Betsy the Border Collie knows more than 300 words. Sure, she’s no Alex-the-African Grey. She won’t be speaking them anytime soon. But she knows them. She can act on them. And she understands them in different contexts, displaying a knack for abstract thinking we’d never before thought possible in animals—not to mention dogs.
So goes National Geographic's March 2008 cover story. It details the unique intelligence of creatures we'd never considered brainy before. But the best part is the dog section (what can I say, I'm specieist).
Though canines are considered to be endowed with less smarts than an ape or an elephant, for example, they’re uniquely talented when it comes to detecting acoustic patterns in human speech. Even an ape can’t grasp the meaning of new words as fast as Betsy does.
Some researchers postulate it’s Betsy’s breed type that makes the difference. Herding dogs have been selected for their ability to receive and respond to verbal commands for hundreds of years. This genetic predisposition has been honed through countless generations of canines by interbreeding the best herders. It makes sense they’d have the kind of intelligence we’d recognize best.
This is why wolves, the canids we’d guess might reign intellectually supreme for their need to survive in the wild, don’t register so high on the IQ scale. Verbal command-oriented dogs are the smartest—by our standards of measurement, at least.
This verbal bias might also explain why cats are considered less intelligent than dogs, and why pigs beat out sloths.
After reading this article, I couldn’t help thinking we Homo sapiens have no earthly way of measuring true non-human intelligence. All we can measure is what we perceive. And the kind of abstract thinking that might take place in a cat’s brain may as well be detectable on Planet Zog, but it sure ain’t clear here on Earth.
That’s when I got to thinking about my stupid stupid Frenchies. Man, are they dumb! By dog standards, they’ve got to rank sub-Maltese. Still, I’ll take a Frenchie any day over a Border Collie.
I don’t know about you but animals with the intelligence of a toddler are not my cuppa tea. I went through the terrible twos once with my own human and I certainly wouldn’t want to live with it ever again—never mind 24/7 for the next fourteen years.
But who knows? Maybe my dogs’ tile-trained lifestyle and rejection of commands (even Brian Kilcommons couldn’t teach my Sophie to sit) represents a higher intelligence than what we assume lies behind Betsy’s deep brown eyes.
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When I got my boston terrier/pug mix puppy, I hired a trainer to help me since I couldn't train her. I told him "I can't figure out if she's really really smart, or really really dumb." His answer?... "Have you ever seen a seeing-eye pug or a bomb-sniffing boston terrier?" However, just recently, I did see a boston terrier service dog to a blind woman! And my frenchie foster dog is definitely smart, but very stubborn.
Tara March 18th, 2008 06:52:00 PM
As you point out, it depends how you define intelligence. If your definition is dependence upon and interest in communicating with another species, then I guess dogs are more intelligent than a lot of animals. They are certainly unique.
People say things such as "Afghan Hounds are so stupid. They are hard to obedience-train". Even if true, this does not, in my mind, equate with stupidity. It equates with independence. It means that, having lived in isolation and been bred for the purpose of sighting, chasing and killing prey without human involvement, they have not needed to learn tricks/commands/artificial tasks in order to succeed in human society.
It's hard to determine if a dog is intelligent when what you really mean is other-directed. The two are not really the same thing.
All my dogs have been intelligent - they've managed to live quite well while I do all the work :>)
Caveat March 18th, 2008 08:07:00 PM
Border Collie! Always the Border Collie gettin' all the attention for doin' what comes naturally for them. I figure intelligence has to do with thinkin' outside the box--solvin' a problem in a totally unexpected, uniquie way. F'instance, I may be a terrier, but I don't like gettin' my feet dirty with all that "go to ground" business. (Australian Terriers started out as herdin' dogs anyway.) But I did need to take care of those pesky gophers on the ranch. What to do, what to do... Well, I figured those gophers had to be as dumb as dirt so I just sat myself down next to one of their holes and waited. Sure 'nough, up pops an intellectually challenged rodent. Score one for the terrier with the clean paws! Taught all my pups to do the same thing. Reduced the gopher population and didn't track dirt all over AHM's floor. Hmmmm...that's two problems I eliminated with a single idea.
Harrison March 18th, 2008 09:05:00 PM
I once had a cat display an example of (I believe) abstract thinking that's not very remarkable in itself, but coming from a feline did surprise me a little. As a child, I lived in a big house where you could go from one room to another on the ground floor until you came back to your starting point. One day I was dragging a rope through the rooms and my cat was chasing after me. Then suddenly she ambushed me from in front -- she had switched and gone round the circle of rooms in the opposite direction. Now, since the house layout can't be seen all at once, she must have had some sort of mental map.
