Perhaps not surprising, working breeds – many of which are known to have been artificially selected for high toy or predatory motivation – were overrepresented in the sample.
There was nothing you could do to satiate his desire. If you gave in to a catch session, you could throw it 100 times, he would start coughing/convulsing from exhaustion, yet still drop a ball at your feet begging you to throw it. You could probably have killed him with it.
If no one was playing catch with him he would spend hours scouring the neighborhood for balls hidden in bushes. At one point I believe he had over 20 balls piling up in various places in our backyard. We would regularly take his balls away so he only had a couple, but more would magically appear.
We did have a little fun with this. My dad would use him as a tennis practice 'partner'. And we built a tennis ball cannon powered by M80s (note: this was mid-80s in the SFV when/where things like bottle rockets and blow guns were legal).
I've had to put down quite a few animals, and he was the only one were there was no sadness, only relief when his time came, esp. after 15 long years of having to pander to this obsessive behavior.
My belief is animals experience something similar to autism, and he was as far along the spectrum as possible, to the point where the only thing that defined him was his working instinct. That million years of mind-meld evolution w/ humans? Simply not there.
Edit: He gets plenty time with other people and dogs - not its not like he is starved for attention.
There’s a guy who trawls dog rescues looking for retrievers who are toy obsessed and then trains them to hunt truffles. He reasons you can’t reward them with food for finding even tastier food, so you have to train them with ball time as a reward/distraction when they find a trove.
Once you pull that prey drive out of a working dog and associate it with something such as a ball, there's no greater satisfaction this planet than doing the thing for that animal. It usually works better as a reward for what we're doing, is more instant, but also it can be deadly for a dog to eat food when they're at working-level activity.
If you make an artificial thing that really wants to do some specific thing, like a computer endlessly printing "hello world" millions of times a second, it's not surprising to see it do the thing it was created to do. I wouldn't say the computer "wants" to print hello world, so I don't see the dog as doing what it truly wants to do if it's a genetic predisposition human breeders forced into it. I see the expression of a society of dog breeders and people's idea of a game called "fetch" which was relatively easy to transition a species towards step-by-step using artificial selection.
Perhaps the obsession with fetching came with that?
Artificial does not preclude real. You can make the same judgement about just about anything selected for anything- Such as strange hairless apes artificially selected planning and building and strategy.
Originally, I went there to pee after arriving from a long train commute.
Then I had a drink outside, it was a summer evening. And there was a group of people in the outside area of the bar with a dog, a tame Labrador/Golden-Retriever-like dog.
It was a good friendly dog, but it had a toy.
I got to know the dog because I threw the toy after the dog came to my table and the owners were bored.
10 minutes later, I felt increasingly stressed by the dog "forcing" me to throw the toy again and again :D
And that outside area was near, while not directly next to, a large road, which also was my final straw to get rid of my new companion before I left – the dog was running after a rolling, misthrown toy and almost ran into a cyclist on a smaller, non-car pathway next to the seatings.
I was completely overwhelmed at first by that dog's firm insistence on me throwing that toy over and over, after I had done it one time.
Just imagining your retriever feeling obligated to sit patiently by your side as you contribute to the pack by deconstructing your life while staring lifelessly at a flashing screen.
As opposed to my Newfoundland that will tease me with the ball and then I'm obligated to chase her until she wears out, I catch her, or I bribe her with a treat.
She also has a large (about 1 food diameter) ball that can't possibly fit in her mouth and I can kick that at which point she'll drop the little ball and try to get the big one in her mouth.
The least food motivated dog I've ever owned. Nothing brought her back, not even cheese.
Have fun turkey99!
When attention/reward/engagement cease when the ball is not returned and dropped - literally turn around and walk away dejectedly - but a successful return results in praise, treats, and MORE FETCH, my dog quickly learned to bring it back.
For my sister's dog, the key is to have a second ball alluringly held ready to throw - the one that's already in the mouth is forgotten about except as a means to get the second ball thrown. The dog has to bring it "all the way!" (point at the ball that was dropped halfway back) before the second ball is thrown.
