I think Cal's point is that while dogs may do these things it reduces to a set of behaviors where maybe 90 percent of them are beneficial to the dog-weedwacker system and the remaining 10 percent are really unfortunate.
We can't really know the dogs inner life so we just kinda have to reduce it to a set of behaviors selected stocastically.
The dog meanwhile has no ability to understand the weedwacker or what it's doing on its back.
So when the guy puts the weedwacker on the dog and the dog predicably does dog things and that results in disaster the guy isn't able to clutch his pearls and say "I guess the system broke containment!"
> The dog meanwhile has no ability to understand the weedwacker
Nah, I’m pretty sure that most medium or larger dogs get that the noise means danger - even if they can’t give a TED talk on how the mechanism would work that would hurt them.
Dogs are similarly interested in / aware of potential energy (things falling from heights or sliding off of angles) - if they’ve seen it enough times for their level.
We can't really know the dogs inner life so we just kinda have to reduce it to a set of behaviors selected stocastically.
The dog meanwhile has no ability to understand the weedwacker or what it's doing on its back.
So when the guy puts the weedwacker on the dog and the dog predicably does dog things and that results in disaster the guy isn't able to clutch his pearls and say "I guess the system broke containment!"