The death of Mufasa is such a sad scene... what could make it sadder?

February 23, 2019 7:13 PM

Empathetic Dog Reacts to Emotional Scene in The Lion King [SLYT, 1m52s]
posted by hippybear (48 comments total)

This is what it sounds like when dogs cry
posted by growabrain at 7:26 PM on February 23, 2019 [13 favorites]

There will come a day when we as a society, take a long look in the mirror and finally try to recon everything we understand about the emotional complexity of these animals and how we treat them.
posted by The Legit Republic of Blanketsburg at 7:35 PM on February 23, 2019 [21 favorites]

I am always astonished to see video clips where dogs actually watch the television. None of my dogs have ever noticed anything on the tv; it might as well be a blank wall as far as they are concerned.
posted by suelac at 7:36 PM on February 23, 2019 [9 favorites]

If I had been an animator on The Lion King, this dog’s reaction would be all the proof I needed that I excel at my job.
posted by Knowyournuts at 7:39 PM on February 23, 2019 [37 favorites]

That dog perked up when Scar appeared out of the mist, too.
posted by traveler_ at 7:53 PM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

The only thing my dog pays attention to on television is horses. She loves Deadwood as much as I do, but for different reasons.
posted by dobbs at 7:54 PM on February 23, 2019 [12 favorites]

Our much-missed Jasper really only reacted to dogs on TV. But he included cartoon dogs (e.g., Dug in Up) as Real Dogs.
posted by Archer25 at 7:59 PM on February 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

My cat once freaked out when there was a crocodile on tv, coming at the screen. He thought it was trying to eat him and ran away, knocking over several barstools in the process.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 8:12 PM on February 23, 2019 [12 favorites]

If I had been an animator on The Lion King, this dog’s reaction would be all the proof I needed that I excel at my job.

When I was watching this earlier today I was thinking/wondering something similar, if it was possible they did research for natural character animation, facial expressions, etc.
posted by rhizome at 8:13 PM on February 23, 2019

Just don't show him Bambi...
posted by jim in austin at 8:17 PM on February 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

When I was watching this earlier today I was thinking/wondering something similar, if it was possible they did research for natural character animation, facial expressions, etc.

My VHS copy when I was a kid had a making-of documentary, so I can confirm that they did indeed bring real animals into the animation studio, including lions!
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:25 PM on February 23, 2019 [12 favorites]

Real cats don't use eyebrows to convey emotion. Disney cats do. Dogs do. Match.
posted by brambleboy at 8:26 PM on February 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

I once knew a pooch that barked at Stitch (the Disney alien)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:30 PM on February 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

Just don't show him Bambi...

Or Old Yaller...
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:41 PM on February 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

Real cats don't use eyebrows to convey emotion

Which, I believe, is why people think of them as detached, independent, and not as affectionate as dogs. Cats express their emotions through body movement, touch, and sometimes sound, which is difficult to capture in still photos.
posted by amtho at 10:12 PM on February 23, 2019 [11 favorites]

All affection from dogs is actually sarcasm.
posted by Segundus at 10:26 PM on February 23, 2019 [11 favorites]

I wonder how much of the scene right before had to do with this. That stampede scene is thunderous. Then it's replaced by this very muted scene. The animators and character designers did a fantastic job with the shape and movement of these animals. Simba's whimpering tone in the silence after such violence and Mufasa's prone body (which, as plenty of heart-breaking videos show, dogs WILL react to) make a pretty unmistakable scene for young humans and animals alike.
posted by es_de_bah at 10:33 PM on February 23, 2019

I don't buy it. I feel that the dog is looking past the screen, and she's well trained. Tell me she's not looking at someone around 1:05. Those are the subtle movements of a dog watching their human!
posted by sylvanshine at 11:10 PM on February 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

I caught my Lennon watching Bringing up Baby.
posted by brujita at 11:35 PM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

Zaprudering every frame of this shit for the tell
posted by naju at 12:42 AM on February 24, 2019 [5 favorites]

All affection from dogs is actually sarcasm.

Lies! You monster!
We already knew Weinersmith was a monster.
posted by sysinfo at 1:26 AM on February 24, 2019

We don't deserve dogs.
posted by Fizz at 2:30 AM on February 24, 2019 [3 favorites]

We don't Disney doesn’t deserve dogs.

