Friday, January 10, 2014
The Lassie Test
One thing about chapter four that I found interesting was the Lassie test. First of all, I am by no means disregarding it. But I would like to point out that I think it was little bit unfair tot est the dogs on something like that. Usually when we hear stories of dogs saving their owners, it is some kind of guide dog that is used to protecting and looking out for their person. The average pet dog isn't used to that. And while there are always exceptions, I don't think it was necessarily fair to judge these average dogs against something the service dogs are trained for. Also, in many cases, (even as we discussed in class today with our guest speaker) dogs can tell when we are actually experiencing physiological changes that might elicit a help-response from the dogs. Faking a heart attack and just lying on the ground was not necessarily the best way to test that. The dogs were probably aware that their owners were not in actual danger. I suppose there is no way to truly test these things, and in all honesty the results might not even change if there were. I was just a little bit sympathetic to the dogs in this Lassie test.
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I agree with what Christine said. I wondered a little about the Lassie test as well, especially the "faking a heart attack" one. I also would suspect that the dog would realize nothing was really going on as they were not looking at the obvious external signs another person would see- falling down, grabbing your arm, yelling- they would be more likely to notice a physiological sign. A change in scent would be a sign to them, like we talked about in class. It's just good to note though- don't adopt a dog expecting it to be able to help you in a medical emergency... On second thought for the most part that wouldn't be why we would adopt a dog anyways, unless it was a specially trained dog.
ReplyDelete- Cassi
I also agree that the Lassie Test seemed a little off and that the dog probably knew there was not actually anything wrong with the person. I think this is an interesting case of humans expecting animal intelligence to mirror human intelligence and jumping to faulty conclusions when it doesn't. Just because the dog reacted "incorrectly" by the researcher's standards does not mean that the dog is stupid. It just means that the dog reacted in a different way than a human would. If we are going to move forward in our understanding of animals, we have to stop comparing their intelligence to ours. Every species experiences the world differently and reacts in their own ways; humans have to realize that our standards do not give other species the credit they deserve.
ReplyDelete- Caroline Thrasher
When I read this part of the chapter, I figured there would be some confounds with the experiment but I for some reason was surprised the dogs did not do anything. This is probably because everyone has such high expectations for these animals with all the stuff we see on television and the experiments that actually found intelligence or cognition. It wasn't until after the guide dog class that I realized that dogs can actually tell if someone is sick or hurt, but probably because of internal changes, like Cassi said. Clearly, we can't fool dogs since they can smell things out at a deeper level!
ReplyDelete-Kelly Ejnes
I really like what each of you have brought up about the Lassie test so far. I also think that maybe the some of the dogs would be reluctant to approach a stranger, seeing as they are pets, they may not encounter other people very often, and some dogs really don't favor many people to begin with. That kind of goes along with there being different breeds and personalities among dogs. I agree with Christine in that I don't think this experiment is very useful. Along the lines of what Cassi and Caroline said, I also don't think that the dogs would be able to pick up on medical/physical cues like that in the heart attack exp. and that maybe there is too much expectation regarding our canine pals in some instances. Like Kelly, I wasn't aware that a dog's sent was so powerful it could detect things such as cancer and a drop in blood sugar, until Diane spoke about it in class. Maybe dogs are smarter than we think, but just in different ways than we are intelligent.
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