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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

There are dogs that have vocabularies of several hundred words. People should breed those together, rather than the incomprehensibly stupid existing breed characteristics.

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Smart dogs are working dogs. If they've got no work, they'll get up to bad things usually because you've left them in your house all day. If you want a pet, get a dumb dog. Or, a very lazy breed, like a greyhound.

Greyhounds are as full of love as they are glorious stupidity. I highly recommend them to anyone considering dog ownership.

I do wish I had a border collie (very intelligent working dog) in my life though. I should go round befriending local farmers so I can play with their dogs :D

Agreed. I think people forget that smart animals are smart enough to do bad things because they feel like it

I had a particularly smart and runty beagle when I was a kid that watched the cats jump the fence once, and then worked out that she could leave whenever she wanted.

The donkey has the reputation for being stupid and lazy because it, unlike the horse, is smart enough to tell the human “I don’t care”

I had a super smart poodle mix growing up, and it was smart enough to easily open the latch on its cage from the inside with its tongue. It also knew how to rearrange chairs in order to climb onto the dinner table.

The ones that are too smart outsmart the owners, which some dog owners see as a bad thing.

Do you really want to breed half-sentient predators that survive just fine in the wild and human settled areas?

Your cute little buddy living a hard life after a few feral generations after being bred for intelligence... I don't know most people live lives almost completely sheltered from wildlife, but let me tell you, wild dogs can be scary.

Yes, definitely. Because most of the dogs that would actually be looked after would be great for a variety of other tasks - everything from being service dogs, dogs that check for illegal substances by smell, police dogs, dogs who can herd animals and a variety of other tasks. Even new tasks that people still haven't been able to offload to canines.

If the animals can provide more value to humanity and will be allowed to become smarter and somewhat evolve, i think it's definitely worth it. Otherwise, if selective breeding for utility wasn't a thing already, we probably wouldn't have breeds that are passable for any of the tasks above.

As for wild dogs, this hasn't ever been a major problem in my country. I haven't seen any, there have never been any news stories about people being bitten or killed by wild dogs, i don't know anyone who has had run in with them and frankly there are bigger problems in the country - things like racoons and other small animals that carry rabies, foxes and the occasional wolves that kill off young deers and does alike, beavers that build dams and flood portions of the forest and so on.

Edit: looked for any studies that i could find, sadly there were none that'd attempt to quantify how many stray dogs there are in the country and how many of those have attacked people and how many have attacked other animals. Just found a news report of one person being bitten by them: https://baltics.news/2021/03/16/in-rezekne-region-a-woman-is...

Just to be clear, i am not attempting to say that wild dogs are not a large problem, just that it's not a problem everywhere to the same degree and that quite possibly there are other social factors at play - why would there be more wild dogs on one region of the world as opposed to another, especially when humans are the ones who breed these animals in the first place? Do the people not look after them? Are there puppy mills that get abandoned? Do people generally not view having dogs as a great responsibility? Are there no services that take care of wild and stray animals?

It's not like humans couldn't do anything about it either - if wild dogs are an inevitability in certain parts of the world, why not disallow "importing" dogs of these breeds to those regions and disallow breeding them there?

Here's an example of concentrated effort in regards to eradicating rabies in the country, i don't see why something similar couldn't be done in regards to stray animals (though it may only work on a smaller scale like in this country, at least without lots of coordinated effort): https://ec.europa.eu/food/sites/food/files/animals/docs/reg-...

I've lived in Norway (>30 years), Ireland (>10 years) and in California (3.5 years). There's extreme differences in culture around dog ownership in different areas. In the time I lived in Norway, nobody I knew had abandoned a dog. Getting a dog is a commitment for the lifetime of the dog; the only cases I've heard of relocation of dogs from anybody I knew has been for medical reasons (e.g. discovering somebody in the family has an allergy). In Ireland, it is similar, though people don't seem to take quite the same commitment (based on known several people that got dogs from shelters). In my relatively small social circle in California there were two families that got and handed off dogs in the 3.5 years I was there. It was just not seen as a big deal.

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