This article demonstrates the difficulty of animal science and neurological science. How much can we infer from brain scans from creatures whose ability to communicate with humans is quite limited?
Through my experience as a dog owner (er, dog guardian), I am convinced that dogs experience emotion and are capable of some deductive reasoning. Yet they are generally incapable of comprehending the entire human world around them. It's as if you perpetually have a two-year-old's brain in a furry, four-legged adult's body.
While the author argues that dogs should be treated more like people, e.g., with the freedom to choose what they will or will not do, he fails to note the opposite tack-- that the choices of two-year-olds must be constrained at times for their own safety and well-being and that the behavior of dogs and two-year-olds is modified-- often for their benefit-- through the use of positive and negative reinforcement.
Only if we could gain more thorough understanding of the emotions that dogs experience can we make good decisions of how they best should be treated.
Through my experience as a dog owner (er, dog guardian), I am convinced that dogs experience emotion and are capable of some deductive reasoning. Yet they are generally incapable of comprehending the entire human world around them. It's as if you perpetually have a two-year-old's brain in a furry, four-legged adult's body.
While the author argues that dogs should be treated more like people, e.g., with the freedom to choose what they will or will not do, he fails to note the opposite tack-- that the choices of two-year-olds must be constrained at times for their own safety and well-being and that the behavior of dogs and two-year-olds is modified-- often for their benefit-- through the use of positive and negative reinforcement.
Only if we could gain more thorough understanding of the emotions that dogs experience can we make good decisions of how they best should be treated.