Back after a bad start

[Peggysu]

Sorry you had such a bad experience. Cats in general like to bite out of no where. Usually they don't draw blood though.

 

[lmarieaa]

You can't compare the behavior of the cat to the behavior of a dog. Two completely different animals.

 

[walleandeva]

You said a dog is not born agressive.....yet I have read up on breeding other animals, such as hedgehogs, and read that you should not breed an aggressive animal or else it may be present in the offspring. I do not agree that all attacking dogs lived a bad life.....a cat I had recently is a prime example. I got him as a kitten from a neighbor, treated him extremely well, and yet he would "turn" on you at any moment....one minute purring nicely on my lap, the next minute attacking my hand (with eyes completely black and hateful). Finally, a year after I got him, he attacked me IN THE FACE one day, for no reason, and I had him put down. And that was a CAT!

I wasn't talking about cats or Hedgehogs. I was talking about Bull Breed dogs. A dog isnt going to be aggressive just because it was born to an aggressive dog. If that puppy was removed from the dog ( at an appropriate age) and adopted into a loving home. That dog will be a nice family pet. I am an experienced Bull Breed owner. I have never had any bad experiences with these dogs as they have all been properly cared for. I have however saw too many cases in which a dog has been mistreated and been aggressive. I have saw too many cases for that to be just a coincidence.

 

[Simonmaal]

The most useful contribution I can think to give is to discuss the notion of developmental plasticity (also known as epigenesis). Debates on dog behaviour tend to go round and round in circles because people create a false dichotomy between the influences of nature and nurture. The conversation goes like a tennis match between two polemics:

1) Nature: "the dog was born that way and no amount of loving care would change that."

2) Nurture: "it's because the dog was treated badly and nothing to do with the dog's genetic makeup."

The nature-nurture debate is not a dichotomy, it is a dialectic! By that, I mean it is not "either-or"; the point of debate is the extent to which nature or nurture influences the dog's development. The notion of developmental plasticity is a useful way to account for this.

The work of Jean Piaget provides us with some clues, and it all started at a much more basic but nevertheless important level than dog behaviour. Piaget was interested to learn why different water snails of the same species ended up with different shaped shells. Surely genetics will determine the shape of the snail? Well, yes, but only to a certain extent! Pond snails were thin and pointy whereas lake snails were fatter and shorter; the more turbulent conditions in a pond caused the snail to develop accordingly. The snails’ genes caused their cells and tissues to have certain “self organising” properties that directed the snails’ development according to their environment. So the relevant genes were switched on or off according to feedback or “information for development” from the local water conditions.

So development happens according to the sum total of these processes, the interaction between genes and environment. You might wonder what water snails have to do with dog behaviour! Well this model provides us with a useful way to account for the way a dog’s brain develops in response to the surrounding environment. Certain behaviours (salivation in response to the smell of meat, the need to drink in response to thirst, the ability to walk etc) are, in the vast majority of cases, hard-wired and will occur no matter what happens in puppyhood. But other behaviours (such as barking at the sound of the doorbell, jumping up, chasing of the tail, licking people) vary strongly between dogs and, to a lesser extent, between dog breeds. Pet dogs interact very closely with people and it is this interaction that determines the way the dog’s brain develops according to the constraints set by the dog’s genetic makeup.

Once the dog’s brain reaches a certain stage of development, the switches are set. It is then much more difficult to get the dog to change his/her behaviour. This is where the saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” comes from and anyone who has kept dogs knows they are much easier to train as puppies. But Pavlov showed that even the behaviour of adult dogs could be tampered with; a bell was rung when food was presented and the dog eventually salivated in response to the sound of the bell even when no food was presented (in the same way that guinea pigs wheek at the sound of rustling plastic). Now, I do not in any way condone such animal experiments but it is an important example in the context of what I’m saying. Especially as some dogs condemned to death for being vicious can be at least partly retrained out of the behaviour.

So, to sum up, the question we should be asking is not “is the dog vicious because of its upbringing or because of its genes?” Instead, we should ask, “to what extent did the dog’s upbringing cause it to be vicious?” If we can answer the second question in an intelligent and open-minded way, then maybe we can save the lives of some dogs condemned to death, or some species (such as the American pit bull) condemned to extinction.

Thank you for listening!

 

[walleandeva]

Very well put.