Dogs Can Be Pessimistic

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday October 13, 2010 @04:52AM from the dog-in-black dept.

Not that it will change anything, but researchers at Bristol University say that your dog might be a gloom-monger. In addition to the downer dogs, the study also found a few that seemed happy no matter how uncaring the world around them was. "We know that people's emotional states affect their judgments and that happy people are more likely to judge an ambiguous situation positively. What our study has shown is that this applies similarly to dogs," said professor Mike Mendl, an author of the study and head of animal welfare and behavior at Bristol University.

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Re:Being a dog owner ... by CarpetShark · 2010-10-13 05:16 · Score: 5, Insightful

Being a dog owner, I think most dogs just want to hump, eat, and sleep. Some like to bark.
If you honestly don't realise that your dog has a sense of humor, needs to socialise, to challenge itself on a long run, to play in a river, then I worry you might not be qualified to own a dog.