That’s better.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:29 AM on February 24, 2019

More of this kind. Seems like this dog (who, hilariously, goes by the name of Khaleesi) is actually scared by King Kong, and not at all worried about the teeth-o-saurus.
posted by Namlit at 3:48 AM on February 24, 2019

Dogs don't deserve people. They do fuck all in exchange for safe and comfortable housing, plenty of food, free medical care, massages on demand, and the pleasure of having their feeders and masseuses walk around behind them several times a day to pick up their poo. If a dog is forced to watch an occasional Disney film in exchange, well, that's the price of civilization.
posted by pracowity at 4:17 AM on February 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

This dog is definitely more empathetic than I am.
posted by Jode at 4:25 AM on February 24, 2019

The recoil and the internal “Nooooo!” and accompanying whimper totally got me. Foo to those who say it’s fake. Foo I say!

None of my dogs have ever noticed anything on the tv; it might as well be a blank wall as far as they are concerned.

My Mum’s dog Mindy has never paid the slightest bit of attention to anything on tv. Then one night we were down at her’s watching Netflix and when the film ended we were chatting and the chromecast home page was running the screensaver pics as it does. For some reason when it brought up a Kandinsky painting she sat up and just stared at it transfixed. When it moved on to the next image she just went back to whatever it was she was doing. I’ve no idea why that particular thing caught her attention - it’s not like it was even a moving image, and there’s nothing recognisable to a dog in it - but I like to think it just unearthed the same little spark in her that we get when we’re moved by art.

That or there was a fly on the screen that I couldn’t see idk
posted by billiebee at 5:00 AM on February 24, 2019 [9 favorites]

My childhood dog used to love watching nature shows, and would run around the side of the tv whenever an animal would walk off-screen. It was hilarious. The cat loves watching videos of birds feeding (there are cat tv videos on youtube) as well as, strangely, curling matches.
posted by transient at 6:00 AM on February 24, 2019 [5 favorites]

biliebee, perhaps Mindy is a devotee of Socialist Realism, and was affronted.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:05 AM on February 24, 2019 [6 favorites]

I thought the guy in the video was odd. He just snickered at one point over his dog's distress rather than, say, comforting the dog. That seemed rather unfeeling to me.
posted by Bella Donna at 6:19 AM on February 24, 2019 [7 favorites]

One more crack like that, pracowity, and you're going on the Bad List.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:34 AM on February 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

Is the TV sitting on a stove there? Perhaps the dog is just anxious about the melting hazard?
posted by Tandem Affinity at 6:35 AM on February 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

I thought the guy in the video was odd. He just snickered at one point over his dog's distress rather than, say, comforting the dog. That seemed rather unfeeling to me.

I don't know that dog but that didn't look like distress to me. The dog just seemed interested in what was on the tv, not bothered by it or concerned about it. I'd expect a dog that was concerned, bothered, or distressed to be trying to get his/her owner to do something about it.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:11 AM on February 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

Yeah, it seems clear to me that the dog is really watching the animals on the TV, but simply with curiosity and a bit of uncertainty, not any emotional reaction to what's happening.
posted by Redstart at 7:22 AM on February 24, 2019

None of my dogs have ever noticed anything on the tv

My dog ignores everything on television except Prince videos (especially Raspberry Berry), which he watches in a daze, and then chitters along to, and finally howls along to. We’ve never found anything else that causes this reaction.
posted by maxsparber at 7:56 AM on February 24, 2019 [6 favorites]

Real cats don't use eyebrows to convey emotion

Which, I believe, is why people think of them as detached, independent, and not as affectionate as dogs.

It also helps explain why people apparently think cats are psychopaths.
posted by gtrwolf at 9:49 AM on February 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

I wonder whether changes in display technology have had any effect on canine engagement. It's easy to imagine CRTs especially refreshing at a rate which is fine for us, but just looks like a fast moving colored dot to another species.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:02 AM on February 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

My dog, a pibble very similar in build to the one in the video, loves watching TV. She doesn't do it all the time, but she watches things that are bright. She also watches the animals on the TV, she loves the horse in mulan. She also loved Okja. And sometimes she gets in arguments with the dog that lives in the bedroom mirrors.
posted by FirstMateKate at 10:20 AM on February 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

Our rescue dog recently warned us that a seemingly innocuous dog in a Star Trek TNG episode was TOTALLY A MURDEROUS ALIEN.

Orrrr actually she just hates strange dogs and love/hates wildlife documentary chase scenes on the tv. Your pick.

She'll totally go look behind the tv if there are television puppies, though.
posted by deludingmyself at 10:37 AM on February 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

We don't deserve dogs.

This sentiment pops up all the time, and it utterly baffles me.  Note—not taking you to task for saying it, it pops up in every dog-adjacent thread on the on the internet.