It's definitely a tough one to solve, though, especially when the act of running around with the ball in the mouth is the rewarding behavior...
It is just anecdotal, but I 100% believe there was nothing she found more entertaining and fun than to pull that wagon because of her genetics. There was no training involved, within seconds of hooking her up with a harness she just knew what she had to do.
She was obsessed with rounding things up - cats, ducks, kids, you name it.
Part of her dna for sure.
They would still fixate on other behaviors they are trained on. And if not trained and neglected, often have destructive behaviors.
When the weather is poor we have often tried to get shorter walks in dry spells but augment it with as much ball time as possible to make sure he's getting enough exercise (since he generally dislikes bad weather).
It's become apparent that there's no possibility of satiety through chasing the ball though. He will simply go forever, however tired he looks.
I joked that as a Labrador will seemingly eat itself sick, a Spaniel will run itself lame.
To get them tired, you need to chill them out and have them use their brain and/or nose.
Maybe try some sniffing games, sit down during the walk and have them just take in the environment, do some obedience that makes them think, or throw their food in the grass and have them figure it out.
Incidentally I feel this way also: like I never fully grew up, and I easily regress to being trapped in a childlike state where I'll e.g. play video games all day. To snap out of it I have to "remember" to be an adult, like it's easily forgotten especially if my daily life doesn't ask me to have any serious responsibilities. maybe dogs don't have any responsibilities so they have no reason to stop playing.
When i found evidence supporting this view, that flew in the face of all i thought i knew about lasers n dogs, i realized how foolish i had been to think pup enjoyed it rather than it being unfulfilled prey drive and protection of the home drive.
The other weird obsession seems to be hunting related. I once attached a toiletry holder in the shower that uses a pump to create the suction. It made a popping sound when I removed it and the GSD came running over to find what made the noise. Even a year later she still gets in the shower to see if there's anything there, especially if I'm crawling around cleaning. Maybe thinking I'm looking for it as well.
They search specifically for dogs obsessed with ball chasing and turn them into rat hunting dogs.
There's funny bit where they talk about finding a dog that had learned how to use the tennis ball firing machine and spent all day chasing a tennis ball and putting it back in the machine which fires the tennis ball in a never ending loop.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/scienceshow/dogs-help...
How did they reach the conclusion that dogs are the only species affected by this if they only investigated dogs?
This feels like confusing "absence of evidence" with "evidence of absence" - especially as they write it right after stating that there is a lack of research in the field.
This is a product of centuries of breeding to focus on a task and enjoy the task above all else.
none of the dogs in the category were bred to kill indiscriminately - they were expected to obey handlers just like any other working breed
and there are a number of fighting breeds outside of the category as well
but yes it's a bit irresponsible to allow the proliferation of some strong breeds, breeding should be a serious crime... these dogs are all over the southern us
Every cattle dog I have known has been ball-obsessed.
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> To conclude, there appear to be parallels between excessive toy motivation in dogs and behavioural addictions in humans.
Understandably, however, the must authors qualify and frame their conclusion, so later on they add:
> Despite the observed parallels between high-AB dogs and humans affected by behavioural addictions, we refrain from conclusively characterising high-AB dogs as exhibiting addictive behaviour, given the absence of established benchmarks or standardised criteria.
because it releases dopamine and is not related to whether the animal or someone will crack or be cracked with viable offspring
evolution via natural selection doesn’t require every trait to have a meaning or purpose, why do intellectuals get it backwards with retroactive explanation
if the trait persists or is present after sexual maturity, then it doesn’t get weeded out by sex and has no purpose or adaptive explanation whatsoever
in this case, play releases dopamine. dopamine production is a guiding force for being with dopamine.
mammals get addicted. rats and humans react the same to the same reward experiments. dogs exhibit the same traits while being exempt from the experiments
I think when she wasn't in the forest, she was just waiting to go there again. Instead of ball, it was forest.
