Me and my dog have been exclusive for almost a decade now. We have traveled across europe, always by my side. Off leash even, I have always wanted to give my dog the most freedom possible. To heck with human rules.
I've mostly worked remotely during my dog's entire life, so I've always been there, and we've always been able to take a long walk outside.
But at the end of the day we have to go home, and I have to fall asleep on the couch after dinner, and I have to work for hours and hours from home, or remote workspaces.
So even with all the freedom my dog enjoys, I still feel like it would want more. We have lived in houses with yards, and my dog has lazily spent every single moment outside, in the sun, in the grass. But I still feel like it's insufficient.
I have claimed this dog as mine, so it goes where I go, not where it wants to go.
If my dog could decide it would have probably died a harsh death in the streets a long time ago. But the dog doesn't understand that. I believe a dog values freedom more than its immediate personal safety.
I regularly meet people like that when I'm camping. I find it pretty frustrating. So many rules like that have basis in reality, they are not just meant to annoy.
I KNOW that my dog would never hurt anyone.
But I also know that no one else in the world has spent hundreds of hours with my dog, and to them he is a strange and large animal. Inevitably some of these ppl probably have some kind of childhood trauma related to dogs.
So I always have him leashed where the rules are to have a leash.
Even the most friendly and easygoing dog becomes violent when they approach another dog and it lashes out.
If I have to kill or harm your “friendly” illegally unleashed dog to keep me and my dog safe I will- luckily I have not had to. Please leash your dog.
Maybe this is a cultural thing, both in terms of people's expectations of encountering dogs in public places, and in terms of the way dogs are trained and conditioned to respond to stimuli. Maybe keeping dogs on leashes prevents them from learning the skills they need to be off-leash reliably.
A well behaved dog off-leash is not a problem - but the rule isn’t against badly behaved dogs or inattentive owners - the rule is against off-leash, period. It isn’t fair to the good ones.
The only reason we emphasize the leash is because any idiot is allowed to get a dog and mistreat it. So we leash them for the owner's sake really, not for any inherent fault of the dog.
So I can't argue with the rules to keep dogs leashed, I just refuse to do it.
Mine is tiny, it flies in the cabin on planes even because it's under 8kg.
But I've seen people with huge belgian malonois off leash, and they make a point of showing everyone around them how well trained it is. It walks next to them the whole time, they regularly give it commands to follow on their walk. So you have a responsibility with a big dog, because it can do more damage, and I think it's a good idea to demonstrate to any doubters around you that you can control it.
But if you just let a pittie go and then stare at your phone, you shouldn't be allowed to handle an animal.
But yeah this is a very hot topic because why should responsible people and good dogs be punished collectively because there are morons? I want more regulations in getting an animal. I see sooo many of them mistreated, neglected, when a child is born for example, now they're just being dragged along after the pram. Common human condition to be short sighted and get a dog as a fun item, but it lives for maybe 15 years. It's a huge commitment.
After that, they value things like food, exercise, curiousity, and the absence of immediate pain.
Most dogs, that haven't been traumatized, seem to have a pretty reasonable attitude toward personal safety: you mustn't let fear rule you. But some dogs, that have been traumatized, can be inordinately concerned with what they perceive to be their personal safety, in some cases to the point of (understandable, tragic) derangement.
Think you're underestimating how much your dog probably likes you...
Dogs have a different relationship to their owner than people do with their best friends or parents.
It's like the best parts of each relationship wrapped into one for dogs.
> I believe a dog values freedom more than its immediate personal safety.
I'm sure you're convinced your dog would never hurt anyone, but are you really sure everyone else you encounter will feel the same? That's a huge amount of trust to put on both strangers and your dog, and I'd argue it has not been earned. I've never encountered an out of control dog, and I pray I don't have to, but I have friends who have. They broke ribs. Eyes would have been next. Please don't make me or anybody else hurt your dog.
A lot of country/ farm dogs for example, who have limitless land to explore, will still follow their owners all day, and if the owner is gone tend to just sleep until they return.
When I first adopted him, I tried inside first, and he was unhappy and anxious, and so much of that went away when he was chillin outside.
I think humans often wrongly project their own preferences onto dogs.
I think it also depends on the mental stimulation. Hiking I see many country houses big gardens. The dogs in them are rarely walked, and bark at anything that passes in ftont of the house all day long.
I think a dog that lives in a house but gets proper stimulation and walks is happier that thosr garden dogs.
All it takes is one time to ruin that for you and probably other people too.
Honestly, I think the dog would rather have a pack in a family (wife, kids etc.) than a single person to essentially spend the rest of their life with. My dog has so much more energy when the whole family is in the same room.
