CleverPet: A Console that Teaches and Feeds Your Dog All Day | Hacker News Reader

CleverPet: A Console that Teaches and Feeds Your Dog All Day

kickstarter.com

12 pointsllamafarmer5 comments

While I admire the goal, this solution makes me sad. If a dog needs more exercise, then it should be exercised more often. A responsible pet owner should know their schedule and lifestyle, and choose a dog whose exercise needs match that.

I find it unfortunate that some pet owners would absolve their responsibility towards their pet with a machine. There is great value to the relationship between a pet and its owner during both feeding and training. While it's neat that we live in an age where technology allows us such "conveniences", I think there is a point where you must ask yourself what is the point of life if you don't actually do anything meaningful? Bonding with a dog, if you have not experienced it, is a lot more meaningful than just making sure they don't shit on your rug while you're gone.

I think this could be more than just a substitute for responsibly exercising and interacting with a dog. I work at home and take my dog for plenty of walks and hikes, and do a lot of training with her, but she's very smart and food motivated, and loves all the Kong-like food dispensing puzzle toys. I suspect she would love this, and if it were a bit cheaper, I'd be all over this. (I could get a lot of $10 dog puzzles for the cost of this.)

Founder, here

Thanks for your comment. Like you, we'd be disappointed and surprised if our users viewed CleverPet as a substitute for real interaction. Our concern is for the times during the day when a dog would like to have something to do, but doesn't. When we've spoken with other dog owners, it's not that they don't want to engage with their pet, it's that they can't. Very few people with dogs can afford to spend eight hours a day directly engaging with their pet, and until now, that has just meant lots of bored dogs. Arriving home to a dog who's happier and less anxious means a stronger bond and fewer behavioral issues.

Teaches my dogs what, exactly?

That's part of the curiosity / discovery point, here, isn't it? We'll find out exactly what they're capable of learning.

I like to think of it like the direction we've seen with video-game systems for humans. We started with hand-held controls, with buttons, and we even still use that now. But it's only relatively recently that we've started using motion-sensing interfaces like the Kinect and Wii. And a big part of making that work is having so much information available to us about how video-game system / human interaction works. It helps us have a better idea of what might be possible.

I think it's important to not underestimate the capabilities of other animals -- just because they don't have language and it often appears that we're much smarter than them, doesn't mean they don't have something valuable to show us. Communicating with other species and the potential to understand how other species process/understand the world is a fascinating possibility.

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