The claim: dogs can sense our feelings and emotions.
Can you prove it? No.
Can you have an opinion about it? Yes—absolutely!
Can you promote your opinion as fact? No, but a lot of people do, and that’s a bigger problem than it appears at first sight. We’ll get back to that in a moment. Put your THIMKING caps on… there are about five different things that have to be explained and then brought together to understand the unwanted storms they create.
Coincidence is not science. If you get angry and your dog sits down, and then tomorrow when you get angry your dog sits down, and then two days later again when you get angry your dog sits down, that’s not proof that every time when you get angry your dog is going to sit down.
Proving something isn’t just a statement saying you’ve proved it or that you *can* prove it, it means that you’ve got data—even if it’s just anecdotal data—and it’s observable, reproducible, and it’s been vetted by any number of others, and it holds water. Too many people don’t understand how hard it is to prove *anything.*
Here’s the appearance of an A-B split: (anecdotally, if you know it’s what it is, you do, and if you don’t you don’t) A) if you believe dogs sense emotion then that’s your foundation, while B) if you believe dogs detect behaviors then that’s your foundation. A) is founded on woo-woo science, and B) is founded on science.
Always focus on the behavior.
Going Down the Rabbit Hole
Nature really needs you to go through all of the following, and it’s long and it may seem convoluted, but unless you make the effort to go down the rabbit hole and understand its parts and its whole, you won’t become familiar with the surroundings enough to know how to get yourself out of the hole in which the current culture unfortunately has us stuck, and stuck we unfortunately are.
Keep It Scientific
If you assume that dogs magically and accurately sense our emotions, and you proceed believing that they are able to detect, non-physical evidence, that is a problem.
What do you mean when “a dog senses your emotions?” I think more to the point, what do you expect if they *ARE* able to sense your emotions? What expectations do you have for the dog when you’re feeling ___ and you look at them and you think to yourself, “<gasp> She ‘knows’ I’m feeling ___!”
So what?
No, seriously, this is a two-part question and the first part is “So what?” and the second part is “How did you ever get to believe that that’s something they’re even able to do?”
In the absence of others to challenge any assumptions you make, in the absence of others to challenge your opinions you hold to be true—when they’re false—you’re going to live as you deceive yourself into believing something you think that’s happening that’s not happening.
The “So what?” Part
If you’re talking to your human friend and you’re confiding in them that something makes you feel a certain way, that’s human interaction and human currency. But to think that your dog can identify your emotions… I’m not even sure I can ask the question that goes to the jugular: how does knowing that even help you?
I claim it doesn’t. I claim it may be an indicator telling you you may be on a dangerously slippery slope.
“Believing your dog knows more about you than you do” *may* make you feel good about yourself because you can convince yourself that you know your dog knows more about you than you do, but look at the negative side of that same claim—your dog knows more about you than you do, yourself. That does not seem to be a good thing; that just seems to be a really bad indicator.
Please, just stop there. Look at how you’ve given up responsibility for knowing yourself—period.
If anyone reading this thinks their dog knows more about them than they do, themselves, please have the discussion with one of your most trusted friends, with a counselor, a minister, a confidant, family member or co-worker, or anyone in the mental health field that gets you figuring out where you can go and what you can do to re-engage with learning about yourself and learning more about your insides than you do now.
What your dog knows about you is none of your business.
The “How did you ever get to that conclusion?” Part
“Esoteric” means “understood by very few people.” This part is esoteric. The discussion that follows is esoteric.
What facts did you use that led to proving the conclusion that your dog was able to sense your emotions? Did you make note of those facts? Did you retest them? Did you tell your friends and ask them if it made sense that you believed that? Did you ask other friends if they experienced the same phenomenon, and were they able to test their claims, too?
Opinions are like belly buttons: everyone has one. Having an opinion that dogs can sense our emotions is an opinion anyone can have, but it’s not a reasonable opinion and I’ll step out on a limb and say that I believe it’s a dangerous opinion to support. It’s dangerous because
- there’s no proof it’s true
- it disconnects you from your dog
- it (arguably) disconnects you from yourself
- it (arguably) takes the focus off of your emotional center and core
- places dogs into the placeholder position that was meant for another human to occupy
- and promotes a non-existent ability in dogs that has limited or zero use to humans.
What May Be Going On
Other humans around us can kind of sense and identify our emotions, but face it: it’s never with 100% accuracy. If humans can’t accurately sense others’ emotions, how can dogs—wild animals that have the brain capacities of toddlers—how can we assume it’s okay for dogs to be bestowed the ability to accurately sense, detect, and identify them? It’s a thorny question. The question itself isn’t thorny—the fact that the question needs to be asked is thorny. How could we have become so non-scientific? How could we have become so enamored with woo-woo science over real science? That’s a dangerous series of writings on the wall…
If it were physical behavior that you believe the dog was detecting, that would make sense, because of behavior can be seen, behavior can be measured, behavior can be counted, multiple people can see that behavior, and that’s just science. Here’s where the problem comes up. But magically, mysteriously, mystically, being able to accurately cents, experience that we are experiencing in an emotional space in an intangible space inside of us… It’s just beyond understanding, explanation, and comprehension, that that even that that possibility even exists. That’s not a firm, solid, scientific, evidential foundation, on which to build understanding about how dogs are, how they act, and what makes them do what they do.
Let’s assume that you make the assumption that every person around you can look at you and “sense your emotions.” Can they? No, but then why do we somehow give dogs the ability, why do we project onto dogs the ability to be able to detect emotions, when we don’t even believe that humans have the ability to do the same thing? It’s so confusing, so convoluted, so messy, so impossible to express, and to talk about, that it’s really difficult to know how to even Address it to start shooting holes in its hole to sync it and get rid of it.
Always focus on the behavior. Emotions can cause behavior, but behaviors are not the cause of emotions. If you need to take time to ponder that, then do, because the world is counting on you to have taken the time to thoroughly ponder it.
Keep it scientific.
Know what you’re feeling. Know your emotional space. Balance your outside-the-body attention and awareness with a balanced amount of inside-the-body attention and awareness. The current culture has us externalizing everything, and that’s abnormal. Life doesn’t happen 100% on our outsides—it’s a beautiful interplay and balance between the inside worlds and the outside worlds.