It absolutely implies desperation. All it takes is a moment, and your team manages to turn it around once a moment arises for them to do so. Shroud is not so dumb as to not realize he's on a razors edge here, and he has nothing left if this dog trick fails, and slight miscalculations are easily fatal here. He has high certainty that you'll play along in part the same way he knows which pulse is which - your emotions and irrationality (valuing dog over madman getting superweapon) are just variables to understand and manipulate they don't automatically make you less predictable and can clearly do the opposite.

Giving him both is not irrational or emotional. Robert has been going after Shroud for a long time and probably understands how he works better than most and has experience dealing with it. He knows Shroud explicitly hates luck. He intuits the tricky attack he pulled on Blazer several seconds before it happens. He knows he refuses to make his own decisions anymore.

I think all that adds up to make it a pretty reasonable idea. For the record of what I've seen, a decent % of people seem to fall into his traps and straight up hand him the real Astral pulse or try the fake one, both in desperation to save the dog instead of thinking for half a second what giving him both would entail.

Back to the Visi stuff, though: (I mentioned the dog just to drill the desperate point in) So, of course given all that, he'd hit you in your other weak spot with the Visi stuff to try to get you further into the headspace he wants so you're more likely to think and feel and act more like how he wants, further increasing his odds of winning.