resource guarding V protection proper - Page 2

The ball example is still self serving behavior. 

when a person does volunteer work in an impoverished country, there is no element of self-serving behaviour in the human?

and could not the dog  protecting the child be just patterned behaviour by association.

your basically saying dogs possess altruism, free will and reasoning.

that's a big stretch for me.

for the record, i am broadly speaking a Skinnerian at heart.

I've trained enough dogs to know that they do have will.  I don't know about free will, but they are trained to think and make decisions every day.  How would protecting another dog or child with no training be self serving. 

There was a story in the news a couple of weeks ago about some kids out playing with their pitbull in a creek bed and the stomped thru a bees nest in a rotted log and were attacked by bees.  The littlest kid couldn't climb out of the creek bed so the pit bull grabbed him and dragged him up out of the creek bed.  Kids had to go to the hospital where they were pulling bees out of their hair.  Dog could've demonstrated self serving behavior and taken off home to where the parents, food, water, shelter were.  He made the choice to drag the kid up the creek bank.  He exercised judgement and will to help someone else at the cost of his pain and suffering.

I have lots of those examples with dogs and wolves.

Far too many real life examples like that to think that they are dumb animals with no ability to reason or think. 

isn't this a contradiction;

"but they are trained to think and make decisions every day.  How would protecting another dog or child with no training be self serving. "

go to germanshepherds.com you will read a thousand posts a day how rin tin tin jr protected the some liitle old  lady from "potential" kidnap, rape, robbery, drowning, terrorists, aliens................

i don't take to many of those endless stories seriously, humans have a high capacity to see and give meaning to events that have little or no meaning.

conversely i see guys who's dogs do protect them evry other night and they are like meh, thats why i feed the stupid a-hole.

But you avoid the tough questions. You can't ignore the tough ones and rotate to a different tact.

self serving in this example to me would be a dog of questionable nerve using threat or defence behavior to keep people away from him. The self service, to the dog, is the image  of creating a safe space. It can become perverted to the point of agrression towards owners. The dog will get a little 'high'' from the person retreating from the dog and use the behavoir more often to recreate the feeling of control.This happens, especially in a dog without good basic obedience.

Exactly GSDstudent!!!

WHich is why I stated earlier that weaker nerved dogs are easier to use for personal protection.  Much easier to elicit the self serving response reliably.

yeah sorry i see glaring contradictions, not saying i have the answer as i am the one who posted the question.

the explanations provided seem to refute themselves from my read.

you both talk about some etheral thing as if it is above a stimulus / response level and then you both qualify with something that is precisely a stimulus response thing in your own words, frikkin mind bendingly illogical.

anyhoo getting too far afield, thanks for the thoughtful and interesting discussion.

They aren't amoebas.

There is more to interaction than stimulis response.  That is a training/psychological view point.  The real world is more grey than that.

Answer the first hard question. We'll start there.

Why did Czar get up and turn the water on for Blitz without getting a drink for himself?

i think i did describe a stim- responce example. dog has underlying fear, uses agression to ward off threat- repeats.