I’m sorry, but I can’t help but think dogs are smarter than most scientists and researchers give them credit for. In my December 3, 2008, interview with Stan Coren, noted author and researcher on the topics of “dog speak” and dog intelligence, Stan said that dogs have the intelligence of a 2 1/2 year old human child. Well, that might be right by conventional definitions and measurements of “dog intelligence,” but I think there’s something more going on here.

How do you explain this?

This morning, during my golf practice, I found a nice new tennis ball. A tennis ball on a golf course, you ask? Well, there are tennis courts right next to the golf short-game practice area. So I brought the tennis ball home for Callie, and, as usual, it became her “ball for the day.” She has a dozen or more tennis balls in her crate and scattered around the house, but this ball became “today’s special tennis ball.” She brought it to me to play “fetch.” She carried it to the kitchen when she went out to pee. And she snuggled with it in the bathroom while I took my shower.

When I went out to lunch, I put Callie in her crate, not noticing that “today’s special ball” was not in the crate. When I got home and let her out of the crate, she ran immediately (as in “no hesitation”) to the bathroom (which is in the opposite direction of her normal path) and came out with — you guessed it — “today’s special ball.”

Would a 2 1/2 year old child have done that? Maybe, but I’m not convinced. Would a child have become so attached to one toy/ball? Would it have remembered, after about 2 hours, where it had left the toy/ball? Would it have planned, the instant I opened the crate door, to go retrieve that ball?

I have a suspicion that the scientists are measuring something like “problem solving ability” or “information processing ability.” So maybe I’m seeing something different. It just seems to me that dogs have an uncanny ability to “connect the dots” sometimes. They remember things — much better than a 2 1/2 year old kid, it seems to me. They remember people, other dogs, places, routes to get to places, and lots of other stuff. Could a 2 1/2 year old kid find its way from my Lake Arrowhead home to my boat dock? I don’t think so, but Callie could, if she wanted to go swimming.

We’ve all heard the stories about dogs that found their way home after being left miles — even hundreds of miles — away. Could a 2 1/2 year old kid to that? Maybe it’s not “intelligence,” but something different — a homing instinct, an uncanny memory, unbelievable sense of smell, or something else. But dogs do some pretty amazing things.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Appreciation, Callie, Dog Bonding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.