<p>My dogs will occasionally give themselves away with their guilty behavior, but nothing which compares to that of Denver and Maggie.</p>
<p>Do your dogs own up to misbehavior by acting guilty? Any cute stories?</p>
<p>Humor me, I’m home recuperating from major surgery, can’t go to work, can’t drive, can’t do housework, so am reduced to living on the internet, catching up on my Kindle reading, and watching Property Virgin and House Hunter marathons on HGTV.</p>
<p>ha-----That’s what I do when I’m home sick. HGTV all the way.</p>
<p>With our two dogs…we always know who did what bad thing. There’s a long hallway from the front of the house to the back doggy door. We call it the “perp walk”. One or the other is either prancing or skulking. Perpetrators skulk and avoid eye contact. Just like on the evening news…</p>
<p>My parents had a dachshund named Trixie. If Trixie had had an accident in the house, she would greet my parents at the door, rubbing her snout in the carpet. With exasperation, my Mom would say “Oh Trixie! Where is it?” And Trixie would lead them to the scene of the crime. I could never be mad at her because it was always so funny.</p>
<p>My dog’s hobby is fence-fighting (running/barking along the fence line “fighting” the dogs that live on the other side). This causes muddy trenches :-(.</p>
<p>My husband often gets home mid-day and if the dog has muddy feet (often) he knows not to enter the house along with DH. Instead he will cry and poke out his muddy paws to show DH. It is so funny! I wish he was smart enough to just avoid the behavior, but he “knows” that he can’t come in until someone hoses down his paws :-).</p>
<p>Two dogs here. When a crime has been committed, sometimes I can get a confession. I put on my stern, disapproval voice. “Ohhhhhhh, bad dog. Baaaaaad dog.” The guilty dog will sometimes slink away and hide. The other dog, nothing.</p>
<p>I have a good friend who is a canine behaviorist. We talk about this kind of video regularly. Dogs don’t feel guilt. What both videos show is classic dog appeasement behaviors. They’re trying to be conciliatory in a situation where they feel threatened.</p>
<p>Perpetrators don’t know they’ve done something wrong; they know that the presence of a torn bag or dog poop or whatever their crime is PLUS the presence of the human means that they’re going to be punished in some way, so they show fear behaviors.</p>
<p>If you want to test this idea, try scolding your dog when he’s done absolutely nothing wrong. You’ll get the same behaviors.</p>
<p>It drives me nuts when I see people get mad at their dog for taking “too long” to come to them when it’s time to leave the dog park; the dog finally comes, and they yell at the dog. I wouldn’t come either if the result was that I got yelled at! </p>
<p>And while I’m on the subject of dog behavior and dog training… dogs do not need to shown who’s “dominant”. They don’t need to be hung by choke chains or kicked or punished. They do need to be trained. </p>
<p>My dog definitely feels guilty- I don’t care what experiments say. </p>
<p>If my dog did something wrong, she’ll tell us before we find it. She will go and put her head on our lap and look guilty. Normally, it’s because she’s had an accident in the living room or she took something off the counter. We’ve never yelled at her or hit her- we rescue pit bulls and we know how to make our dogs obey us without being cruel. Our dogs live like royalty.</p>
<p>Sort of off topic, but my dog also puts herself to bed at night. Every night around 8:30 she’ll go and sit by her crate and whine until someone goes and gets her kong and “puts her to bed”. If she doesn’t feel as though we’re going quick enough, she’ll come and whine by us and then run back to her cage. She’s probably the funniest dog we’ve ever had.</p>
<p>We used to have 2 Westies, a brother and sister. If we found anything chewed up or destroyed, H used to always blame the female. Of course, it was usually impossible to know which one (if not both) were responsible.</p>
<p>One day we came home to discover one of my hot pink fuzzy gloves in tatters on the living room floor. H started to blame the female, as usual. Then the dogs ran in the room to greet us. Westies are all white. The male’s mouth was hot pink. The female’s mouth was white.</p>
<p>That was the last time H automatically blamed her for all the mischief! She was smarter than her brother, by the way, which is why I think H blamed her.</p>
<p>romani,
One of my pooches also asks to go to bed each night. She leaves the bed in the room downstairs where we all are sometime by 9:00pm. She sits in front of one of us and focuses on the person intently. In a few minutes, she starts whining. If we still have not reacted, she ups it to batting our hands away from our book or computer screen. her next tactic is to try to sit on our lap (and she is NOT a lap dog!).
The minute one of us stands up, the bed-time routine starts, led by her.</p>
<p>This poochie is so anthropologically tuned in to routines and sequences that after we feed her her dinner, she whines, so we let her out. She comes back in, and she starts the whining again. We have finally realized that she is saying, “Hurry up and eat YOUR dinner, my humans, so I can get my scraps /my second dinner!”</p>
<p>Dogs are brilliant at reading body-language and other patterns to determine what is coming next , esp things that they love (walks, food, toys, the dog play park) or hate (bathe, nails dremeling, that certain dog or big man with a hat down the street).
They are now being trained to recognize subtle signals for diseases like breast cancer and seizures. Their attunement to sequenced patterns makes them “anticipators”.</p>
<p>This is how they survived in the wild, too. </p>
<p>Frankly, we are mutually parasitic- I doubt the human would have evolved without the help of the canine (and a few other important animals). The intuition of a dog, what it mirrors back about its environment, and its companionship make it a true partner for us.</p>