I Keep Thinking He’s A Dog, But Owl Thinks He’s People

Tags

babies, child development, children, concepts, dog, experiments, generalization, learning, psychology, reading, symbols, toddler, words

Most of my experience with teaching and training beings whose brains are smaller than mine has been with animals. Furthermore, in most scenarios Owl acts and responds very much like a dog and so I treat him very similarly most of the time.

I use redirection, positive reinforcement, a high-pitched, encouraging tone when I deal with him, and it seems to work. He responds well to praise, touch, and food rewards. He likes to fetch.

He’s a puppy!

So I am amused and delighted when Owl displays human-like abilities that are beyond the grasp of the dogs I have worked with.

Like when he was 14 months old and I realized that he understood that he was looking at himself in the mirror.

Hi, me!

I pointed to his reflection and said “who’s that?” and he pointed to himself! To test his understanding, I secretly placed a banana sticker in his hair and showed him his reflection. Sure enough, his hand crept up to his hair while a perplexed look appeared on his face.

Dogs would NOT get that.

Also, I am constantly surprised by not only the extent to which he imitates us, but the extent to which he understands what he is imitating. Like at Hallowe’en, when he had just learned to walk, and he spotted a candy wrapper on the ground. He picked it up and toddled over to the cupboard under the kitchen sink, and proceeded to try and open it to throw away the wrapper.

A dog can learn to put something in the garbage if you teach him, but it would never occur to him to see something like a wrapper, identify it as garbage, and then try to throw it away himself. Hypothetically you could teach a dog to recognize certain things are garbage to be thrown away, but it would be a lot of work.

Your average dog does not watch you do something, intuit the intent behind your action, and then try to do it himself.

Owl does this every day.

I'll just slip these on...

Then there are other things that I almost don’t notice until I think about them.

For example, every morning I ask him to choose his footwear for the day. He can pick his wading boots, or his little doc-martin style boots. No matter which he chooses, he always brings me a matching pair. He has never brought me, say, one wader and one doc martin.

It’s the same thing when he brings me my own footwear (yes, I get my baby to fetch my shoes. I told you he is very like a dog…). He never brings me one sneaker and one boot. He brings me two sneakers, or two boots.

Again, a dog would have difficulty with that. He can fetch your shoes, but you’d have to formally train him to understand “fetch my sneakers” vs “fetch my boots”. It would take WORK.

But Owl does it as a matter of course. Humans are clever.

And the way he generalizes! I made the mistake of teaching my dog to chase my ex-boyfriend’s cat under the command “get the cat”. When I got my own cat, that command didn’t work, because he didn’t understand that “cat” meant any cat other than ex-boyfriend’s cat. We had to teach him our new cat’s name, instead.

But the baby understands categories easily. When he was 12 months old I could say “where’s Beloved Dog?” and he would point to Beloved Dog, meanwhile identifying him as “dog”. Ditto for the cat. He knew that we had A DOG and A CAT but that they each have their own unique identifiers as well.

We taught him what a hippo was, and from then on he could identify all sorts of hippos in all sorts of books, even drawn by different artists. No dog could do that!

"hippo" is one of his favourite signs

Then again, Owl’s capacity for self-control, maturity, patience, obedience, following basic instructions, and potty training are completely eclipsed by our dog, and certainly his capacity for destruction rivals any dog I have ever met.

So I am putting him to the ultimate test.

I am going to try to teach both dog and Owl to read.

Well, not READ.

At least, not as those who use the alphabet would consider to be reading (Owl is trying to teach himself the alphabet, but has difficulty after “D”…).

More… symbol recognition, like in Mandarin. I’m trying to teach Owl to recognize certain letter combinations as holding meaning.

I made Owl flash cards

some of his favourite things

I’m going to do the same with Beloved Dog. I borrowed flash cards from my friend and business partner who swear up and down that she has seen dogs learn to recognize words like “sit” and “down” and differentiate between them.

Just to be clear:

I am NOT pushing, pressuring, or otherwise making this un-fun for Owl. It’s just a game, something I am interested in to test his capacity for generalization and symbolic representation. I don’t believe that it will aid his development or help him school in the future.

I’m just pitting him against the dog.

For science.

(I’m so going to get trolled…)

Which one looks smarter to you?

