How do dogs know that completely different looking dogs are also dogs?

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Poppavalyim Andropoff
there's an app called Doggr they use
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Syntaxion said:
Maybe their behaviour. Or smell perhaps too? idk
How do you know people how look completely different from you are also humans?
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Humans don’t have nearly as much genetic variation as dogs do. The average white man and the average black man, even if they look completely different in terms of facial features, are generally going to be of the same build and stature.
 
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DoNotFeedTheSneed said:
Humans don’t have nearly as much genetic variation as dogs do. The average white man and the average black man, even if they look completely different in terms of facial features, are generally going to be of the same build and stature.
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Fair enough. That does add another question in my head

Would a german shepard think of a wolf as just another dog?
Wolves certainly resemble shepards more than pugs or chihuahas do.

What about cats and other felines like the lynx?
 
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Syntaxion said:
What about cats and other felines like the lynx?
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Even if a cat did know that a lynx is also a cat, it wouldn’t matter much. Unlike dogs, cats are not a social species and they’re predisposed to treat everything besides them as a hostile. The sole exceptions are humans and other cats within the same household because those are seen as family members.

Syntaxion said:
Would a german shepard think of a wolf as just another dog?
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They do. there’s like 5 different breeds of wolf-dog hybrid. The Czechs even used one of those hybrid breeds as military dogs during the Cold War
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It's probably due to instinct, but what I mean by that is all sensory data being processed in their brain (smell of the other dog, sounds it makes, how it looks, how it behaves, etc), and making an "educated" assumption. This would be for the individuals in general, a mentally damaged subject may process things differently.

If you were to put an alien who looks, smells, behaves, etc as other dog, but is not, it would probably fool the observer dog because the "checkboxes of traits" was filled enough for that assumption.

But outside of crazy hypotheticals, this would appear obvious & the assumption would be accurate, so a normal Rottweiler would think of a German Shepherd as something close to itself, as opposed to a human (but without classifying the dog like humans do, with words and fairly defined categories or concepts).
 
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We Are The Witches said:
It's probably due to instinct, but what I mean by that is all sensory data being processed in their brain (smell of the other dog, sounds it makes, how it looks, how it behaves, etc), and making an "educated" assumption. This would be for the individuals in general, a mentally damaged subject may process things differently.
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So what you're saying is, if an individual smells different from me, makes different sounds than me, and behaves differently than me, it's probably not human?

Based, thanks.
 
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Different breeds of dogs are more varied from eachother than different "races" of Homo sapiens are.

Differences among the latter could be like differences among the different breeds of cats, at most.
 
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I read somewhere that dogs see humans as weird-looking dogs. And they probably think the same thing about other animals too, especially if they share similar characteristics. So by this logic, if dogs think any creature is a dog like them, then they can recognize each other as dogs.
 
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We Are The Witches said:
It's probably due to instinct, but what I mean by that is all sensory data being processed in their brain (smell of the other dog, sounds it makes, how it looks, how it behaves, etc), and making an "educated" assumption. This would be for the individuals in general, a mentally damaged subject may process things differently.

If you were to put an alien who looks, smells, behaves, etc as other dog, but is not, it would probably fool the observer dog because the "checkboxes of traits" was filled enough for that assumption.

But outside of crazy hypotheticals, this would appear obvious & the assumption would be accurate, so a normal Rottweiler would think of a German Shepherd as something close to itself, as opposed to a human (but without classifying the dog like humans do, with words and fairly defined categories or concepts).
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If only some weird little gremlin that vaguely resembles a human didnt write this...
 
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