Comment by cmrdporcupine
4 months ago
If there's a frisbee or ball in sight, my female border collie won't even attend to basic bodily needs. And she'll chase the object while she's in pain and exhausted or shivering with cold and not notice. She has lupoid onychodystrophy which causes her nails to come in deformed and split and painful and she'll still obsess on some running play/task while she's got bleeding paws and can barely walk. An an owner we have to intervene to remove the object of obsession and force disengagement.
This is a product of centuries of breeding to focus on a task and enjoy the task above all else.
It’s kind of funny how the idea of behavior being a result of breeding goes out the window when it comes to pitbulls. Retrievers naturally retrieve, collies naturally herd, but when a murder-canine eats a family it’s all “oh it could have been any breed”.
it's more nuanced - "pitbull" isn't a single breed, it's a category
none of the dogs in the category were bred to kill indiscriminately - they were expected to obey handlers just like any other working breed
and there are a number of fighting breeds outside of the category as well
Obey handlers to do what?
1 reply →
Lol, murder canine huh? ok, I'll take the bait. Because I'm pretty sure you don't mean a malinois.
Because it could be any breed. There are more significant differences between individual dogs within a breed than between different breeds. Cattle dogs have a reputation for being asocial and "bittey", especially towards ankles, mine would "never" because they have been taught and socialized correctly. Would it be easier to teach him to bite ankles then the average dog? Yes, because hearding breeds have stronger prey drives than companions breeds. But I could teach a retriever to herd too. People with animals to heard buy hearding breeds because they want to herd, will every individual dog from a hearding breed be a good herding dog? No same with service animals, many wash out. Now here's the rub, and why everyone paying attention says it's not about the breed... Antisocial people buy a breed because they want it's reported antisocial characteristics. These people don't train their dog, and.... it's a dog! It's natural instincts are more violent, and it's stronger and better at inflicting injury, dogs hunt.
I suspect you're applying reason incorrectly here because you have some preexisting bias against some dogs in a shape you have an aversion to. Small dogs are much more likely to bite and cause injuries, but you don't care about them as much do you?
Lets try vehicles instead. someone gets drunk, and run over a kid on a motorcycle, They probably don't die right? Someone else gets drunk and runs over a kid in a range rover. They probably do die right? Is it the vehicle? Or is the real problem the person operating the vehicle? Range rovers are the problem here right? No?
Are some breeds stronger and more able to cause harm? Yes, but you don't blame the wood chipper when someone loses their arm in it. You equally don't blame the law mower even though in only takes a finger instead of an arm.
All dogs are pack animals, (just like humans). If a golden retriever owned by a violent person is more dangerous than rottweiler owned by kind loving person, why are you still blaming the breed of the dog instead of the pack it was raised by?
It’s just wokery innit. Can’t even train dogs to murder children nowadays because the woke brigade will cancel you.
I wonder if autism is a similar kind of selection process. They are people selected by nature to be obsessed about different things, but this could be incredibly fruitful if you end up focused on the right thing. Of course in this situation we have no control over the selection process, it's a product of living in a world that's difficult to
You may find the recently published article “A General Principle of Neuronal Evolution Reveals a Human-Accelerated Neuron Type Potentially Underlying the High Prevalence of Autism in Humans” interesting.
https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/9/msaf189/8245036
Avoiding spoilers, Peter Watts' works have parts which show what happens when this idea is taken to its logical extreme.
The two dogs I know that share this behavior are border collies.
Have a non-working line border collie, and he has had zero interest in chasing a ball his whole life. All he ever wanted to do was run or chase birds. He failed all his training, didn't even get through puppy preschool as he's not that food motivated either.
Every cattle dog I have known has been ball-obsessed.
Exactly, we made them this way
my sprollie is the same (half nap collie) … he is 100% ball obsessed