Comment by cmrdporcupine
1 day 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?
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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