
What is a Dog? - fern12
https://www.openlettersmonthly.com/mans-pest-friend/
======
albertgoeswoof
I'm not sure I fully agree with the article's takeaway that dogs are only in
it for the food. It's a bit of a crude summary. In addition to food, humans
provide shelter, protection, love, attention, play time, and companionship - I
don't think food is the only driver of the relationship.

My dog will hide behind me if he's scared, and enjoys attention from people he
doesn't know - irrespective of whether they provide food for him or not. And
he'll cry and ignore food from others for hours if I'm separated from him.
Maybe this is just anecdotal data, but seems doubtful.

~~~
arkades
Any trainer can tell you some breeds just care more about food than others.

My German Shepherd would do anything for a piece of chicken. He would suddenly
seem to understand English. My boxer couldn’t care less for treats as a
motivator - positive attention was the absolute only way to mold behavior.
Having had the GSD first, it took some adjustment for me to learn to train a
dog that just didn’t care about food. The breeder later told me that was
entirely typical of boxers.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
Some _dogs_ care more about food than others. There are lots of
counterexamples.

I grew up with a boxer that was almost completely food motivated. The
neighbor's GSD was almost completely play motivated, and would skip meals in
the hopes that someone would just. throw. the. ball.

Your breeder's statement is like stereotyping human personalities by ethnicity
or gender - something may show up strongly in the statistics, but it's a poor
tool to apply when interacting with individuals.

~~~
arkades
The existence of counterexamples isn’t that notable here. OPs position is
“dogs are only in it for the food.”

Dogs that are not only in it for the food are a useful counterexample, because
it trumps the sweeping “only.”

That -some- dogs are in it for the food doesn’t move the needle in the debate
one way or the other.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
I was responding to the GP's comment that it was delineated by breed.

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srrge
I never was a dog guy. Always had cats during childhood. I used to find dogs
scary and stinky. But then, at 38, a few years ago, I suddenly needed a dog.
What was it? The kids growing older? Me, getting older? I don't know. But I
wanted a dog. I contemplated the idea for one year. And then I adopted a dog
from a shelter. Greatest thing ever. A dog is such a great companion. They say
that a dog will make you laugh once a day. It's 100% true based on my
experience.

~~~
fern12
This was my experience as well. I disliked dogs all throughout my teens. I
thought they were dirty, smelly, annoying, etc. Then during college, my dad
and sister (who both love dogs) decided to get an Old English Sheepdog. He was
the most in-your-face, helpless dog, always needing someone to wipe his chin
or pay attention to him. He was incredibly affectionate, and would literally
shove his snout under someone's arm to force them to pet/hug him. After him, I
was sold.

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elysian_eunoia
The argument against this article reminds me of the notoriously tear-jerking
Futurama episode in which Fry tells his dog to wait outside the building for a
moment. Fry accidentally cryogenically freezes himself while in the building
and wakes up in the future, but his dog had waited there for his owner for the
rest of his life.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XECQApj9IJs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XECQApj9IJs)

~~~
deerpig
That is likely based on the Japanese story of the dog Hachiko, (sort of the
Japanese version of Lassie) the dog who waited for his master at the train
station every day. And when the master, a university professor, died while at
school, the dog continued to go to the station every day until his death.
There is a statue outside the train station where he waited. There were two
movies made about the story, the Japanese original reduces everyone to tears.
The American one with Richard Gere, not so much.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachik%C5%8D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachik%C5%8D)

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dcw303
As a dog owner, I smirked when the author described dogs as only interested in
humans because we supply the food. Yeah, that's probably true, but I don't
care if my beloved pet only thinks of me as a meal dispenser, it's actually
kinda funny.

> But when they murmur and pump their legs while sleeping, they’re dreaming of
> freedom.

But ouch. That really hurts.

~~~
moonshinefe
I wouldn't read too much into that; the life of a wild dog is far more harsh
and brutal than one that has a caring owner.

~~~
Adirael
Mine sometimes will also whimper while dreaming, but I guess that's part of
the freedom too

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brndnmtthws
This doesn't seem quite right. My Shiba Inu (her name is Doge, check her out:
[https://www.instagram.com/brndnmtthws/](https://www.instagram.com/brndnmtthws/))
is generally quite disinterested in food. I often have to trick her or keep
her leash on and attach it near her bowl to make her eat. When she gets
excited, she can't be bribed with treats (she just ignores them).

