WHY ANIMALS DO THE THING

Some of both, really. 

There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that domestic dogs and cats understand that baby humans are not full-grown humans, and they’ll often be extremely tolerant of or even very attached to human spawn. They’re often very gentle and tolerant with babies of their own species, so it’s not really surprising that - assuming they understand baby = small human - they react to human babies in similar ways. Similarly, dogs that have never encountered babies or toddlers tend to be a whole lot less comfortable around them, and don’t modify their behavior and communication as much when interacting with them. 

It’s also totally possible to teach dogs and cats (but mostly dogs) to accept a new baby in the house - but this generally results in the dog not stressing / being afraid of the baby, rather than suddenly liking it. 

I will also add that part of what you may be seeing in some of the videos - and I can’t tell you for sure because I don’t know what you were watching - is learned helplessness. Western culture has a really bad habit of assuming that our pets should like our babies and pretty much forcing them to put up with really rude / uncomfortable / painful / inappropriate treatment from little kids. A lot of times what looks like a cute video of a dog and a baby is actually a really uncomfortable dog signalling desperately that it would like this to be done now, please. That’s why so many times when a dog bites a kid people say it “came out of nowhere” - not because it did, but because they’d been ignoring the dog’s signals for so long that the dog finally ran out of ability to tolerate things and communicated it’s discomfort in the only way it knew how. 

haleyth:

skate-dog:

notactuallyherenotreally:

haussofkm:

mockeryd:

Dog: I AM SORRY BABY HUMAN! DO NOT CRY ANYMORE! i SHALL BRING YOU MORE TOYS

The cutest thing ever.

is no one gonna mention how it gives the kid a playstation controller?

like ‘here small human, this makes the big humans happy. i am sorry please stop crying’

dogs are so pure like ???????

why-animals-do-the-thing is this just anthropomorphizing or is it an actual behavior? the dog’s tail is up and wagging and its ears aren’t held back, but this could just be appeasement signs?

These gifs are from this video  If you watch it, this is actually a trained behavior on the part of the dog. The video is on mute with dubbed over sound, so you can’t hear the cue, but the way the dog looks at the person holding the camera and where the cuts are inserted make it obvious this isn’t just footage of a ‘random occurance’. 

Dogs don’t understand the concept of guilt, so the closest this might be is ‘dog learns that bringing the child things makes it stop making loud annoying noises’ but at that point, the dog would likely bring the baby anything, not just toys. Either way, it’s a moot point because it’s a trained behavior.

gaymilesedgeworth:

simply-canine:

zooophagous:

tastefullyoffensive:

“This is my bed now.” [video]

That dog is straight up big enough to bite that kid’s head off his shoulders and his parents let him smack the dog in the face to make a cute video for the internet.

This is where “It happened completely out of nowhere we were so shocked!” begins. They’re lucky this animal has as much restraint as it does.

My heart dropped into my stomach watching this.

this. is. fucking. scary. why do we have to be the ones scared for these people’s damn babies? take care of your fucking kids

This is actually sickening. That dog was clearly distressed and confused by the kid smacking it in the face and people think this is okay and even funny? Not to mention the huge risk to both the child and dog. Disgusting.

Waltz comment: 

While obviously this isn’t good, this dog is still clearly being tolerant of the baby. It stands up suddenly but it’s behavior codes more as surprise than aggression, and it stops to watch the kid afterwards like ‘wtf’. Children should never be allowed to be unattended around dogs, and this is definitely not okay, but that is pretty much the calmest, best response you could ask for from a pet dog.  

kaciart:

onlylolgifs:

Dog teaching baby to jump

omg

So, good news, this is actually nothing to do with the dog interacting with the baby and you don’t have to expect a post of super bad baby/dog interaction horror doom. 

Bad news, this isn’t a great behavior for the dog. He’s actually chasing the shadow of the baby’s swing moving. This is a behavior that occurs a lot when dogs are encouraged to chase laser pointers (which is fine for cats, but often becomes obsessive in dogs) - they’ll generalize to any moving light or shadow. Dogs that do this will often chase headlights that come into a room through windows or the reflections of light off of basically anything. 

It’s cute, and we don’t know the extent of this dog’s fixation so it might be okay, but it’s not a good behavior to encourage as it can turn into really obsessive and harmful sequences.