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Are you sure, you are not just a very very strange alpha dog, whos moods are easily readable by looking at the face muscles and the tone of voice? Dogs have no

• mikestew 9y ago
  Are you sure, you are not just a very very strange alpha dog, whos moods are easily readable by looking at the face muscles and the tone of voice? Pretty sure, yeah. It's an extrapolation: my dogs don't try to eat another dog that's about the same size and furriness of a rabbit, but they'll about take my arm off to chase a rabbit. So there's some kind of categorization going on. "These things are for eating, these other things are for fun." I'm quite confident that dogs have not created a system that breaks things down along lines of genus and species, but I'm pretty sure they know I'm not one of them. To a large degree it's moot, I suppose, because they can't tell us what's on their mind, so we just have to play with inputs and observed behavior, and go from there. As a sidenote, research has on multiple occasions demonstrated that pack mentality and other such things as "alpha dog" don't apply to domesticated dogs (IOW, you can pretty much ignore anything Caeser Millan has to say). Extrapolating from those assumptions can be rife with error.