The Usual Evil

Tags

authority, dog training, dogs, evil, experiments, Milgram, morality, punishment, reward, work

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about every day evil.

I don’t mean atrocious, terrible evil like baby-rape, dolphin slaying, off-shore oil drilling, or girl’s T-shirts saying stuff like “Daddy’s Little Consumer Whore”. I mean the sort of evil that regular people commit simply because they don’t have the guts to stand up and say no. The kind of little evils we commit from peer pressure, or personal uncertainty, or fear of losing our jobs.

A man named Stanley Milgram once wondered why the Nazis had done what they did. Not the big orchestrators of the holocaust, but the regular joes who ended up doing terrible things because they were told it was okay.

So he conducted an experiment.

He put an actor in a fake electric chair and then he paid some local people to come in. He told them that whenever the man in the chair answered wrong, they had to give an electric shock which would increase by 15 V each time. The man in the chair would screech in increasing agony, and would begin begging them to stop the experiment. The dial was creeping closer and closer to the “Danger – lethal” range. When the subject wanted to stop giving shocks (usually well over the 300 V level), Milgram would tell them that they had no choice.

This of course was not true. They were physically free to walk out of the room at any time. The only thing forcing them to torture another person was the man in the coat telling them to do so. The fourth time the person wanted to stop, they were told they could.

Even though they could have, no one stopped without permission. Less than half of the people ever achieved permission to leave. The majority went on to give lethal levels of shock to the actor in the fake chair three times.

But maybe, you might argue, these people sensed that it was all an act?

So someone did the experiment again, only this time they were genuinely shocking a little puppy. 20 out of 26 people continued to shock the puppy right up to the end of the experiment. Of the few who insisted on stopping, all were men. The rest of the men and all of the women continued to shock the poor puppy, some weeping as they did so, because the man in the lab coat told them to.

Think about it yourself, before you judge – have you ever done something you felt was a little wrong, because your boss told you to at work? Or because the people around you assured you that it was normal or acceptable, or outright told you that your beliefs were wrong? I’m not talking about fatally shocking people. Just little things that conflicted with your personal set of morals.

I know I have.

The dog training world largely consists of two warring factions. There are the “positive” dog trainers, who have actually read books on Psychology and have learned that reward is much more powerful than punishment. Then there is the older school of thought,which talks a lot about “earning the dog’s respect” and “tone of voice”. They use choke chains and other physical methods to enforce their will on the dog.

In my previous job, we tried to merge both schools of thought as best we could. For the most part, I was allowed to try positive methods first. But some things were non-negotiable.

For the first time since I was a small child, I found myself using a “chain collar” (because “choke chain” sounds too negative, y’know). My own dog has never had such a collar. His training was entirely reward-based, with the occasional scolding for serious infractions. But I didn’t have a choice in my job – at least, not if I wanted to keep my job. Not only was I using them on a daily basis, but I was instructing the volunteers who raise the puppies in the art of doing so.

I found my abilities and my confidence as a dog trainer disintegrating.

When you have the power to inflict discomfort on another creature for not obeying your will, you find yourself using that power. When you have that power, you find you don’t need patience or calmness. It becomes easy – too easy – to take out your frustrations on the confused animal at the end of the leash.

Here’s another secret – some dog trainers feel that the best way to train a dog to retrieve something is to pinch their ear until they are screaming and bleeding – and then put the object in their mouth and release the ear. After a few weeks of this, the dog learns that grabbing the object makes the torture stop, and they begin to lunge desperately for something to retrieve.

The old-style trainers aren’t monsters; they didn’t like torturing dogs. But in their mind, they thought they “had to” because they found it difficult to believe that any other method could be as effective. But they were willing to try other methods, and so I was allowed to reward-retrieve my dogs. It worked fine. But the day would have come when I would have been told to pinch a dog instead, for whatever reason.

Here’s the thing – I would have done it.

I loved my job. I wanted to keep my job. I would have doubted myself, and trusted them.

I was upset about being laid off, but now I am glad I got out before that happened. Now I have the perspective to say “No, I will never do that.” If someone tells me to in the future, I will say no, and hang my job. I think I will be a better and happier person now than I was when I was trying to please people with different ideas, and a different set of morals.

I don’t ever want to find myself in that position again.