#172 Anthropomorphizing

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Why do we insist on believing our dogs are plotting against us? That puddle in the bedroom must be revenge for leaving them alone, and that growl surely means they're just feeling grumpy today. These assumptions seem harmless, even endearing—until they start undermining our relationship with our canine companions.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Have you ever caught yourself saying your dog is
jealous or maybe they're justbeing spiteful because you left
them home alone?
Yeah, you're not alone.
But let's talk about why thattype of thinking might be
getting in the way of ourtraining and our relationship.
So first, what isanthropomorphizing?

(00:26):
It's when we put human emotionsand motivations and logic onto
our dogs, we assume they'redoing things with the same
reasoning that we might Likesaying he peed in my bed because
he was mad at me.
That's a pretty common one.

(00:46):
Now, let's be real.
It's tempting to do this.
We live with them, we love them.
They have big expressive eyesand all those quirky behaviors.
But dogs are not tiny furrypeople, they're dogs.
Tiny furry people, they're dogs.
They don't have the same mentalprocesses that we do.

(01:07):
That doesn't make them lessintelligent, it just makes them
different.
And here's why it matters.
When we assume human motives, wemight miss the real reason for
the behavior.
Take that whole example of mydog peed just to spite me.

(01:27):
A dog urinating inside isn'ttrying to get revenge.
More likely, they're stressed,maybe more active than usual, or
maybe we overlooked a scheduledpotty break.
So if we assume malice, wedon't look for or remedy the
actual issue.

(01:48):
Or when a dog growls and we say, ah, she's just grumpy today.
No, she's not.
She's communicating discomfort.
And if we blow it off, we riskignoring a warning sign, and
that's how people get bitten.
So what should we do instead?
Start by swapping human motivesfor canine ones.

(02:13):
Ask yourself is my dog stressed, under-trained, over-stimulated
?
Is this a communication cuethat I'm ignoring?
The more we try to understandour dogs as dogs, the better
we'll communicate and the lesslikely we are to mislabel

(02:33):
something important.
So your dog isn't beingspiteful or stubborn or
manipulative.
They're being a dogmanipulative, they're being a
dog.
And when we stop treating themlike little humans with fur
coats and start learning howdogs actually think and feel,
everything from training totrust gets easier.