I like dogs like I like toddlers. It’s fun to hang out with other people’s for a while, but ultimately they’re annoying, loud, and make a mess. I feel like in the past 10 years or so, dog owners have become increasingly convinced that everyone thinks their slobbering, untrained mutt is god’s gift to everyone, and expects everyone to love it unconditionally. Dogs in restaurants. Dogs in stores when you go shopping. “Oh it’s so funny that your dog is jumping on me and getting it’s dirty paws all over me while it tries to sniff my crotch.” “Oh oops! Your dog ate my food off the counter, fucking again. Guess that’s my fault because in this house nothing is safe from the coddled fucking dog.” “Hey man can you watch the dog? It’s really easy, not like it pisses all over the floor and knocks the trash over or anything. We have to leave the house for 2 hours and it has anxiety/depression/borderline personality disorder and he’s a wittle special boy who needs constant attention.”
I’m just tired of it. Nobody gives a goddamn about your stupid dog. Stop bringing your animal to restaurants, it’s disgusting and inconsiderate. It’s not your child, it’s a dog. Dog people have made me hate dogs.
I’ve rarely seen this. I have seen some inconsiderate things like people thinking they could bring their “purse dogs” in Dollar Tree? But I’ve never been to anyone’s house where the dog is just allowed to steal food, or jump on people, etc. Other than a few well-behaved service dogs in my lifetime, I’ve never seen a dog in a restaurant. That’s not legal. I’ve heard of people acting like ESAs have public access, but I’ve never actually seen it.
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.”