Originally Posted by
pingu_pie
I probably shouldn't reply to this thread, but hey.
I work as a dog trainer, and while there are loads of opinions on here, a lot of stuff about dogs is anthropomorphism and associated noise. Example - talking about a dog not loving you if your neighbour feeds it for a month. Can you define love? I can't. So how exactly do you expect a dog with a brain the size of a lemon to be formulating such a complicated social construct?
Essentially, most of the dog folks on here have it right - it's about responsible ownership. Train your dog, and clean up after your dog, and you are minimising the potential for issues. You cannot, ever, 100% guarantee how any dog will react in any situation - the "best" dog ever will one day chase something they shouldn't, and often the "worst" dog could be a hell of a lot better if someone put some time into them. It's why I never like people who walk dogs without leads on main roads, or anywhere in public really, outside of parks that allow dogs to free run. You may think you know it all, but you only need to be wrong once.
The other main issue with dogs is that they give off a huge amount of communication, and we know that we can't even understand a huge part of it - we don't have the olfactory receptors that they have, and we cannot sense the pheromones that they can pick up on from us. Even disregarding that, there is an absolute ton that dogs "tell" us that people are terrible at reading (including some famous trainers). It would be funny seeing the word "aggressive" thrown around as much as it is, except it's so sad to see what happens when dogs are considered such. As with so much else, people think they know everything just because.
Like everyone and everything, dogs learn through repetition and the associated consequence (reinforcement or punishment - in the scientific sense; punishment does not necessarily mean what you might think it means, it's essentially "make X less likely to be repeated in future"). They do form bonds, however, and having a dog that you love and who takes pleasure from your company etc is a lovely thing.
Having said that, somewhat surprisingly to most folks I have never had a pet dog myself. Like others on here, I can't give them the time they need as I am not around for several hours a day. I did, however, grow up with cats and used to work for a cat rehoming charity. I saw someone put about them being the biggest threat to wild birds - they aren't, I don't think it's even close. The biggest threat to wild birds are habitat loss (humans digging everything up and building on it), climate change (humans burning fossil fuels) and intensive farming (humans feeding their ever growing population). If we want a culprit species for most of the damage to the natural world, it doesn't have four legs.
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