Indeed. Mostly because every study on "behavioral addictions" is published in third tier journals or is a negative result in real journals. It's something that doesn't actually exist in mammals and it's current popularity is mostly from profit seeking scams for rehabilitation "clinics" preying on the 'screens are addictive' meme burning through current parent populations.
And despite the headlines suggesting otherwise, and the press likely running with those false headlines, *the actual study itself does not find any addictive behavior*. A null result.
>Despite the observed parallels between high-AB dogs and humans affected by behavioural addictions, we refrain from conclusively characterising high-AB dogs as exhibiting addictive behaviour, given the absence of established benchmarks or standardised criteria. It is important to be cautious when pathologising behaviour, especially given that even in humans, addictive behaviours are still difficult to define and measure.
It's not "Nature", it's "Scientific Reports" with impact factor of only 3.8 vs 48 of "Nature".
Sure the publisher is "Springer Nature", and the domain is "nature.com" but that doesn't make the journal "Nature".
The quote you cite doesn't support your claim. If there is no established criteria, then no amount of evidence will establish the link. But absent a rigorous definition, they are still giving evidence for a qualitative similarity between human addiction and the observed animal behavior. That's not a null result.
what is the definition here? are impulsive avoidance copings like playing a video game instead of doing the hard work of addressing the worries/planned hard activities not a “video game addiction”?
and if we are talking physical withdrawal, then how should we call the same aspect of nicotine/alcohol addiction mechanics?
There are things you don't do but you understand not doing them is hurting you, so you decide to follow CBT (for example - there are other ways, but CBT has decent efficiency although it's expensive). They don't really need to be classified disorders or fobias.
Similarly, there are things you do and you realize not doing them would be beneficial to you. So you try to stop them and you realize it's hard. Again, you can use CBT or another method (or even medication in some cases). Whether you classify these things as "behavioral addictions" or use another term is secondary, the phenomenon itself is very real and I find it baffling anyone would dispute that.
What's self-evident to you (and me) to some people gets in the way of a neat description of society.
What about gambling, eating, or shopping?
We used have words like "vice" and "sin" to describe these poor choices, but thanks to post-60s radical individualism, the only vocabulary for describing maladaptive behavior that remains of the language of medicine. Therefore, everything bad someone does is a "disease" for which he needs "therapy" or "treatment". We've utterly lost the capacity for describing deficiencies of the conscience.
But then again, so is "vice" and "sin". You're not helping.
Put it another way: why would gambling companies continue to develop gambling machines? Why not stop with the mechanical, one-armed-bandit of the early 1900s if what they do has no effect on people?
But who made him start gambling in the first place? It's not like people who start gambling don't know how it ends. The most addictive slot machine in the world can't compel someone to sit at it for the first time. People KNOW these machines are addictive and choose to use them anyway.
It used to be cultural common knowledge that the wages of sin is death.
Bingo. The machines don't play themselves, of course. But at the same time, the manufacturers and casinos know exactly what they are doing. I would say:
We've utterly lost the capacity for describing deficiencies of the conscience.
applies to those the manufacturers and casinos as well.
> Behavioural addictions, characterised by compulsive engagement in rewarding activities despite adverse consequences in the long term, are more heterogeneous and less well-understood than substance addictions, and there is a relative lack of translational research.
Does that make sense to anyone?
"more heterogeneous" (trans: different)
"less well-understood: (trans: I have no idea, but I need to finish this paper)
"adverse consequences" (trans: Who knows? But, I surveyed pet-owners for their opinion, and cited some other source)
"relative lack of translational research" (trans: sounds good, whatever it means)
Dogs can mess themselves up for these rewards in various ways, and nobody much has worked out any useful facts about it yet.
... including us.
Spaniels are all rounders in terms of their working - they’re as happy to flush, work ground or retrieve. 2/3 (and have done some light work) of ours are reasonably well trained but as mentioned they’re normally happier having a good sniff than picking up a tennis ball.
Probably living in the countryside that’s more interesting than chasing a plastic ball about all day.
On the topic of ad-infinitum ball throwing there are literally people automating this task [1] which I think is pretty terrible.