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[Rose]

Cats and dogs have both evolved to be sociable.

Spiders have evolved to eat their mates when they're done doing the business.

[Grim Portent]

There are also some that form colonies of interconnected webs they maintain as a group, share captured food and care for their broods collectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_spider

I would also expect a spider the size of a dog to behave very differently to a spider the size of a grapefruit. Differences in the way strength works as size increases, the efficacy of venom production compared to using mechanical force to cause injury, the requirement for better vision, more food, decreased efficiency of webs and so on would make their standard lifecycle rather impractical.

[scrdest]

There are also some that form colonies of interconnected webs they maintain as a group, share captured food and care for their broods collectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_spider

I would also expect a spider the size of a dog to behave very differently to a spider the size of a grapefruit. Differences in the way strength works as size increases, the efficacy of venom production compared to using mechanical force to cause injury, the requirement for better vision, more food, decreased efficiency of webs and so on would make their standard lifecycle rather impractical.

Well, then you're just speculating any which way the fancy strikes you. If we went with that, the first thing that would happen is that it would have to have lungs, because the trachea simply do not work at the dog-scale. Cognitive efficiency is not correlated with size alone; the bigger you are, the more neurons you need to wire up all the bodyparts, and improving that to mammalian levels via evolution is not a given (but possible - ask octopi).

[Grim Portent]

Large carnivores have a tendency to be somewhat intelligent, it seems somewhat sensible to me to assume a large spider would have to follow the trend that active carnivorous lifestyles require decent intelligence as you get larger and need more food than can be acquired by sitting still and waiting for it to blunder into you (aquatic environments being an exception as there are a lot of fairly large animals that sit still and snatch passing prey as a large part of their hunting strategy).

I can't actually think of any large carnivore (fennec fox or larger) that can't be trained in some fashion, even if it's as simple as teaching them a specific set of circumstances that lead to feeding time. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals have all been observed as learning when and where to expect food in captivity, and have been trained to do tricks as a result. Hell, I've even seen lobsters trained to do simple tricks.

Important to note there are some jumping spiders that demonstrate reasonable intelligence, being able to solve simple puzzles for rewards or to avoid punishment and having complex hunting behaviors. As well as some social behaviors similar to the social orbweavers, such as sharing food. I could easily see such things being trained if their brains weren't the size of pinheads.

[Neonivek]

I can't actually think of any large carnivore (fennec fox or larger) that can't be trained in some fashion

Sea Sponge

[Eric Blank]

man-o-war and really big jellyfish.

I fully expect the first few owners of dog-sized spiders to be eaten by them.

[Grim Portent]

I should have specified carnivores that actually have a brain. 

But yeah, I imagine even a tame giant spider would still be a dangerous pet in the same way large monitors are if they have the wrong temperament. Niles can do a lot of damage if they want to.

[hops]

I think you guys underestimate how dangerous dogs are.

[Eric Blank]

Dogs at least are bred to be subservient and those genes are most expressed. Usually a dog with a bad attitude is the product of an owner with a bad attitude or no idea what they're doing.

Or feral, stray. Being loveable and loyal doesn't make sense when there's nobody to love.

Other animals don't have that 30k years of genetic conditioning based on a species that is highly sociable and has a top-down social structure rewarding loyalty to the alpha.

[hops]

I mean in an alternate universe with dog-sized spiders we would probably have bred them to be loyal and subservient and become dark elves.

[scriver]

Yeah

I fully expect the first few owners of dog-sized spiders to be eaten by them.

I fully expect the first few owners of dog-sized dogs to have gotten eaten by them too

[pisskop]

idk.  Spiders wouldnt work as large dogs.  Plan and simple, their bitties wouldnt scale right.

so, if they were the size of a dog, they wouldnt be spiders?

[Grim Portent]

There used to be some very large spiders and spider like creatures back when there was more oxygen in the air, but even they topped out at sizes still quite small compared to dogs. Water is a far better environment for invertebrates than land. I think ancient spiders capped out just a bit larger than the foot wide ones that you can still find today.

Some bits would still work if you made a spider 4 feet long, but others would long since be rendered useless. Their respiratory system is rather bleh for trying to support large bodies, the whole exo-skeleton thing has problems as you scale up due to the different ways weight and strength scale as you go up in size. The exoskeleton should get heavier faster than the muscles get stronger if I remember how that whole mess works correctly, and you'd get a spider that breaks under it's own weight.

Hell, needing to moult periodically would screw a lot of them over if they were big, try hiding your soft smooshy body when you're the size of a beachball and things want to eat your tasty goopy bits. It ain't easy.

[Levi]

A cat with a headmice infestation.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[hops]

Why is food crawling on my face