Mystery solved:
Smart dog.
I’m not sure I buy this. I’d agree that their memory is much lower than humans, but my experience with dogs is that they do remember negative episodes.
When I first got my previous dog, a choc lab, we went for a walk. She was still quite young and we walked past a parked school bus. Right when we were by the rear wheel, the air brakes let loose and scared that poor puppy nearly to death! For the rest of her life, she was scared to death of school busses! Not all busses, just school busses!
Now I have an adopted coon hound and he reacts very aggressively to men wearing carhart coats! I suspect that his previous experiences haven’t been nso great with men wearing carhart!
That said, I do agree that they only remember the most traumatic episodes! I suspect that they “don’t sweat the small stuff, unless it is about bits of food.”
;-)
We took our Golden Retriever up the road to a pond on a trip to the mountains.He dove in and chased sticks for an hour with a happy face on.We left to go home a week later.
The following YEAR, we went back to the same house and Charlie leapt out of the car as soon as a door was opened, raced up the road and jumped in the pond, waiting.
No memory?
My wife is and always has been terrified of snakes.
Her reaction to a snake is so rapid and so violent that I don't think there is any "remembering" going on. She recognizes that the object is a snake and the rest is on auto-pilot.
I think it is possible, though difficult to know, that some animals routinely operate on a similar principle. Recognizing a danger or associating a situation or object with potential pleasure doesn't necessarily require any conscious memory of why that association exists.
Anyone who has rescued abused dogs would call this BS.
I’ve had dogs who had the canine form of PTSD.
They remembered all their yesterdays, alright.
There has been a deluge of anti-dog propaganda, of late.
This, to me, goes hand in hand with the all the pro-Islam drivel.
Our dogs are part of their conquest agenda.
We have a coon hound that we adopted at about five weeks old and has NEVER been abused but to watch him you would never know it.
If I pick up my back scratcher he zooms out the doggie door. He pretty much stays outside during football games where there is a lot of cheering or jeering.
Once I clapped my hands loudly and he jumped out of the window. Living in Houston the windows are seldom open but I guess he must have remembered it was open and used it because it was the quickest escape route.