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Excerpt from
Good dog, smart dog
Sarah Kershaw of The New York Times delves deep into the psyche of
man's best friend: "The matter of what exactly goes on in the mind of a
dog is a tricky one, and until recently much of the research on canine
intelligence has been met with large doses of skepticism. But over the
last several years a growing body of evidence, culled from small
scientific studies of dogs’ abilities to do things like detect cancer
or seizures, solve complex problems (complex for a dog, anyway), and
learn language suggests that they may know more than we thought they
did."
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/weekinreview/01kershaw.html?_r=1&em&utm_source=Ode+Newsletters&utm_campaign=060488a1fb-good-news-weekly-rss&utm_medium=email
In September, the Army announced that it would spend $300,000 to
study the impact of pairing psychiatric service dogs like Jet with
soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Both the House and Senate have recently passed bills that would finance
the training and placement of these dogs with veterans.Hungarian
researchers reported in a study last year that a guide dog for a blind
and epileptic person became anxious before its master suffered a
seizure and was taught to bark and lick the owner’s face and upper arm
when it detected an onset, three to five minutes before the seizure. It
is still somewhat mysterious how exactly dogs detect seizures, whether
it’s by picking up on behavioral changes or smelling something awry,
but several small studies have shown that a powerful sense of smell can
detect lung and other types of cancer, as the dogs sniff out odors
emitted by the disease. Beyond these perceptual abilities, in
which trainers can use the dogs’ natural instincts, some research has
examined dogs’ actual cognitive ability, and found not just good
doggie, but smart doggie.
“I believe that so much research has
come out lately suggesting that we may have underestimated certain
aspects of the mental ability of dogs that even the most hardened cynic
has to think twice before rejecting the possibilities,” said Stanley
Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and an author of several books on dogs.
Dr.
Coren’s work on intelligence, along with other research suggesting that
the canine brain processes information something like the way people
do, has drawn criticism. And there is good reason. For most of the last
century the specter of a horse named Clever Hans hung over anyone who
tried to prove that dogs were acting in thoughtful ways — not merely
mimicking or manipulating people into believing that they in fact
grasped human concepts.
Clever Hans was said to be able to
count, make change and tell time by tapping his hoof, until
investigators in the early 1900s learned that Hans was merely
responding to his trainer’s body language, tapping when the trainer
nodded his head. This provided an enduring example for those who
believed thought was the exclusive domain of humans.
But in
2004, German researchers reported that a border collie named Rico could
learn the name of an object in one try, had 200 objects in his
repertoire and remembered them all a month later, all very human. Even
skeptical animal behavior researchers found the Rico results impressive
and sound. Is it possible that Rico turned the tide on the Clever Hans
problem, even though there is debate about how we can reliably measure
what dogs know?
By giving dogs language learning and other
tests devised for infants and toddlers, Dr. Coren has come up with an
intelligence ranking of 100 breeds, with border collies at No. 1. He
says the most intelligent breeds (poodles, retrievers, Labradors and
shepherds) can learn as many as 250 words, signs and signals, while the
others can learn 165. The average dog is about as intellectually
advanced as a 2- to 2-and-a-half-year-old child, he has concluded, with
an ability to understand some abstract concepts. For example, the
animal can get “the idea of being a dog” by differentiating photographs
with dogs in them from photographs without dogs.
But Clive D. L. Wynne, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Florida who specializes in canine cognition and has himself said he met a
border collie who knew 1,500 words, takes issue with efforts to compare
human and canine brains.
He argues that it is dogs’ deep
sensitivity to the humans around them, their obedience under rigorous
training, and their desire to please that can explain most of these
capabilities. They may be deft at reading human cues — and teachable —
but that doesn’t mean they are thinking like people, he says. A dog’s
entire world revolves around its primary owner, and it will respond to
that person to get what it wants, usually food, treats or affection.
“I
take the view that dogs have their own unique way of thinking,” Dr.
Wynne said. “It’s a happy accident that doggie thinking and human
thinking overlap enough that we can have these relationships with dogs,
but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that dogs are viewing the world the way
we do.”