With the caveat that you can "drive any creature crazy" if you put it into insane environments (such as a panther in a small enclosure), feed it with poison, or torture it continuously with actions, substances, and behaviours from the outside, all the rest of the behaviour problems you might come across can be chunked up to versions of "attention seeking behaviour".
This is a very, very interesting phrase. Just run it through your mind and apply it to a creature of any kind, a dog, a child perhaps: "She was attention seeking all the time." What response, what gut response do you have to that phrase?
It’s not a good one, I would wager. It’s along the lines of, "Dear oh dear. Tut. Shake head. Naughty child. Ah, she’ll learn to keep herself quiet eventually. Her parents probably "spoiled" her. She thinks she’s the centre of the universe. Ah, we’ll beat it out of her ..."
It is extraordinary to me just how we have come to that. Where did this come from? Who was the first to think it was a good idea to leave a child crying for hours in the dark and expect this to be "good for them"?
At least now (in the last 30 years or so, to put it in perspective, and by all means not in all Western parent’s thoughts) it is held to be the right thing to feed a baby when it is crying and as soon as possible because...
• The baby doesn’t cry because it is naughty or evil but because it is using a feedback device that is programmed in to alert the care takers of a shortfall of food supplies.
• A baby fed immediately has a better immune system, less sleep disturbances, even more intelligence as umpteen scientific studies now decree.
• The caretakers of a baby that is fed immediately experience massively less stress, less psychological disorders and less psychosomatic disease because the baby is easier to satisfy and cries markedly less overall.
This process is the exact template for energy exchanges of the "love" kind. Dog attention seeking behaviour is a feedback device designed to alert those who can do something about it that there is a shortfall in an energy system that cannot be alleviated by other forms of energy but specifically needs to be fed by the attention of others.
As an aside, it is my supposition that even universal Christ love cannot satisfy the human circuitry set up to process and utilise human energy input. It can, however, feed the overall system enough to stave off full collapse if it can be successfully received on a regular basis.
Dog attention seeking behaviour is set up so that reflexively and unless there are mitigating circumstances, western humans will automatically draw back and refuse to give that attention.
It is extraordinary how we have been programmed to think of "neediness" as a terrible character flaw and to jump on it viciously and trying to extinguish it at every possible opportunity, no matter how insane and totally crippling such behaviour may be.
For example, you may have come across the way that young medical doctors are kept awake due to an insane rota system for days on end. Here the "need that must not speak it’s name" is sleep. Everyone needs sleep for maximum functioning. No-one whatsoever is served by a tired, unconcentrated doctor – not the system, not the doctor, not the nurses, and most totally not, the patients. Yet that system is still in place and there is tremendous resistance to changing it.
