One of my pet peeves is that scientists keep publishing papers that say either “dogs aren’t very smart” or “maybe dogs are a little smarter than we thought.” They obviously aren’t smart in the same ways that humans are smart, but they do some pretty amazing things. Scientists may not be using the right criteria. They usually evaluate dogs for their “problem solving” skills. So if a dog can’t work a Rubik’s Cube, does that mean it isn’t smart?
Here’s what I mean.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago that our morning jog at Lake Arrowhead takes us past some tennis courts at the UCLA Conference Center. The courts are buffered from the street, where we run, by some bushes that are as high as the screen around the tennis courts. One morning, Callie noticed a tennis ball under the bushes. She stopped dead in her tracks, asking, “could we please retrieve this tennis ball?”
Unfortunately, the ball was on the other side of the wire screen, so we couldn’t get at it.
Just last weekend, we did the same jog, and as we approached the tennis courts, Callie went on “ready alert.” She absolutely remembered that she had found a tennis ball in this place before; she fixed her gaze on the base of the bushes as we jogged by. Then, she spotted a tennis ball and froze in place. “Hey, Fred, can you reach this one?” Luckily, this time the ball was on our side of the fence, so I was able to crawl under the bushes and retrieve it for the salivating Callie.
So what was that all about? Callie obviously remembered that she had seen a ball by the tennis courts. She knew to look for one. She knew that she is, in fact, a “ball dog.” (Not all dogs are “ball dogs.”) So tell me that’s not some kind of smart.
This won’t be real scientific, although I do have some background in using computers to do things that people usually do — a field dubbed “artificial intelligence.” And I can see sort of a parallel between dogs’ intelligence and the intelligence of computers. Computers have two kinds of intelligence: 1) “processing power,” or the ability to crunch numbers & logic and 2) memory, the ability to recall enormous amounts of data — sometimes in an “associative” manner. Some computer memories are “associative,” which means that they are good at remembering relationships between different things.
Maybe dogs don’t have Intel chips to do their processing. Maybe they aren’t great “problem solvers,” in the sense of the scientists. But they do seem to have rich “associative” memories. They remember places. They remember routes. They remember how to get back home. They remember where they put their toys. They remember their favorite places. Jamie, the heroine of “My Doggie Says… Messages from Jamie.” remembered where her Floppy Disc was.
And best of all, they remember when it’s time to eat.
How smart is your dog? How do you know?
