Here’s an analogy for you: Masters are to dogs as George W. Bush is to the American People.
Why?
Discovery recently covered a study being published in Animal Behavior that looked at dogs’ decision making capabilities. A dog’s ball was hidden under a flower pot. Sometimes the dog owner would hint at the wrong pot, which the dog would then erroneously pick. Othertimes the dog would not be given any clues and would pick the correct pot.
People exert a strong influence on canine choices, it seems, and not always for the better. Dogs are so attuned to our actions, in fact, that they will sometimes abandon logic entirely to please us. But abandoning reason for obedience may serve our pets well in the end.
“I do not think that domestication made dogs less intelligent,” lead author Anes Erdohegyi told Discovery News. “On the contrary, dogs seem to show special sophistication in understanding social situations.”
“However,” she added, “it is true that focusing on the human…sometimes leads to erroneous behavior.”
…Josep Call, a noted animal expert and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology…told Discovery News that he too was reminded of studies on children “in which the cues they get from adults also send them down the wrong path, and [they] end up using inefficient strategies simply because children are so attuned to what adults do.”
Hmm, kind of like the Bush administration insisting there are WMDs in Iraq, even when they knew there weren’t any and there still aren’t any. . .let’s go to war! . . .maybe we’re part of an experiment too?
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