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.”

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    You

    they absolutely don’t reward these dogs for mistakes

    The post

    the handler just patted his head and goes “it’s okay buddy i know pizza always confuses you” and gave him his treat anyways.”

    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.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 days ago

        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.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 days ago

        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:

        • That somebody saw a working dog handler rewarding a dog for doing something funny even though that’s not really what the dog was supposed to do?
        • That working dog handlers absolutely don’t (i.e. none, ever) reward dogs for mistakes?
        • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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          4 days ago

          It does, because a random person being humorous on twitter carries no presumption of truth. An “article” kinda implies that, unless it’s satire.