T.T. March 18th, 2008 10:43:00 PM
Really, the idea that higher predators, like cats, dogs, and their wild cousins, wouldn't be able to make a mental map of their territory is pretty funny when you think about it--but ordinarily, we're not encouraged to think about it. We're encouraged to think tha they're "dumb animals" and don't think _at_ _all_.
The example of abstract thinking in a cat that first caught my attention was when I brought home a new cat from the shelter. The new cat was in her cardboard carrier from the shelter, and my older cat was making her (negative) opinion known, approaching cautiously--and then she stopped. And looked around, to where her own pink, plastic carrier was sitting in the corner. She sat down, and looked back and forth between the two carriers several times, clearly, unmistakably, thinking about it, and making the connection.
(It took a while, but eventually they became the best of friends.)
Lis March 19th, 2008 06:14:00 AM
I once had a beagle/rat terrier mix who was a houdini at getting out of a fence. One day I took her in a car over to a friend's house. We had never been to this person's house, never had driven there or walked there. It was about a mile away, across a very busy 4 lane city street. The next day I came home from class and she was gone. I walked the neighborhood, called, etc, to no avail. I guess y'all can guess the rest - after my friend came home from work, she called me: "guess who's sitting on my front porch?".
How that dog figured out to get there - and why - will forever be a mystery to me.
Margherita
rita205 March 19th, 2008 07:42:00 AM
Nice to see the collie. My family had a collie who knew about that many words, he learned names for things in one trial, names for people and could generalise simple categories like the parrot. Unlike the parrot he could also fetch things and people, take things from one named place to another, and herd livestock :)
emily March 19th, 2008 09:23:00 AM
My example of abstract thinking in a cat: Our kitty is trained to jump, more or less on command. Y'all know how cats are. There is a window next to the front door and since our kitty is also an escape artist, we try to have her jump up into the window just before we head out the door. For awhile, this worked beautifully. Now, however, she prowls around the door and refuses to jump. She clearly understands that when she does jump up, her humans will walk out the door. How dare they leave her behind, especially with the baby in tow!
MeriGray March 19th, 2008 09:31:00 AM
I came home from work one day and let my dogs into the yard. I didn't know my gardener had left the side gate opened, and when I went to let the dogs back inside maybe 10 minutes later they were gone. I walked out the side gate and went down the backside of the house and around the corner looking for my dogs. I am now starting to panic because I don't see them. A guy drives by and asks me if I am looking for dogs and I say yes. He tells me they are at my front door. I walk around to the front of the house and sure enough there are all four dogs sitting and staring at the front door. They didn't take off they were just looking for me, I'm guessing, and if I'm not in the back I must be in front. I thought that was pretty smart.
CLynch March 19th, 2008 11:38:00 AM
We keep losing count how many commands the two trained dogs reliably respond to. It's well over 50 and probably closer to 100 and that doesn't count visual commands (20 that I can think of off the top of my head) nor whistle commands. I'll put it this way, when we have to put a word to something I want my dog to do, I have to make sure I use a word I haven't already and it's getting tougher and tougher. So 300 commands for a dog used for research doesn't blow me away.
BUT, I still think the most intelligent dog in our house is the least trainable. He was a stray and he's a puzzle solver. He's our critter getter and Houdini dog. I think intelligence and trainability are two different things. Linked, yes.
People in general think horses are dumb; I think they're pretty smart. I know I've put mine in a box on wheels where she can't see where she's going, driven the box 5 hours from the flatlands to mountain foothills, unloaded her and rode 25 or 50 miles the next day. The following year when I did it again, she knew the trail and made sure I knew if anything was different! (On our home trails, she recognizes every stick and leaf and jumps sideways if anything's out of place.) And that's for about 8 different locations per year, all vastly different. I bet if I went to a place that I rode 5 years ago only once that she would remember the trail. That's prey animal thinking for you. Their survival depends on knowing where safety is and what's different about their environment so they can run from it.
Deanna March 19th, 2008 12:34:00 PM
I have a little rat terrier and she is your typical hard-to-train terrier – at least using “traditional” dog training techniques. Positive reinforcement is the only thing that works and she is really quite slow to learn a cue for a behavior even though she learns the behavior itself very fast.
But occasionally over the years she has showed an unmistakable capacity for foresight and planning. A couple of times her bones and other treasures got chopped up by the lawn mower – after than she would run round picking up everything she valued and putting it on the patio whenever the lawn mower appeared. I have also seen her go and get her blanket off the lawn if it starts to rain.. She’s also brought a pig’s ear she couldn’t eat all at once to me for safe keeping when she was afraid another dog was going to get it.
So she’s no fool – even if did take her nearly 11 years to learn to “sit”.
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