A lot of this just sounds like... dog training? Gradually getting them used to things with positive reinforcement.<p>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.
> If evidence suggests that many dogs, like many humans, misbehave because they are struggling with emotions and anxiety, why do so many pet owners and trainers look to punishment as the solution, rather than addressing the emotions directly?<p>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.<p>Also, it's less work (at lesst in the short term). All the more reason to continue.
There is a great book on dog training called How to Behave So Your Dog Behaves by Sophia Yin. The basic premise is that all animals, including humans, are "trained" 100% of the time. That is to say, there is no explicit training time vs. non-training time. Each time an animal does anything, they either get a positive or negative reward. E.g. if a dog barks and you pay attention to it, then the dog learns to bark for your attention.<p>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.<p>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.
I wonder if this differs from wolves? I sometimes think about just how much we have evolved dogs to mirror us in so many different ways.<p>In other words: by selecting for responsiveness to human emotions, to what degree have we made dogs' brains more like our own?<p>Now I'm going to cuddle my pup Henry.
My older dog was a stray as a puppy and we give her fluoxetine(commonly called Prozac) to help with anxiety. Even after years of training we have issues with trying to walk her during daylight because she crumbles in fear. Our other dog being present gives her some confidence but they both also react more to other dogs when they think they have to protect the other, so it's a daily struggle.
Is there a direct connection between falling birth rates and treating animals as if they were beloved children? It seems like these animals evolutionary strategy is akin to that of the cuckoo bird.
This is very coincidental with PJ Vogt new podcast "Search Engine", they released a preview episode in the last days titled "How Sad Are Monkeys In The Zoo" [1] that tackles this problem of animal emotions. I was very surprised to learn that most animals in Zoos are on constant anti-depression and anti-anxiety prescriptions.<p><a href="https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/welcome-to-search-engine" rel="nofollow">https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/welcome-to-search-engine</a><p>Edit: typo
Treating dogs like humans is very detrimental to the dogs, more than detrimental, actively harmful.<p>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.<p>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.
I love dogs, but aren't there bigger issues in this world that we should focus on first?<p>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?
With dogs approaching the quasi religious status, quasi sacred status of sacred cow here in America, how long before laws are passed mandating annual checkups for dogs?