Do dogs forgive you when you accidentally step on them?
Michelle Hauck
2025-06-15 00:56:30
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: 17
Dogs have the ability to understand human intentions based on their emotional response. This means they understand it was an accident - and you wasn't trying to hurt them intentionally. Dogs understand mistakes. You have effectively apologised, believe it or not. Dogs, cats, and pigs to I believe, are physically social animals and understand apologetic petting. They do it to each other all the time and they realise it's a mistake once you do so. If you just talk nice to them and pet them and maybe give them a treat it's fine. Dogs accidentally hurt each other when they are playing and they get over it right away. You just apologise the same way you would apologise to a child or when you hit someone by mistake. Petting him like crazy and talking with a comforting voice should be enough.
Kristofer Cronin
2025-06-04 22:47:10
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: 17
They may be startled/scared, hurt or could even hold a grudge temporarily. Some dogs may completely brush it off without a thought. Dogs are actually really good at picking up on our emotions. So if you step on your pup’s paw and feel super guilty about it afterwards, he can most likely sense that. There have been studies done that have shown dogs do understand human intentions to some degree. Your body language and facial expressions may tell your pup that this was an accident. Accidentally stepping on your dog’s paw is bound to happen, unfortunately, but it doesn’t have to be the end of the world. You and your pup love each other, so even if he’s a little upset at first, he won’t stay that way.
Jena Lowe
2025-05-27 20:21:35
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: 13
Scientists believe that when dogs appear to forgive their owners, they are able to understand that their owners did not mean to cause them harm. The perception of emotional expressions allows animals to evaluate the social intentions and motivations of each other. Using a cross-modal preferential looking paradigm, we presented dogs with either human or dog faces with different emotional valences paired with a single vocalisation from the same individual with either a positive or negative valence or Brownian noise. Dogs looked significantly longer at the face whose expression was congruent to the valence of vocalisation, for both conspecifics and heterospecifics, an ability previously known only in humans. These results demonstrate that dogs can extract and integrate bimodal sensory emotional information, and discriminate between positive and negative emotions from both humans and dogs. If you just talk nice to them and pet them and maybe give them a treat it's fine. You just apologise the same way you would apologise to a child or when you hit someone by mistake. Petting him like crazy and talking with a comforting voice should be enough. Dogs understand mistakes. You have effectively apologised, believe it or not. Dogs, cats, and pigs to I believe, are physically social animals and understand apologetic petting.
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