We literally made dogs.  They wouldn't exist were it not for us.  I mean, I get the sentiment, but we're kinda willfully ignoring the details here.  It's kinda like saying God doesn't deserve huma—hey, wait!   Nevermind, I agree!
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 10:46 AM on February 24, 2019 [4 favorites]

"I wonder whether changes in display technology have had any effect on canine engagement."

Yeah, image capture and display is a kind of hack of human vision. Particularly color reproduction, but also the illusion of motion via a series of still images.

Rather than actually reproducing the entire spectra of the original image, our photographic and video tech captures only (most of) the spectral information we're actually sensitive to, which is the intensity of light at three regions of our visible spectrum, centered on 420, 527, and 557 nanometers respectively (trichromatic). For dogs, the color will be a bit off, as their bichromatic vision uses 440 and 555 nanometer sensitivity. That's not that much different from us, and our trichromaticity means our tech is capturing and displaying more spectral info than a dog can see, so the color reproduction should be close enough to be convincing for dogs.

Both visual acuity and brightness discrimination are poorer in dogs that humans, so the detail and contrast of our imaging should be more than sufficient.

However, dogs are more sensitive to motion than we are, with a fusion rate of about 70hz, compared to our approximate 45hz. Interlaced video refreshing at 30 frames per second should look very jerky to dogs, and far from smooth motion. Even a 60fps video, which are uncommon, wouldn't quite be smooth motion for a dog.

Even so, many televisions these days are factory default set to interpolate a series of images up to 120fps from slower sources, so that setting should allow for smooth motion perception for dogs.

Dogs have a 60° wider field of view than humans, so our images won't be as wide as dogs would likely prefer and, more importantly, the images themselves will usually have an unusually narrow perspective for them. It's difficult to speculate on how much this might matter, though it seems reasonable to assume that larger, more spatially immersive images would be better. But that's generally true for us, as well.

As you can see -- no pun intended -- human vision is generally "better" than dog vision, excepting motion sensitivity. Our display tech should be convincing, especially at the higher frame rates. On the other hand, because dogs rely on vision less than humans, they rely more on hearing and smell. While our display tech may be convincing, it's probably not remotely as compelling for dogs as it is for us. This is why they mostly ignore it. (Though we include audio, it's very poor from a dog's perspective.)

This isn't even accounting for composition and editing. Most of the angles will be unfamiliar to dogs, which will make the images more confusing; but especially the editing will make for a bunch of nonsense. (Keep in mind that people have to learn and acclimate to the visual "grammar" of film -- it's a cultural artifact.)

Finally, the one big advantage dogs have over other animals in this respect is that they've evolved to be sensitive to human body language and facial expression. Our visual media naturally includes a great deal of this information, some of which must be easily comprehensible to dogs.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:27 PM on February 24, 2019 [11 favorites]

We’ve made a lot of things we don’t deserve.
posted by maxsparber at 12:37 PM on February 24, 2019

For some reason when it brought up a Kandinsky painting she sat up and just stared at it transfixed.

Probably thinking: "I could do that."
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:45 PM on February 24, 2019 [7 favorites]

> thought the guy in the video was odd. He just snickered at one point over his dog's distress rather than, say, comforting the dog. That seemed rather unfeeling to me.

Later in the video he's seen to make the motion of throwing a ball, but the ball is still in his hand. This is some kind of unfeeling sociopath
posted by Space Coyote at 3:10 PM on February 24, 2019 [5 favorites]

Like others, my dogs generally don't notice what's on screen. I have an insane kelpie that follows the cursor on screen - which is all about movement.

Having said that, years ago we had two dogs that were very close. One of these dog died and one night we were watching video footage of him. The other dog suddenly looked at the screen and started whining. He clearly identified his lost brother who had very clear black and white markings. That was a heart-wrenching experience.
posted by greenhornet at 5:05 PM on February 24, 2019 [3 favorites]

Cats use their ears as eyebrow substitutes, I thought everyone knew this.
posted by some loser at 8:17 PM on February 24, 2019

One of our dogs couldn't care less about the tv. The other however, stares when dogs are on the screen and gets all excited for a good stampede of horses or cattle. The movement of sports sometimes catches his eye too. The contrast between the two dogs is personality and while they are mutts, they both tend to exhibit traits from their dominant breeds - the one who gives no shit is partly lab (and terrier) - the other is half herder.

the real mystery is what personal beef the herder has with the target dog and why Bing Bong from Inside/Out stresses him out so much.
posted by domino at 6:24 AM on February 25, 2019

When I realized my dog was a TV watcher, I used this video to teach him not to cross the street. I don't know if it worked, but he doesn't go near the street unless he's on a leash.
posted by ambulocetus at 7:07 AM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]