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Dogs can remember names of toys years after not seeing them, study shows

theguardian.com

131–140 of 225 posts

Re: Dogs can remember names of toys years after not seeing them, study shows

#131

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While this is all cute, dogs should be discouraged from eating food they find in the street! It could be poisoned. You never know whether there's someone who really hates dogs in the neighborhood, or if someone tries to solve problems with rats. Unfortunately, my friend lost a dog that way.

No doubt this happens, it must be so rare for someone to put out poisoned half-eaten sausage rolls with the aim of killing a random dog that finds it, I think this is perhaps a teensy bit paranoid.

We've had this problem in Malmö, Sweden recently: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/nya-hundbullar-hitta...

Bread rolls with bits of glass or metal in them, found in parks or along other pedestrian paths. They caught one woman doing it, but it is believed the news might have inspired other nutjobs.

Re: Dogs can remember names of toys years after not seeing them, study shows

#132

I've had my Labrador for 12 years, she was about 1 when we rescued her. In the first week I was walking her and passed a bus stop mainly used by school kids. There's a small wall behind it and she dashed around and emerged with half a sausage roll hanging out of her mouth. To this day, every time we pass that spot she enthusiastically pulls and goes round to inspect.

If you search "magic pie bush" you can find other similar stories :)

That has NSFW written all over it.

Re: Dogs can remember names of toys years after not seeing them, study shows

#133
post #127
post #98

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One trick that is popular in my family is to rest a treat on the tip of a dog's nose, tell them to wait, count silently for a few seconds, and then give them permission to eat it. (My sister's dog does it every day after his breakfast, and I recently had the pleasure of asking him to perform this trick for me when they visited. :) Anyhow, my favorite of the dogs from my childhood was generally uninterested in what ce…

Yeah that is why I think dogs that don’t learn tricks are the smart ones not the ones who obey on the first ask. But humans want obedient dogs not ones that have their own opinions :)

They're animals, you want predictable behavior (as much as is possible - because they're animals).

Re: Dogs can remember names of toys years after not seeing them, study shows

#134
post #6

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For me typically some attribute remains in memory after the name fades: "white-teeth marketing dude" or "guy obsessed with keyboards". I suppose that's how names started: Miller, Shepard, etc. As a corollary to this if I'm going into a business situation where I think it would be useful to be remembered, I'll try to wear something notable -- brightly colored shoes, something like that. Imagining the other parties dis…

Official family names like Miller etc are a quite modern phenomenon for the majority of people, an aspect of a more formal and powerful state apparatus. Traditional names are the first names, and these have been less direct for a very long time. First names are assigned in childhood and used for most of your life, so they are rarely related to your occupation. Much of Europe, America, and the Middle East of course us…

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

Re: Dogs can remember names of toys years after not seeing them, study shows

#135
post #18
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me typically some attribute remains in memory after the name fades: "white-teeth marketing dude" or "guy obsessed with keyboards". I suppose that's how names started: Miller, Shepard, etc. As a corollary to this if I'm going into a business situation where I think it would be useful to be remembered, I'll try to wear something notable -- brightly colored shoes, something like that. Imagining the other parties dis…

I once interviewed for a job with a small group of people, all at once. To keep them all straight in my head before I learned their names I gave each a mental nickname based on their appearance: Red Hair, Taller Than My Dad, Jack Sparrow (he had hollow cheeks and a dark unkempt beard). Taller Than My Dad turned out to be comp.lang.c FAQ maintainer, Steve Summit.

This is straight out of The Office

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcksTKoZMts&t=178

Re: Dogs can remember names of toys years after not seeing them, study shows

#136

I've had my Labrador for 12 years, she was about 1 when we rescued her. In the first week I was walking her and passed a bus stop mainly used by school kids. There's a small wall behind it and she dashed around and emerged with half a sausage roll hanging out of her mouth. To this day, every time we pass that spot she enthusiastically pulls and goes round to inspect.

I've never understood people who say dogs are hard to train. They are SO motivated by food

I agree, most dogs are not hard to train, but also not all of them are motivated by food. We accidentally got a Kuvasz (probably a mix, with 50cm at the shoulder she is a little short for a pure breed) puppy eight years ago. That's a LGD from Hungary. By "accidentally" I mean nobody in the shelter knew what kind this white fuzzball was, but she liked us, we liked her, so we took her home. It was quite the surprise when we found out what we got there.

Anyhow, like many of her kind she is NOT into food. That made training her in the beginning very difficult, because we knew no other way back than. Even today, I always have to chuckle when I try to give her a treat and she takes the treat very gently from my hand and puts it down on the floor, like saying "let me put it there for you." Of course, sometimes she just eats it but you never know.

Re: Dogs can remember names of toys years after not seeing them, study shows

#137

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Then again, in the universe of Benjamin/Squealer fanfic, who's to say we couldn't find the following convo? — ... Ironic. He could save others from death, but not himself. — Is it possible to learn this power? — Not from a pig.

SPJ’s innovation, was to keep it bipartite and below— making sure type IIIs didnt feel like they were a higher class & everyone else was type II (Imagine an army with only NCOs and officers, but the NCOs are type IIIs) No proles (grunts) in the orgchart of a very large design agency..culturally, designers often happy to work like grunts anyway! (Painters = painters) This trouble with the proles (app store, actual sto…

Contrast also the scale of the engineering consultancies/art/design coops that are purportedly the talent-dense equivalents of Mondragon, eg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arup_Group

Re: Dogs can remember names of toys years after not seeing them, study shows

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all dogs are motivated by food. Our high energy, water-loving, labradoodle is only motivated by one thing: frisbee.

IME all are... Labradoodles are loopy, like most of the bred-for-instagram breeds. Got to expect the abnormal

I have a German Shepherd who isn’t toy motivated, but will climb mountains to play tug.

Don’t assume your experience is universal, especially when there’s a lot of people telling you it isn’t.

Re: Dogs can remember names of toys years after not seeing them, study shows

#139

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Every time I encounter resistance to your points here, I feel like an alien among humans. I think it cuts so deep into people's psychology, and frequently religion. The very notion that we are not the apex of anything. And that we no longer need to eat other animals to live and be healthy. Too much to bear for many, so it frequently results in low-quality conversation, laden with emotions. The fact remains, however.…

I am in no way religious, and I don't think we are fundamentally different than other animals, but I don't think it is surprising that most of us (myself included) think of human emotions and intelligence as being on a completely different level than animals. The complexity of human language, social structure, and technology is not even in the same ballpark as animals. Humans make iPhones and travel to space and writ…

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Re: Dogs can remember names of toys years after not seeing them, study shows

#140

My dog constantly surprises me and he's only 3.5 years old. The first year I had him as a puppy, he could smell/hear (?) his best neighborhood buddy walking multiple buildings away from our apartment while the windows were closed. He'd run to the door and start crying and as soon as we got outside he knew the right path. And his friend hadn't even walked by our building yet, so it's not like there was a trail to snif…

There's also this experiment with dogs where they observed dogs getting up, walking to the front door, and waiting for their owner to come back home from work, as soon as the owner started heading home from the office. They somehow know, like they're telephatically connected.
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