Do we know anything about animal's memories? When they get to be adults do they still remember being kittens or puppies? Has any study ever been done on this? People always say animals just think in the present and don't worry about the future or remember the past but how can anyone really know that? Clearly they have some memory because they remember the sound of cans of food opening or going to the parks or like this dog does, his favorite old spot to sleep. But can we even know how far back they can remember?
They have past memory, but they probably don't have the type of memory we do. Like they aren't going to remember dates, but they'll remember faces and probably smells.
My families old dog had a happy fit when my uncle came back home, and the last time she had seen him was 5 years prior during her puppy hood. She was never that friendly towards anyone else except the family, at least not right away.
My current dog also flipped out when we took her to a certain park where she got to run around off leash, and she hadn't been there in at least a year.
I think that myth just comes from uninformed people, or misinformed.
>>2122485
I wonder if they ever get nostalgic and remember previous homes they lived in and the things they used to do there. My cat used to love running up and down the stairs of our old house and now that we live in an apartment there are no stairs. I always regretted that part of his life got removed. I wonder if he remembers the good old days of running up those stairs.
my dog got hit by a door once and has not trusted doors since
>>2122489
I'm not sure, but when we moved to the coast and my dog got used to having a huge yard, she would get nervous and depressed when I had to leave her with grandma (a small apartment we were living in before) for a couple days.
It got to the point where if I came back to town and stopped by to say hi, she would want to come in the door. I thought maybe it was because I wasn't there, so I the next time I had to leave her, I stayed the first night with her.
She would just wander around, looking sad, sigh and then lay down. Sometimes she would walk to the door and just stare at it with her head and ears down. She didn't want to play or get cuddles, she just wanted OUT. It was pitiful lol.
>>2122475
the problem is there's a difference between a conscious memory and an unconscious one.
You can by conditioning be trained to react a certain way to a certain thing without actually knowing you're doing it. The reaction is automatic.
this type of memory isn't what you think of as a memory. i.e., you can't actually remember it, your body does.
it's likely that most of the memories dogs have are unconscious. Just conditioned responses to past stimuli. It seems likely they remember certain people and places, but it's impossible to know if they remember anything about them aside from how they make them feel.
both of my cats seem to be sentimentally attached to 2 toys from their kittenhood. One is a crocheted candy corn on a string I made, and the other is a ball with a bell in it that was his in the shelter. We've bought similar ones, but he doesn't react even close to how he reacts to the one that came with him.
we rent a house at the beach for a couple of weeks every summer and bring our dog. we stayed at the same house for years and then switched to a different house 1 street away. the dog kept trying to go back to the old house even though it was ~8 months since it was last there. even 2 years later, she still tries to go back to the old house.
I think I read about this a little while ago, and what it came down to was dogs are more likely to remember "feelings" than actual images or memories of the events that created those feelings.
So a dog might not be able to remember why the door is scary, or what happened to make the door scary, or make a distinction between "before" and "after" the door became scary to him, but he remembers the pain of the door hitting him and the fear from the suddenness of it.
My cat seems to forget she is a mother and treats her now grown daughter like all the other cats. They are definitely closer than the other two but she beats all the three equally.
My dog nearly drowned when she was younger, around 2 or 3 years old.
Until she died at the age of 12, she never went into a large body of water and whenever she saw someone else swimming, she would try claw them out.
I'd say that's memory.
When I worked for a boarding kennel we had these two dogs from the same family. We'd put them in a random medium size room.
When they'd come in from the yard for the first time while boarding again (usually months between visits) they'd always run straight for whichever kennel they were boarded in the last time they had stayed and paw at it to go in. I'd have to show them the new room they were in this time and the cycle would continue next visit. They usually stayed for a week each boarding so I think they got used to and remembered which room was "theirs" previously, either by location or smell, and were always drawn back to it.
