She had the food in her dish in the kitchen. She ran there from the living-room where I was sitting, picked up her dish, carried it to the living-room, directly to me and put it in my lap. It spilled, but that's not her fault.boywonderlord wrote: ↑January 11th, 2019, 7:00 pm I think its pretty easy to rationalize why a dog might dump a kibble in your lap, and I think its because your pup wants some food.
The smarts are about understanding human language a helluva lot better than we understand canine. The desire to make you feel better is empathy. I don't know whether you can call empathy rational, but it's certainly functional: it enables sentient beings to relate to one another in a mutually supportive and beneficial way. It works among members of the same species and also members of different species who care about one another.Dogs are smart, but I don't think it would be smart to desire to make you feel better for no rational reason.
I wasn't sad; I had just come off a long, productive day; had worked through lunch and was famished.Assuming your brain wasn't just fabricating a connection and your dog really could tell that you were sad,
However, all dogs and most cats are aware of their humans' moods, and when they have a special relationship to one human, they're hyper-aware of that person's emotions. Also, dogs can smell chemical changes in the secretions of human skin. That's the principle behind helper dogs for people with MS or epilepsy.
Bull. Feathers.In fact a study was released recently that dogs feel no guilt, they just fake it REALLY well in order to look even cuter and get more food.
Of course, if that were true, it would prove that dogs are more intelligent than humans, as we're rubbish at faking guilt. (Plus, we're already overfeeding pets, with no effort on their part.)
It's not more than it is. It is just what it needs to be.Everything serves a purpose, survival. Theres nothing wrong with the simple nature of every species, but I don't see a reason to try to make altruism more than it is.
[/quote]Have you ever read Nietzsche's "genealogy of morality"? He paints a pretty sad picture of the whole "good-bad" equation, along with the "bad conscience". [/quote]
Poor unhappy bastard! Maybe if he'd had a dog...
skewered? painful!I think many of us actively try to avoid for a skewered perspective
Inexperienced, unobservant, limited, could use improvement in reading comprehension - sure. Crazy? Probably no more than most humans.Maybe I'm just crazy?
Yep.Perhaps there is more to this,