#172 Anthropomorphizing

Why do we insist on believing our dogs are plotting against us? That puddle in the bedroom must be revenge for leaving them alone, and that growl surely means they're just feeling grumpy today. These assumptions seem harmless, even endearing—until they start undermining our relationship with our canine companions.

Chapters

• 0:00 What is Anthropomorphizing?
• 1:19 Why Anthropomorphizing Matters
• 2:06 Better Approaches to Dog Behavior
• 2:48 Benefits of Understanding Dogs as Dogs

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Have you ever caught yourself saying your dog is jealous or maybe they're just being spiteful because you left them home alone? Yeah, you're not alone. But let's talk about why that type of thinking might be getting in the way of our training and our relationship. So first, what is anthropomorphizing? It's when we put human emotions and motivations and logic onto our dogs, we assume they're doing things with the same reasoning that we might Like saying he peed in my bed because he was mad at me. That's a pretty common one. Now, let's be real. It's tempting to do this. We live with them, we love them. They have big expressive eyes and all those quirky behaviors. But dogs are not tiny furry people, they're dogs. Tiny furry people, they're dogs. They don't have the same mental processes that we do. That doesn't make them less intelligent, it just makes them different. And here's why it matters.

Speaker 1: 1:22

When we assume human motives, we might miss the real reason for the behavior. Take that whole example of my dog peed just to spite me. A dog urinating inside isn't trying to get revenge. More likely, they're stressed, maybe more active than usual, or maybe we overlooked a scheduled potty break. So if we assume malice, we don't look for or remedy the actual issue. Or when a dog growls and we say, ah, she's just grumpy today. No, she's not. She's communicating discomfort. And if we blow it off, we risk ignoring a warning sign, and that's how people get bitten.

Speaker 1: 2:06

So what should we do instead? Start by swapping human motives for canine ones. Ask yourself is my dog stressed, under-trained, over-stimulated? Is this a communication cue that I'm ignoring? The more we try to understand our dogs as dogs, the better we'll communicate and the less likely we are to mislabel something important. So your dog isn't being spiteful or stubborn or manipulative. They're being a dog manipulative, they're being a dog. And when we stop treating them like little humans with fur coats and start learning how dogs actually think and feel, everything from training to trust gets easier.