Humanize your dog

Pets live in close contact with us humans. Dog owners try hard to offer their pets a nice life, but sometimes less is more. How the humanization of the dog often makes a harmonious living together impossible, is explained here.

How does humanization come about?

Many dog owners see the dog as social partner and family member. It becomes problematic if human characteristics and emotions are attributed to the dog (= anthropomorphic view), which it cannot feel at all. But this is exactly what we were taught through series like Lassie and Commissioner Rex, in which dogs embodied human roles.

But the interpretation of human feelings into the behaviour of the dog can become a problem in the education and living together.

What emotions do animals have?

Of course dogs have emotions like fear, joy or anger, but they do not feel secondary moral emotions like pride, gratitude or a guilty conscience. Other secondary emotions such as jealousy can occur in dogs, but this is a social (not moral) secondary emotion.

Emotions that we mistakenly interpret as moral secondary emotions are only the reaction to our behavior.

Interpretation of behavior

This is how it is with the classic “bad conscience”. The dog has done something (e.g.: knocked over the trash can). You get angry, scold and maybe even bend over the “bad dog”. For the four-legged friend this is a threatening gesture to which he reacts with a gesture of appeasement (lower his head, avert his gaze, ears down).

Appeasement is a normal, natural behavior and is shown when the other person is angry in order to de-escalate the situation. Unfortunately, it is often mistakenly interpreted as a guilty conscience, because the dog’s “sad look” reminds us of human facial expressions when we have done something wrong.

What misunderstandings can arise from this

Also, with the emotions gratitude and separation fear it comes to misunderstandings due to the wrong interpretation by us humans:

• Some people think that the dog must be grateful because they rescued him from the shelter. They expect themselves that the dog “behaves” out of gratitude. These feelings are completely foreign to the poor stimulus-drenched dog, who probably did not enjoy a good socialization, and he rather shows leash aggression and fear of separation, because he simply never learned it differently.
  Out of “gratitude” we expect affection, but this is completely foreign to the rescued dogs and therefore often unpleasant.
  And here it becomes problematic with the upbringing, because we expect a behavior due to a wrongly interpreted emotion, which the dog cannot deliver. This frustrates man and dog, because we humans then get the impression that the dog “intentionally” does not behave as desired.

• Problem separation anxiety: Out of the fear of being left alone, the dog “redecorates” the apartment in the absence of the owner. When the owner comes home, he scolds the dog. The person thinks that the dog has a bad conscience because of his appeasement behavior (see above). And here again it becomes problematic: the dog associates the scolding with the owner coming home and gets into more and more stress. So the dog is afraid of the moment when the owner comes home because he is always scolded then. He never associates the scolding with the destruction of objects, which may even be hours ago. But the human thinks that the dog is aware of this and becomes more and more angry. A vicious circle, which has a strong negative influence on the living together of man and dog.

How the dog feels

Pride, gratitude, bad conscience – the dog does not feel all these emotions. He only appeases a normal behavior when the other person is angry in order to calm them down.

Often we overtax the poor dog with our wishes and ideas and make impossible demands (because he must know what he has done wrong etc.). These demands cannot be fulfilled by him and this frustrates both man and dog in the long run.

Dogs live in the here and now. Therefore, it is so important that dogs are rewarded immediately after the desired behavior. Because after a certain time (longer than 3 seconds) they no longer associate the reward with their actions. Now we certainly cannot expect the dog to remember the tattered upholstery from 3 hours ago and associate our scolding with it, even if we show it the upholstery.

We must not forget that dogs are not human beings and in many respects they are much simpler knitted, this makes the education easier and allows a harmonious living together.

What can you do?

Like us humans, dogs are very different and everyone learns in his own way. Dog training is not universal and you cannot apply the same training structure to every dog. Every dog has different strengths or weaknesses. In training it is all about emphasizing the strengths even more and training the dog so that the weaknesses take a back seat. If you have problems living together with your pet, contact a dog trainer.

It is also important to understand the language of the dogs and take it seriously.