Humans learned the hard way in 1908 that sometimes classical conditioning can come back to bite you in the arse – or, as it were, shove your kids into a river. The tale goes that a “hero” dog who was rewarded with a steak for saving a drowning child decided to make it into a full-time gig, shoving unsuspecting children into the Seine so that it could fetch them out again. You’ve got to respect the hustle, I guess.
The story, published by the New York Times on February 2, 1908, begins with a Newfoundland dog owned by a man living on the banks of the Seine just outside Paris. This heroic pooch went leaping over hedges and into the water when it heard a child’s cries, rescuing the wee tyke after they had fallen in while playing. A straight-up rescue, and one that was reportedly – and rightfully – met with a steak reward for our brave Newfoundland dog.
In what would already seem like a bit of a strange coincidence, the exact same dog rescued another child from the Seine two days later. Another life saved, another steak, and it was here that a pattern started to emerge.
Children started falling into the water more and more frequently, getting rescued by the same dog each time until “hardly a day passed” that a child wasn’t taking an involuntary plunge and getting pulled out by the Newfoundland pooch. Residents grew concerned that a “mysterious criminal” might be at work, so set up a watch to catch the horrid child shover red-handed.
The perpetrator would be caught, but instead red-pawed. Yes, it seemed the dog had picked up on the fact that if it pulled a child from the Seine, it would get lots of food and attention. However, the children weren’t falling in at a rapid enough rate, so every time it saw a child playing near the edge of the bank it would shove them in before pulling them out. “He had thus established for himself a profitable source of revenue,” said NYT.
The New York Times describes the tale itself as “a good story,” so the events are to be taken with a pinch of salt, but the idea that a dog might learn to do something for a reward is far from far-fetched. Pavlov’s famous theory of classical conditioning demonstrated how dogs could learn to anticipate a reward with a stimulus (though the actual experiments themselves were a lot more horrific than some food and a few bells), so why couldn’t that stimulus be yeeting a child into the Seine?
Let the Newfoundland Seine Shover be a reminder to choose carefully when rewarding your dog’s behavior.
An earlier version of this article was published in March 2022.
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