Anthropomorphism - My Dog is Smiling at Me!

  Have you ever looked at an animal and made an instant connection to a human emotion?  An example of this may be when we swear our dog is smiling at us as he happily pants by our side.  The human tendency to assign human emotions or attributes to non-human objects or animals is called anthropomorphization.  This tendency is not in itself a negative thing until we begin making assumptions about the root cause of an animal’s behavior and respond in a negative or harmful way.

  You might wonder "What’s the harm in assuming that my cat or dog is happy or sad"?  The problem arises when we take the range of human emotion and attribute it to a specific action.  One of the things I hear of frequently is when an animal is exhibiting unwanted elimination behaviors.  A family comes home from vacation tired, happy, and with a list of chores a mile long.  As they rush to get back into their routine a puddle of urine is found on the floor by the front door.  Instantly, Mom and Dad are disgusted and frustrated.  The assumption is made that the cat was “pissed off” because they had been gone for a week.  As punishment, Dad mops the floor with Fluffy to clean up the urine.  Yuck!!!

  The cat has absolutely no idea what it did wrong and it most certainly is not going to learn its lesson, other than I think I need to avoid the tall man that shares my territory.  Upon further investigation, there’s a rather simple explanation for Fluffy’s behavior.  A few weeks before the family left for vacation a new feral cat had appeared in the yard and Fluffy made it clear that this newcomer was unwelcome by growling and screaming at the living room window.  I can almost guarantee that after the family left this cat felt a little more comfortable coming closer to the house and may have even started scent marking around the perimeter.  The only response that Fluffy could think of was to clearly mark his territory by the main entrance to his territory by spraying his urine as at the door as a clear warning. 

  In this case there’s no need to respond angrily to the cat for doing something that is as natural as eating and sleeping.  While the peeing behavior needs to be corrected, once we find the cause, we can come up with an effective solution to make it stop.  For this case, any urine should be cleaned using an enzymatic cleaner that actually breaks down the urine as opposed to just wiping up the mess with a standard cleanser or vinegar.  Without an enzyme cleaner the smell of the urine spot is still present to our companion animals even though we can’t still see or smell it. 

  In addition, the new feral would need to be relocated or encouraged to move further away from the house to prevent Fluffy from becoming so anxious about the encroachment on their territory.  This can be achieved by live trapping the feral and releasing them in a new area, setting up motion activated water sprinklers as a deterrent near the house, or placing citrus smells or planting rue around the house as a natural deterrent.  The end result is that Fluffy feels secure in his home territory and Mom and Dad are happy that he’s returned to peeing in the litter box.