Transcription
A Twitter post by Kylie Cunningham @kyyylieeeee that reads “today at the airport one of the drug dogs set off a false alarm and officers rushed over to find out the dog had alerted them for a piece of pizza. the handler just patted his head and goes “it’s okay buddy i know pizza always confuses you” and gave him his treat anyways.”
I don’t disagree with everything you say but this post is totally fake. Trained dogs would definitely not alert for pizza, why the fuck would pizza be inside luggage, and they absolutely don’t reward these dogs for mistakes. Ffs, please use some critical sense?
You
The post
It’s there literally in the article that the handler rewarded the dog for a mistake. Whilst I doubt that in this case it was the handler’s intention to incentivise the dog to make that mistake more, in practice by giving the dog a treat for making that mistake they were doing positive reinforcement of that behaviour.
It’s not an article it’s a random tweet that may or may not have been true.
In my experience descriptions of events (like the one in the article) are less likely to be false than absolute certainty general statements about things always/never happening (such as “they absolutely don’t reward these dogs for mistakes”).
This is mainly because the absolute certainty general statements are pure opinion worded as fact (i.e. with no actual study or similar to back that assertion that something always or never happens) hence usually bollocks, whilst somebody describing an event would have to willingly, explicitly and activelly be lying for it to be false.
So purelly from the way you worded things, that random tweet is already way more believable than your post.
Then beyond that, what’s described in that post is the handler being nice to the dog for their quirky behaviour, which doesn’t at sound far fetched - I’ve often seen people unthinkingly reinforcing a dog’s negative behaviour because “it’s cute” - people like dogs and often end up doing dumb things with them because they like them, which is how you end up with dogs which are too fat (which is bad for the dog) because that dog is smart and good at begging for food.
I’m not even saying that the poster you replied to claiming that handlers were purposefully mistraning the dogs was right (frankly I have no idea as, like you, they just voice opinion as fact), I’m saying that the way you tried to counter argument that post is even more bullshit than that post and now you just doubled down of scoring own goals by claiming the tweet itself is possibly a lie.
I am not the same person that you replied to.
What article? You mean the Internet meme? Memes are passing as articles nowadays?
Does me using the wrong word (“article” instead of “tweet”) alter the point that the previous poster’s absolute statement “they absolutely don’t reward these dogs for mistakes” is just an opionated statement with no backing meant only to contradict the event related in that tweet?
In the face of two statements unsupported by evidence (the tweet and that post I replied to), what’s more believable:
It does, because a random person being humorous on twitter carries no presumption of truth. An “article” kinda implies that, unless it’s satire.
What makes you say that? There is pretty strong evidence that they do.
What evidence? Dogs with jobs get pretty strict training.
The conditioning doesnt work well with a delayed reward. They dont wait until after the search and the dog is proven correct to give the reward when in the field, (unlike in the training where the handlers know which items are correct ahead of time and can only reward correct responses )
Your also making a huge assumption that the officer handling the dog is actually good at his job.
Or cares about the people they are harassing
Why wouldn’t pizza be in luggage? Taking a leftover slice in a plastic bag on my carry-on to wait for my flight sounds like a fantastic idea and is way cheaper than buying food there. People pack all kinds of snacks and meals for the airport.
A dog alerting for food is also not that shocking at all, especially if the officer rewards them anyway. Sure a freshly trained dog might not do it, but if their handler still rewards them for alerting on foods then they will forget their training pretty quick.
And well an officer doing the wrong thing and disregarding their training is not hard to believe at all.
Everything in this story is definently plausible