To Err Is Human And To Forgive Is Canine

To paraphrase the saying that to make mistakes is human and to forgive is divine, it has become popular among those who love their pets to say that forgiving is canine.

Just seeing two dogs that have a fight in the middle of a game – and as in a few seconds the aggression disappears and they start having fun together again – you can understand how little space the rancor occupies in their lives.

We spiteful beings aspire to be forgiven by them. Also, we almost always get it.

animal forgiveness

Forgiveness, in addition to being part of human nature, is also part of other animals. These attitudes could also be observed in other species, for example:

• Monkeys;
• Goats;
• Sheep;
• Dolphins.

Of course, as a social being, reconciliation and forgiveness is inherent in the dog.

Social Animals Seek Reconciliation

So it is that men and other social animals, like our furry friends, if we do not repair our relationships with our near and dear ones, we will lose the advantages of cooperation. In short, social animals – including humans and dogs – reconcile because they need each other.

Scientist Frans Do Waal, who has spent more than 30 years studying primate behaviors, explains that forgiveness, often considered unique to humans, could also be a natural tendency among cooperative animals.

Thus, it points out that, insofar as the data of social life are kept in memory for the long term – in most animals and humans – there is a need to overcome the past for the benefit of the future.

Following this reasoning, the tendency to reconciliation would be a calculation of political or social personality that varies according to species, gender and type of society.

to forgive is canine

We are used to observing how, many times, dogs that were mistreated by humans, come back to trust other people who offer them care and protection.

Without these extreme examples, we can point out that, on a daily basis, and even without realizing it, we can have arbitrary attitudes towards our pets, which are passed over or quickly forgotten by them.

Beyond the theme that dogs’ memory works differently from ours, or that they use calm signals, and far from any scientific statement about it, everything would seem to indicate that furry ones try to understand our attitudes and apologize for they.

How the memory of dogs works

Is that, if we observe their everyday attitudes, the dog seems to have no memory to hold grudges.

But how do the different types of furry memory work? Let’s see:

• The associative. It allows them to learn different commands used for their training.
• The mechanics. Through it, they know what moves to make to solve a situation. For example, to solve elaborate thinking games in which you have to overcome different obstacles to get a reward.
• The affective. It is the one that relates your moods to concrete situations. It can manifest when animals vomit or drool or when they are in a vehicle. In short, it is a feeling, with a special emotional charge, which manifests itself every time a situation occurs that, previously, has acquired a positive or negative meaning for the dog.

memory and forgiveness

Also, our canine friends, in addition to having very well developed their sense of smell, have a great olfactory memory. Although they don’t remember scents of their own volition, when they come into contact with a scent that they’ve been exposed to in the past, they remember immediately.

However, they lack temporal memory. They don’t have the ability to remember an exact time or date. But anyway, thanks to their episodic memory, they can associate a person with good or bad memories, even though dogs lack the possibility of remembering when this fact occurred.

Possibly through this mechanism, they too may choose to forgive.