire him and then eventually he made his way up to the front by himself and into the register area behind the counter and now he’s my new manager
In the dog world, humans are elves that routinely live to be 500+ years old.
“They live so long…but the good ones still bond with us for our entire lives.”
“These immortals are so kind we must be good friends to them”
My heart wtf
Not gonna lie, this fucked me up a bit.
POV Fantasy slice of life book when?
“Now I am old. The fur around my muzzle is grey and my joints ache when we walk together. Yet she remains unchanged, her hair still glossy, her skin still fresh, her step still sprightly. Time doesn’t touch her and yet I love her still.”
We trained the dog so that when he wants out, he goes to the front door and waits.
Somehow in his little golden retriever brain, he interpreted this to mean “go to the front door, and lick it.”
If he’s at the door, but isn’t licking it, he doesn’t need out, he’s just chilling.
So, this was our routine - when he wants out, he goes to the front door, and licks it. And then we moved house, and he got very, very confused.
He knew he had to go to the front door when he wants out, but this was a new house with obviously a door that was completely new to him.
Despite our condo having only one door that leads outside, and him going out this very same door literally at least five times a day, every day, for about a year…he still has no idea where the front door is in this house. Absolutely no idea at all.
Now whenever he needs out, he will go to any random door and start licking it. And I mean any door - the bathroom door, my bedroom door, my closet, the goddamn door of a kitchen cabinet, even.
I don’t know if he’s really smart or really dumb. Because clearly, he understands conceptually what a door is. I don’t know if he thinks my closet or the kitchen cabinets lead to outside, or if he’s just hoping to find doggy Narnia, or if he’s just hopelessly given up on ever being able to find the door by himself and is just doing the best he can, but every goddamn time he wants out, he’s right there licking the glass door to the shower or something.
He doesn’t alert us he needs out any other way. So if you haven’t seen him in a while, you have to search room by room until you find him with his tongue pressed up against the linen closet because he thinks outside might be that way.
He’s the biggest, dumbest dog I have ever met in my life and I could not love him any more. He’s perfect.
Here he is, patiently licking the door of my wardrobe.
at work we have a family of three huskies who come in for daycare and everyone calls them “the mafia” it makes me so happy because occasionally out of nowhere someone over the radios will say “we’re sending in the mafia” and then three huskies barrel their way inside and usually slip and fall on the tile ajfjajg
the white one is zephyr but everyone calls him the godfather and his sisters follow him around everywhere and they’re a tiny gang which i love
The tradition of Dalmatians in firehouses dates back more than a century. Nowadays they mainly serve as mascots, but before fire trucks had engines, Dalmatians played a vital role every time firefighters raced to a blaze.
It all dates back to when people used horse-drawn carriages. But, at first, the dogs didn’t have anything to do with fire fighters. People realized that Dalmatians would run alongside horses, keeping pace even when sprinting long distances. The dogs would even defend the horses from other dogs or animals that could spook or attack the horses during the ride.
When a fire alarm sounded, the Dalmatians would run out of the firehouse, barking to let bystanders know that they should get out of the way because the firefighters’ wagon would soon come roaring by. Once the wagon was out on the street, the Dalmatians would run beside it.
Or, no, a dog trainer AU, because Max clearly trained Dog in The Road Warrior to an impressive degree despite their conditions. Maybe he’s an ex-K9 unit cop who got fucked up and now volunteers at a shelter. Maybe Furiosa trains rescues into service dogs and she spots him working there: looking like a homeless dude and shying away from humans, but so very gentle and patient with the animals, teaching them manners and tricks, calming them down – and then looking baffled when they follow him around adoringly.
And Furiosa sees his limp, the way he avoids people and talking but has enormous potential – and thinks maybe she can take in one more stray today.
*drains beer* Fuck it I don’t have work tomorrow LET’S FANG IT
****
Furiosa walks into the shelter and nods a greeting to Val at the front desk. “You got something for me?” she asks, leaning on the counter.
Val grins. “Out in the yard. You’ll see which one I mean.”
It’s a game they like to play: Furiosa needs dogs with the right personality to train as combination service-and-guard dogs for abused women, and Val has the best eye for evaluating animals in town, thanks to a lifetime of shelter work. But Val’s also an old friend, and competitive as hell, so she always makes Furiosa guess which dog Val called her in to see.
In 2007 a Doberman Pinscher named Khan was rescued from an animal shelter. Just four days later he would save his new owner’s baby girl from a deadly snake attack.
On the day of the incident, seventeen-month-old Charlotte Svillcic was playing in the garden of her home in Atherton, Australia. At first Khan began acting strangely, it seemed as if he was being slightly aggressive towards Charlotte, attempting to push her away from where she played.
The fact was, Khan had spotted a King Brown snake, the world’s third most venomous snake and he was trying to nudge her to safety. As the snake was about to strike the baby girl, Khan did the most heroic thing.
“Khan was really concentrating, he kept trying to nudge her but it wasn’t working, so he grabbed her by the back of the nappy and threw her over his shoulder more than a meter.”
With baby Charlotte clear, Khan ended up taking a venomous bite to the paw himself.
“Charlotte looked pretty shocked and Khan screamed, like he’d been stabbed,” said Catherine. “I realized quickly it was a snake and Khan had been trying to get in between her and the snake before he threw her” said
Charlotte’s mother Catherine.
After being bitten, Khan ran inside and collapsed. He was given a shot of anti-venom by a vet and spent a night in a lot of pain but managed to survive and eat a large breakfast the next day.
In contrast to the treatment Khan endured before his rescue, Catherine said he would spend the rest of his life in luxury. “If Khan wants a gold bowl, Khan gets it. We owe him for the rest of his life.”
