Is "Why does my pet do X?" on topic?

Question

These questions are often unanswerable since the actual triggers for most of these activities are going to vary.

For instance:

Why is my dog afraid of other dogs? There are hundreds of potential reasons for this and with out being able to know a whole lot more about the dog there is no way to know for sure.

Why is my cat so interested in me making the bed? - Who knows maybe it just likes to watch you make it, maybe its a signal that you are going to leave for the day, maybe it is waiting because you usually feed it after you make the bed. Maybe it thought it saw something to play with come out when you were making it one day and now hopes to see it again. And there are hundreds of more potential reasons. We can not really know this and even if we do know it the answer is not terribly helpful.

Most of these types questions should be savable by asking how to correct it, and possibly if it is a behavior that should be corrected. But I am thinking that it might be helpful to add something about this to the help center.

Other wise if we ask why does my dog bark? That is a guessing game or a dart board and is not likely to be helpful.

Answer 1

These types of questions are on topic as long as they are not so broad that you cannot provide a sensible list of potential answers.

For example, Why do dogs eat grass? could be considered too broad, but it's a common question and the provided list answer covers most bases. It was a broad question that did not require clarification.

If you feel a behavior-based question is too broad to be answered, you need to ask the questioner for clarification regarding the specifics of their particular situation. You need to discover what the impetus was for the question being asked. We must all judge whether these questions are too broad, request clarification if they are, and rescind close votes either when clarification is sufficiently supplied, or if a provided answer seemingly covers all bases; making the question less broad.

Answer 2

I don't think we should focus on banning questions because they don't have answers.

If you look at who answers questions, you can see a very small group of core users, which is to be expected with a starting site like this I think. But even more so, because each person only really sticks to certain types of questions (Probably why our answer rate is still only 1.6).

For an example: I myself will generally only stick to reptile questions, because I'm more comfortable answering those types of questions. I only answer the occasional dog/cat question when I feel like I have the experience to give another answer. Combine this will all the different types of questions we get, we need a larger group of people who can answer different types of questions before we start to see more variety in our answers.

So I guess what I'm getting at, is I think there are people who can answer those questions, if they aren't answered yet, then it's because we don't have people to answer them yet.