This article by Rob Stein, Washington Post Staff Writer, describes some fascinating experiments that suggest that dogs are smarter than scientists have thought. (What Were They Thinking? More Than We Knew. Washingtonpost.com, Monday, June 4, 2007)
The article describes an experiment performed at the University of Vienna. First, it was demonstrated that fourteen-month-old children imitated adult behavior, but only under certain circumstances. Then, a similar experiment was done with dogs. The scientists trained a Border Collie named Guinness to get a treat by pushing a wooden rod with her paw. Usually, a dog would do this with its mouth.
A group of dogs that saw Guinness push the rod while holding a ball in her mouth decided to push the rod with their mouths, because they concluded that Guinness was using her paw only because her mouth was busy. But the dogs that saw Guinness push the rod with no ball in her mouth concluded that this was the best way to get the treat, so they used their paws to push the rod.
The scientists were amazed that the dogs’ thought process was similar to that of the fourteen-month-old human children.
Many studies have tried to assess the “intelligence” of dogs. They all seem to conclude something like “dogs can’t work a Rubik’s Cube, so they must not be very smart.” Yet just being around my own pets, I’ve always felt that they were smarter than the scientists thought. Jamie (My Doggie Says…: Messages from Jamie. How a dog named Jamie “talks” to her people) really brought this home for me. She did some things that seemed to me to require a lot of intelligence.
Much of our intelligence comes from our brains’ ability to “associate” objects, ideas, places, images, people and other things. Jamie clearly had this ability. She could remember every jogging path we had taken. And she had her preferences. She knew, for example, which way to turn to get to our boat dock, which was her favorite place at Lake Arrowhead, because it was her place to swim. Here she is pulling us in the direction of our dock.
But even more amazing to me was the whole sequence of events leading up to an outing to our dock. It started with my green backpack (full of flashlights, bottle openers, etc.) coming out of the hall closet. As soon as Jamie saw it, she would get a big drink of water and sit by the front door waiting for us to get in the car. When we parked the car, she would pull us to the correct path. Then she would pull us to the correct dock. Then she would stand by the storage box that contained her floating “floppy disc.” Not just by the storage box, but at the exact place where she knew her “floppy” was stored. Then she would carry her “floppy” to the gate and wait until someone opened it so she could run down the gangway. Then she waited for one of us to throw her “floppy” into the lake so she could retrieve it. Then she would swim and swim and swim until we knew she had to stop.
This may not be a scientific proof that Jamie was “smart,” but it was pretty convincing to me. It was a complex sequence of events that she was able to work through in order to do one of the things that she was bred to do and one of the things that she loved more than anything else in the world — to retrieve her “floppy” and swim in the lake.
