This article on dog intelligence has been floating around for a couple of days now. According to Freya and Axel, the part where Professor Stanley Coren and team put the Rottweiler in ninth place on their list of the ten most intelligent breeds, has got to be totally wrong, since Rottweilers are obviously the smartest dogs on the planet and maybe in the universe. I happen to agree with them, but we are admittedly somewhat biased.
I’m not exactly shocked at too many of the findings. The fact that most dogs can understand as much language and math as a two-year-old human child is not surprising at all. Ask most dog owners how many nicknames their dogs have and respond to, and how many toys and people the dog can identify by name. Add to that the commands that even barely-trained dogs know, like sit and down, and that’s already a lot of words out of the 165 to 250 words, signs and signals that most dogs are supposedly able to understand.
This amused me, though: “A survey of more than 200 dog obedience judges in the US and Canada has also helped to reveal the most intelligent breeds.” It’s a good thing that an expanded version of the article linked does go on to mention that there is a difference between intelligence and trainability. My dogs are very intelligent, but I can’t say they’ve been particularly easy to train. Not for me, anyway. Maybe I’m the one that is not smarter than a two-year-old!
This statement, though, is something I’ve seen so many times:
“[Dogs] can also deliberately deceive, which is something that young children only start developing later in their life.”
When our first two Rottweilers, Heidi and Oscar, would be given treats at the same time, Oscar would usually finish his first. If it was a large treat, like a rawhide bone or a large biscuit, he’d finish well before Heidi. One day, he was watching Heidi still enjoying her treat. He got up and ran to the back door and barked a couple of times. We, and Heidi, of course assumed that Oscar wanted a potty break, so we all got up and headed to the door. Oscar ran back around to where Heidi had left her treat and grabbed it. And that was all he wanted. He was able to fool Heidi on several other occasions with this trick, but eventually she did catch on.
And this is probably more misdirection than deception, but every one of our dogs, past and present, has used the trick of parading some item back and forth and making it seem super happy fun to try and get a more coveted toy away from one of the others. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Intelligence, instinct, deception, whatever. It’s still fun to watch.
(NaBloPoMo | August ’09: 11 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 199 of 274)