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Gettin real goddamn tired of dogs
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Unpopular Opinion
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It's an issue of enforcement rather than whether they're "allowed" to or not. I've been to many houses where the response to the dog jumping on a guest is "Hey! Don't do that!" Pets the dog. They think it's a child learning English, not an animal with no understanding of language. Even when I worked retail close to 10 years ago, people bringing their dog into the store was a regular occurrence. We had a policy against it, I just wasn't paid enough to care. And if I said anything, I'd get the "iTs My SuPpOrT aNiMaL" BS anyway. And whether it's legal or not, I've seen it, several times lmao. I was at a restaurant in Boston just a few weeks ago and a guy had his dog in one of those sling baby carriers across his chest.
Dogs do understand language, that's how they learn commands. Through repetitive training of the word just like a baby learns a language. They just don't have the mental capacity to understand much past that.
Idk if I'd call being able to discern a few commands by the way they sound "understanding language"; people tend to personify the ways their pets act. You couldn't take part of one command, splice it into a different one, and expect the dog to act accordingly unless you repeatedly trained that "new" command into them, for example. But that's a different argument, and depends on how we're defining "understand," and not a hill I'm willing to die on lol.
That's exactly how you learn language though, by listening to the sounds repetitively and understand the meaning. Dogs have limited mental capacity so them using logic and reasoning to understand spliced commands is not going to work. It's learning on a 3 year old level, they don't ever make it past that mental age.
My definition of understand requires reasoning. They never learn the meaning of words. They just know they'll get a treat if you make that sound and they do the thing. That's not understanding language, it's just responding to stimuli. Whether the training process is somewhat? similar to how a baby learns to talk is irrelevant. They're not people, they're not learning at a 3 year old level, they're responding how a dog responds.
Like, your comment is reading, "Dogs understand language. They just don't have the mental capacity to understand language."