Comment by cmrdporcupine

Comment by cmrdporcupine a day ago

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If there's a frisbee or ball in sight, my female border collie won't even attend to basic bodily needs. And she'll chase the object while she's in pain and exhausted or shivering with cold and not notice. She has lupoid onychodystrophy which causes her nails to come in deformed and split and painful and she'll still obsess on some running play/task while she's got bleeding paws and can barely walk. An an owner we have to intervene to remove the object of obsession and force disengagement.

This is a product of centuries of breeding to focus on a task and enjoy the task above all else.

gigatree a day ago

It’s kind of funny how the idea of behavior being a result of breeding goes out the window when it comes to pitbulls. Retrievers naturally retrieve, collies naturally herd, but when a murder-canine eats a family it’s all “oh it could have been any breed”.

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  • micromacrofoot 21 hours ago

    it's more nuanced - "pitbull" isn't a single breed, it's a category

    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

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    • gigatree 19 hours ago

      Obey handlers to do what?

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      • micromacrofoot 18 hours ago

        to not bite people! it's the compact between species that is the reason dogs were allowed to become dogs!

        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

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  • testdelacc1 a day ago

    It’s just wokery innit. Can’t even train dogs to murder children nowadays because the woke brigade will cancel you.

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tsol a day ago

I wonder if autism is a similar kind of selection process. They are people selected by nature to be obsessed about different things, but this could be incredibly fruitful if you end up focused on the right thing. Of course in this situation we have no control over the selection process, it's a product of living in a world that's difficult to

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captainclam a day ago

The two dogs I know that share this behavior are border collies.

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  • dwd 18 hours ago

    Have a non-working line border collie, and he has had zero interest in chasing a ball his whole life. All he ever wanted to do was run or chase birds. He failed all his training, didn't even get through puppy preschool as he's not that food motivated either.

    Every cattle dog I have known has been ball-obsessed.

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librasteve a day ago

my sprollie is the same (half nap collie) … he is 100% ball obsessed

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