"The difficult challenge is figuring out why they do it."

June 3, 2020 8:07 AM

Inside every dog there’s a hero waiting to be unleashed, or at least, that’s what we’d like to believe about our canine companions. New research suggests dogs truly want to rescue us when we’re in a bad situation, but they have to know how to help. […] At the same time, however, the new study still leaves us wondering if their heroic actions are prosocially motivated or if their behaviors are driven by other factors.
posted by Johnny Wallflower (19 comments total)

"The difficult challenge is figuring out why they do it."

They're good dogs brent.
posted by Fizz at 8:30 AM on June 3, 2020 [31 favorites]

I would be stuck in the box forever.
posted by Grandysaur at 8:47 AM on June 3, 2020 [4 favorites]

The big Lassie spectaculars are the ones that hog the spotlight, but I think most animals know they save their humans a little bit every day.
posted by chavenet at 8:49 AM on June 3, 2020 [14 favorites]

That “something” is what the researchers refer to as emotional contagion, in which owners transmit their stress to their pets.

I am using this in my next meeting at work.
posted by phunniemee at 8:51 AM on June 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

That “something” is what the researchers refer to as emotional contagion, in which owners transmit their stress to their pets.

If you watch dog shows on TV, you'll inevitably hear the goofy color guy (played by Fred Willard) ask the guy who actually knows something about dogs a question like "do you think the dogs know what a big deal it is to win the breed at Westminster?" And the stock response is: "well, the handlers are very excited and it travels down the leash."

In my family, we've found that "it travels down the leash" is a very useful phrase.
posted by The Bellman at 9:06 AM on June 3, 2020 [18 favorites]

just like El Negro Matapacos <3 <3 <3
posted by entropone at 9:37 AM on June 3, 2020 [4 favorites]

Dog, upon seeing their human drowning: “Dammit! I wasn’t done teaching it how to throw sticks.”
posted by Thorzdad at 9:42 AM on June 3, 2020 [7 favorites]

I'm not sure this was really a great test of how much dogs want to help when their owners are in distress. Nearly as many dogs opened the door to the box when their owners were just calmly reading in the box. Dogs were slightly more likely to want to open it when their owners were yelling for help, but there are a lot of possible reasons for that. They might have interpreted the yelling as some kind of command and they may just have been trying to do what they hoped the owner wanted. They may have thought, "Hey, the boss sounds excited about something, I want to see what's going on in there!" They may have thought the yelling meant danger and they were trying to get to the owner because it made them feel safer, not because they were attempting a rescue. And I doubt any of the dogs actually concluded that the owner was trapped in the box and that opening the door would allow them to get out. Even if they were responding to distress with a desire to help, I imagine the thinking involved was more of a vague, "Something's wrong, I need to check it out!"
posted by Redstart at 9:50 AM on June 3, 2020 [8 favorites]

Cheese.
posted by elkevelvet at 10:24 AM on June 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

Humans project a lot of things onto their pets. It's why humans have pets.

“I thought of that old joke. This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ And the doctor says, ‘Well, why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’ Well, I guess that’s pretty much now how I feel about relationships. They’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd and . . . but I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs.”

- Woody Allen
posted by SoberHighland at 10:58 AM on June 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

A similar test was done with the humans sitting in a glass enclosed room with a door that the dogs could push open in order to reach them. Only about half the dogs figured out how to get to their humans. The idea that there is a drive to overcome any barrier is the fallacy. Some dogs are better at solving barriers than others. One of my dogs would probably be a bit befuddled unless someone showed her how the door functioned, then she'd be fine. The other dog would barrel through the door with a "door? what door?" attitude.
posted by drossdragon at 12:32 PM on June 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

I wouldn't like to try this with cats. That time I broke my leg in a snowstorm? I crawled on my hands and knees to the front door, and my cat just followed and stared at me blankly.
posted by acrasis at 3:54 PM on June 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

Now work up a test with Newfies and their owners in water. I've known a couple where you could take the dog swimming but you couldn't swim around them because they'd immediately pull you out of the water.
posted by Mitheral at 4:08 PM on June 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

It's a crime against nature to have enslaved them and then bred them to love us for it.
posted by jamjam at 5:51 PM on June 3, 2020

Perhaps the dogs and cats have "enslaved" us. That seems like a better description to me. We take care of their every need, we assist in their reproduction, we feed them and shelter them, we develop medication and medical treatments for their illnesses.

I guess we mistreat them and even eat them sometimes. But mostly we give a lot of time and effort to their well being and population size.

I truly believe this to be the case with dogs, especially. Dogs have learned to mimic our facial expressions and body language even. I do not think dogs actually share the same emotions that we have, except on a very basic, deep, brain-stem fashion. Dogs have learned to manipulate humans. It goes both ways, I guess, but dogs get the "better" end of the relationship.
posted by SoberHighland at 6:03 PM on June 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

When your dog takes you to the vet to be neutered get back to me.
posted by jamjam at 6:08 PM on June 3, 2020 [2 favorites]

It's only difficult if you subscribe to this bizarre, utterly unsubstantiated unscientific belief that dogs aren't conscious, caring creatures.

There's not a lick of evidence for this, and counterfactual data exists at pretty much every scale. Dogs are running roughly the same molecular code we are.

It's stupid. Dogs may well know us better than we know them.
posted by effugas at 3:43 AM on June 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

Well it's quite simple - dogs are our friends.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 5:57 AM on June 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

It's a crime against nature to have enslaved them and then bred them to love us for it.

Almost certainly they started to love us first; given the age of the human-dog relationship and the genetic origins, it's thought dogs descend from wolves that started hanging out near humans for our delicious leftovers. Eventually they got friendlier and friendlier, and *then* humans could enlist them for tasks. Human villages at that time simply didn't have the sort of resources to maintain deliberate breeding programs that would turn wolves into dogs; they may have kidnapped or saved the occasional cub, but they would have turned mostly feral they aged. Dogs did it to themselves, so no need to feel guilty about domestication.
posted by tavella at 4:25 PM on June 4, 2020 [2 favorites]