Text From Dog Analysis

One particular internet trend in the last few years, Texts From Dog, humorously captures the relationship between a human and their dog, as well as the imagined inner workings of the lovable furball’s mind. Much like the character Doug, in the Pixar film Up, the dog/dogs of Text From Dog is easily excited, if not a little feistier. The comical adventures chronicled in the Texts From Dog series range from every day delights, like being fed, to the woes of having to wear a cone or finding out that their owner is cheating on them and has been petting other dogs. While entirely fictional solely for entertainment purposes, Texts From Dog helps to illustrate that the bond between a pet and it’s owner is something special. For a pet owner, there are

Dogs are capable of feeling complex emotions beyond those of instinct, especially when they develop relationships with humans. In order to distinguish between instinct and emotion, a few definitions are presented below. Instinct is described as “a way of behaving, thinking, or feeling that is not learned: a natural desire or tendency that makes you want to act in a particular way” (Merriam-Webster). The two best known instincts across different species are the entitled motherly instinct and the fight-or-flight instinct. These two instincts are found in animals such as primates, dogs, tigers, and even humans. To better explain the concept of an instance, the stimulus for the maternal instinct is interacting with some sort of an offspring, while the stimulus of the fight-or-flight response would

During a study examining jealousy in domestic dogs, it was found that when presented with a situation designed to inspire jealousy in which their owner gave another (stuffed, to maximize their control in the situation) dog, among various other objects, a bit of attention, 36% of the dogs exhibited aggressive behavior by snapping at the object (Harris, Prouvost 4). The discussion of the results addressed the issue that they used a stuffed dog in the study instead of the real thing, but added that “86% of the dogs sniffed the anal region of the toy dog during the experiment or post-experiment phases,” leading them to believe that the fake dog was realistic enough to fool the test subjects. The study shows that even dogs whose owners believed they would not exhibit aggressive behavior did, which raises the question of whether or not jealousy has a primordial form that is existent in dogs and infants. Dogs have been known to be territorial, which could very easily be mistaken for jealousy, but in the study done, dogs would also try to gain their owner’s attention by pushing or nudging the owner or placing themselves in between the owner and the object. This far less aggressive behavior could be an indicator of the feeling being less territorial and more closely related to a feeling of