Why do you believe that? Bear in mind that our domesticated dogs of today are very different from their wild ancestors (or from wolves, their closest wild relatives).
Having dogs off of leashes is incredibly dangerous and irresponsible. The amount of children killed or injured by poorly restrained dogs is very high. A dog should be fenced in or on a leash if they are outside, full stop. Dog ownership should really have a license requirement.
This claim is interesting, if true. Can you back it up? I spent 15 minutes on research, and my preliminary findings, using US statistics (I'm not American but it's just easier to google American stuff) suggest that:
a) about 42 Americans die to dog attacks per year (about 0.13 per 100k population) (very high confidence)
b) it looks like about half of those are kids under 17, with ages 1-4 over-represented (very high confidence)
c) most of those kids-dying-to-dogs deaths are not due to unrestrained dogs in public, but rather infants in their family homes, dying to dogs owned by the child's parents (low to medium confidence)
For example, WP gathers media/journal reports on dog fatalities, and has 16 records for 2023 (so presumably about 1/3 of the fatalities for that year). 6 of those are children. Of those 6 children, 4 died to the family pet, the other 2 died to neighbours' dogs while in their own home. Extrapolating from that that suggests that the number of American children killed by poorly restrained dogs, other than their own family, is roughly 6. Out of around 10k child fatalities per year in the US.
That doesn't seem "very high" to me, but that's just a matter of opinion. Do you have data that shows a different pattern?
Shadow gets excited upon hearing "do you want to come with?" because the repetitiveness of the outing doesn't matter. It's time spent with his human and that is more than enough. It's literally what he was made to do: in need of a faithful companion (other humans being too dodgy) we took one of nature's finest predators and engineered it over millennia, bending its will to need our companionship to the point of utter emotional dependency. Dogs, compared to wolves, even have extra muscles around their eyes whose sole purpose appears to be to enable them to emote to humans more effectively.
Furthermore, dogs have the approximate intelligence of a human toddler... do any of you remember being three or four years old, and every single ride in the car was a new adventure to look forward to? I know that half of Hackernews considers it a biological impossibility to remember anything before about age seven, if that, but maybe when you have a toddler-level brain, things are still full of wonder that might be mundane or forgettable to adult humans.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes#Philosophy :
> asked why he was called a dog [Diogenes] replied, "I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals."
I hope you can at least understand that pets bring joy into the lives of their owners. It doesn't all have to make perfect sense.
In the grand scheme of things, we're all just temporary cosmic dust, right? And dogs are a great daily reminder to focus on the small moments of happiness whenever you can find one.
> In the grand scheme of things, we're all just temporary cosmic dust, right?
What else would you be able to justify using this platitude?
I think another perspective to consider here is how this applies to rescue dogs. I rescued my dog, but from your pov it would’ve been a better idea to euthanize her to spare the lives of all the other animals she would’ve consumed in her lifetime.
Few more things that come to mind:
1. Nature does not reward for smartest, but for the fittest. Which is interesting in itself
2. Argument could be made the same for humans (there are some people that are not worth the life of a farm animal, for example). But also one could say that the summed intellect of all animals that have been killed for consumption for one person in their life time may be net more than that person’s intelligence
I am not for pet owner ship as a broad concept because of this feeding pattern but there is that issue of once they are here - then what? So long as we can get their numbers down then that is a good start. At the moment we are in a predicament, with a solution a while off.
> In the authentic happiness Shadow finds in the most banal of activities, his commitment to life and action is one that we humans find so hard to emulate. This is because of something that happened to us: a great schism in consciousness that we know as reflection. We humans are the world heavyweight champions of thinking about ourselves, scrutinising and evaluating what we do and why we do it.
> This schism breaks us in two. Henceforth we are all divided into one who thinks and one who is thought about; one who sees and one who is seen; one who reflects and one who is reflected upon. This bifurcation in our consciousness robs us of the possibility of a certain type of happiness, the happiness that accompanies being whole. Shadow is whole in a way that a human can never be.
...
> Being undivided by reflection, being whole and entire, a dog has only one life to live, whereas we – in whom reflection’s canyon is deepest – have two. For us, there is both the life that we live and the life that we think about, scrutinise, evaluate and judge.
It's one thing to assert that a philosophy of living in the moment may be good for people, something completely different to assert that dogs are incapable of living otherwise.
I don't think there is any evidence for mental reflection at this moment, but the nature of reflection is that is entirely internal, and we don't really know in what manner dogs have cognition.
But, the trend seems to be that we only learn more about the inner lives of animals as time goes on. 100 years ago it was accepted that non-human animals were essentially automatons that didn't feel feelings or have emotions, or engage in any kind of thought, which we know now is not true.