She likes food, but it seems like her main interest is playing. She'd rather
run around in circles or play fetch than eat most of the time.

~~~
cableshaft
Our Shiba, Kubo, loves human food and treats, and will bark and get up on his
hind legs to try to get bits of our meals, but he's not super excited about
dog food and we have to leave it out all day for him to eventually get around
to eating it (he will though).

At first we actually thought he wasn't food motivated, but that was before we
started feeding him human food. He goes into full scavenger/hunter mode
whenever he's outside too, and manages to find all sorts of junk on the ground
that I swear isn't there until he has it in his mouth.

He actually slipped his harness and ran away for a week earlier this year, and
we were able to catch him again with the help of hot dogs and fried chicken
(and a lot of hard work and a lot of help from local volunteer organizations).

You can check him out here:
[https://www.instagram.com/kubotheshiba/](https://www.instagram.com/kubotheshiba/)

~~~
brndnmtthws
So handsome! I love him!

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posterboy
noone here knows, but I am :D

joking aside; in light of the text, I could imagine one dog defending a turf
against intruding dogs would be a huge driver to their adoption.

------
ggm
It isn't wrong to project our desires and fantasy of engagement on to specific
dogs, in as much as mutuality can exist between us as good source and them as
consumers. Symbiosis takes many forms and to imagine the butterfly feels no
pleasure as the plant releases a drop of nectar is to deny we could build a
probe fine enough to find out. But so what? They go on sucking nectar, and our
dogs go on making eyes at us and whining for food, which we willingly and
happily comply with. There is nothing intrinsically wrong here. There is
something intrinsically wrong in claiming to be objective and denying the
possibility and it's wrong to attribute all species enhancing behaviours
purely to genes and acquired traits. If dogs are capable of making choices and
we are capable of making choices is there no room for a happy medium? An
equitable, biologically deterministic mutuality?

PS not a dog owner but also not a dog hater. The book sounds like a good read.

~~~
agumonkey
I have a funny metaphor about animal vs humans.

Video games today are 1000000x more sophisticated, realistic than anything
from the early 80s. Still 8 bit games were games, they had the same elements
in them, except in low res, freq and count. The structure, the "quality", not
the quantity. Same goes for computers. When I boot a win95 box, it's all
there, minus the HTML5/CSS3 capable stack.

I do believe that most life forms, above a level of complexity have most of
the things we think as human exclusive. Surely when an animal spent so much
time and effort into finding a source of feeding, as the nutrient come in, his
system reacts and communicate "satisfaction" in one form or another. The
butterfly just don't write a song about it afterwards.

~~~
ggm
I think your analogy is good, but I do have some issues. The lower down the 8
bit scale you go, into greyscale graphics or black and white, the more it
approaches the old cellular automata games, game of life. Which, we can show
is turing complete now we have functioning instruction-set machine logic. But,
GoL is not itself the turing, its the machine we build inside it.

In that sense, the pleasure a butterfly feels as a commanding thing, set
against its overall brain function probably is more at the cellular automota
end of the scale. The mouse we're trying to kill, before it gets our cheese is
a couple or more orders of magnitude up the food chain. Its decidedly not
monochrome.

Its where you draw the line which matters, in conversations about ethics and
equity. Jains draw it a lot lower than I do.

~~~
agumonkey
I wouldn't consider insects so bare. Maybe a bacterium. These things are
minuscule, but they're internals/system is not trivial. They have a potent
visual system
([http://farm1.staticflickr.com/21/29252954_1aa90a5c3d.jpg](http://farm1.staticflickr.com/21/29252954_1aa90a5c3d.jpg)),
which is already quite high level.

Maybe the signal they get from satisfaction is very low but it's still
something.. and probably not a one bit thing.

------
jchrome
I find it funnier the outrage of those who can’t bear to think of their dog’s
love as contingent upon food. “But I need unconditional love from my pet!”

------
hyperpallium
What is dog, that thou art mindful of him?

------
dboreham
Even cats aren't only in it for the food.

Although they will eat you if you die and they have access to your corpse..

~~~
steveadoo
I think dogs will do this too.

~~~
logfromblammo
But there is also the possibility that your dog will guard your corpse and not
let strangers or other animals near it (like Talero). And a lesser possibility
that your dog will guard your grave until it dies [0].

Cats? They'll sit on your corpse to interview servants to replace you.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Bobby](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Bobby)

~~~
dboreham
Curiously I went to school around the corner from the Greyfriars church yard
and must have walked past the statue thousands of times. I noticed that the
statue has been defaced in recent years by tourists touching its nose for good
luck.

------
MentallyRetired
I couldn't even get through two paragraphs of this guys writing style. It
reads like he has a word count on a school paper.

------
elysian_eunoia
Clearly the author is a cat person.

