Interesting talk on Animal Minds with inputs from Alexandra Horowitz on dog cognition. I am big fan of her work but I disagree when she starts generalizing. She infers dog's aren't guilty conscious but they act just submissive when they do something is wrong and hence that guilty look. May be its true in an very abstract sense. How can we can explain this - When Max does something wrong, he reacts very fast reading my subtle facial expression even before I start emoting and he does one or all of the following few:
- He takes that big "gulp" (sweetest thing to watch), emulating a cartoon character.
- The common head down posture with guilt in the eyes
- He would start jumping on me trying to pacify me with a twinkle in the eyes saying "dude, no sweat".
The "guilty" feeling we emote varies drastically even across humans depending on culture, religion, morality et al and we cannot even begin to stereotype them. It's very unfair that we to personalize everything if its human but generalize when it comes to animals.
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