Even Lassie Was Trained!

Even Lassie Was Trained!

This piece follows directly on from a previous blog I wrote in response to an RSPCA report on injured deer. In that earlier discussion, I touched on the way we frame animal suffering, animal purpose, and animal worth — and, in doing so, I briefly referenced rats trained to detect landmines and the way they are often described as ‘heroic’. 

That example stayed with me, because it sits at the centre of something much bigger: the stories we tell ourselves about animals, and what those stories allow us to feel comfortable ignoring. This blog grows out of that moment of reflection.

Most of us grew up believing animals could be heroes long before we had any real understanding of what heroism actually means or how animals learn, behave, or are prepared for the roles we ask them to perform. From television to comic books, from family storytelling to headline news, animals have been presented not just as capable, but as morally driven — brave, selfless, instinctively compelled to protect and save. As heroes.

That idea takes root early. And it stays with us.

That shouldn’t surprise us. Decades ago, researchers John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller, in their published work Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog, demonstrated just how profoundly early experience shapes canine behaviour, perception, and future response. Their research showed that what an animal is exposed to during its most susceptible developmental periods doesn’t just influence learning in the moment — it sets a framework for how the world is interpreted going forward.

Dogs exposed early to certain experiences carry those impressions into adulthood. And despite our far greater cognitive capacity in certain areas of life, humans are no less susceptible to the influence of early developmental experience than any other animal.

We might like to think we are exempt. Or exceptional. Or somehow above it. We often place ourselves in the role of observer, guardian, or interpreter of the animal world, as though we stand outside it. But we don’t. We are still very much part of it.

Like other animals, our early exposure, socialisation, and emotional framing shape how we interpret the world long before we have the language to describe it. The difference is not that we are unaffected — it’s that we have the cognitive capacity, later in life, to recognise that we were affected at all.

As far as we know, we are the only species capable of reflecting on our own development in this way. We can look back, question it, and re-examine it. But that blessing or curse (depending on your perspective) doesn’t place us above the animal kingdom. It simply places us within it — with a particular set of tools for self-reflection, speech, and meaning-making that other animals may not possess, or at least not in the same form.

And I want you to realise why that matters here, when we consider the ‘heroic’ actions of animals, because the heroic animals that dominate childhood television, books, and storytelling, land at precisely the point when our uniquely moral frameworks and emotional expectations are still being formed. Long before we understand training, conditioning, or behavioural shaping, we have already absorbed a template: animals as instinctive moral actors, compelled to protect, save, and sacrifice.

What I’m saying is that we are taught that animals can be morally driven heroes, at an age where we lack the intellectual capacity to actually understand or question those teachings.

That template doesn’t disappear as we grow older, just as our childhood doesn’t disappear either. Instead it remains with us, despite the passage of time. Childhood experience persists, and it drives much of our decision making, individual natures and preferences well into adulthood.

Heroism is a word that sits easily with us. It’s warm. It gives us somewhere safe to place gratitude and admiration. And when we apply it to animals, it offers an extra comfort — the sense that courage and moral goodness aren’t uniquely human traits, but something we share across species. What we were conditioned to believe as children, is reaffirmed in adulthood.

Generations (including mine and very likely yours) were raised on this framing. The loyal collie who sensed danger before anyone else. The wandering dog who turned up just in time to put things right. The animal companion who seemed to understand human crisis and step in without being asked. Long before many of us ever encountered working dogs in the real world, we had already been taught what animals were meant to be.

In that earlier blog I mentioned, the example of landmine-detecting rats was meant to illustrate how selectively we apply sympathy and admiration. Small animals, trained to work in unimaginably dangerous environments, are celebrated as heroic, while other animals — often suffering just as acutely — are framed very differently depending on context, usefulness, or narrative convenience. Pests, disease-spreading or convenient for laboratory experimentation. It was that contrast that prompted this deeper look at what we actually mean when we talk about heroism in animals.

Once the storytelling falls away, what we’re left with isn’t spontaneous moral bravery in non/human animals. What we see instead is selection, conditioning and purposeful training. The deliberate narrowing of an animal’s natural behavioural choices towards outcomes that almost exclusively serve human needs — and occasionally conservation goals — but rarely an animal’s own independent evolutionary agenda.

Police dogs aren’t simply discovered. They’re selected. Often bred with particular traits in mind: nerve strength, environmental resilience, controllable aggression thresholds, the ability to recover quickly from stressors. They’re then carefully placed to be raised in accordance with acceptance and tolerance for what their future life purpose involves. Trained through structured programmes designed to produce reliable responses under very specific conditions. Dogs that don’t meet those standards don’t progress. They’re redirected, rehomed, or quietly removed from the system altogether.

The public sees the finished product.

They never see the funnel.

What is produced is an animal that has been intentionally conditioned to act in a way that best serves humans, even if the actions don’t best serve itself, or come with significant risk. The dog is completely oblivious to unrealised, potential risks, because it has been (for want of a better phrase) ‘programmed’ to perform.

And this pattern isn’t unique to policing. Detection animals. Military animals. Protection dogs. Assistance dogs. All reflect the same underlying reality: reliability is engineered. Behavioural variation is reduced and response predictability is built in.

Elite performance — in any species — almost always comes at the cost of genuine preference, or true choice. But a human animal is aware of a future that it has not yet experienced. Risks can be known, and even where the calculation falls against the best interests of the human, they can choose to act in ways whereby they knowingly place the safety of others before themselves.

That’s heroism.

If I say that a robot is programmed to perform a task, most people accept that it’s following design and instruction. That’s it. No feelings such as empathy or compassion are considered necessary.

However if I say that a ‘heroic’ animal – just like the robot – is also simply but deliberately programmed (conditioned) to serve human goals, irrespective of risk to itself, people often bristle, because now we are ‘making’ an animal do something that it wouldn’t naturally choose to do that may result in harms of which it has no understanding or awareness.

 So let’s say instead, that I tell you that the animal is a free thinking individual that is simply ‘trained’ to make guided choices using ‘kind techniques’ based on ‘what is the morally right thing to do in certain circumstances’, and things suddenly feel more comfortable. All of a sudden I’m telling you that the animal – like the human animal – can understand the morality of right and wrong and that it can act in accordance with this moral framework to act in a just and even heroic manner. I’m lying to you, but you will be at ease with the lies because they resonate with your childhood storytelling experiences.

The functional aim in all three cases is remarkably similar: produce predictable behaviour under defined conditions to better facilitate human-centred outcomes.

We soften the language when the subject is alive, sentient, and emotionally meaningful to us.

Then we soften it further.

“Trained” becomes “served”.

“Conditioned” becomes “protected”.

“Reliable performance” becomes “sacrifice”.

And before long, we arrive at “hero”.

Which raises an uncomfortable question.

If an animal has been shaped to strongly prefer one behavioural outcome…

If alternative responses have been made unrewarding or actively suppressed…

If deviation has been reduced to the point where reliability is expected…

Are we really looking at heroism?

I would confidently argue that we are not. 

I would argue instead, that we are looking at the deliberate manipulation of biological selection combined with behavioural engineering of an animal lacking the appropriate self-awareness to evaluate and consent to its intended future – that being to predictably serve outcomes intended to benefit human objectives and minimise human effort, costs and associated risks above the wellbeing of the servant animal itself.

The ‘hero’.

Jamie Penrith

July 2026