I'm a dog lover. Dogs are awesome in my book.
I had a rotti for about 10 years and because of her I thoroughly revised my concept of the word "intelligence".
She was just scary smart.
She had an 'isomorphic' understanding of the world: what I mean by that is inside the house she was aware of the EXACT location of things outside the house, no matter where she was in the house.
She always had her face stuck right in the middle of whatever I was doing (except guitar playing_ guitars scared her and she wouldn't go near them.)
She was always right. It was scary.
And they are even smarter than we - who are already impressed by them - think they are.
Yale Study Report
They did a couple of different cognitive tests. One involved a puppet show:
In the puppet show exam, the dogs are shown one scene, where a rat puppet assists a hedgehog puppet up a hill. In a different scene, the rat puppet knocks the hedgehog puppet down.
Human children are reported to not like the mean puppet and in the study the dogs appeared to 'be weary' of the the rat puppet.
In another test a person looks at a book with their dog. then the book is placed on the floor and the person leaves. Then somebody else comes and takes the book away
“What we really want to see is whether or not dogs know when we’ve missed some information,” Santos said. “Do they realize that, first of all, and when they do realize it, are they motivated to help?”
And, of course, they do know and they did seem to want to communicate this to their people, though the article doesn't explain what provided that appearance. People weren't surprised and I am pretty sure my old dog would have acted the same way, though I doubt the person who came to get the book would have been able to get it: my dog loved my mom and dad and always was happy when they visited. When my parents started packing up to leave and tried to take THEIR stuff to the car, she growled. Crazy dog.
A third test includes the dog and companion relaxing in a room, when a researcher appears and introduces a new object. The goal of this test is to see whether or not a dog will become interested in the same item as humans.
My dog would push her massive face right into the middle of what was happening as if asking "hey! Whatcha doing? What's that? Hows that work? huh? huh? huh?"
If it wasn't that, it was sitting strategically in the floor so as to see the most of everything going on in the whole house.
I miss all that.
I am honing in on a decision to get a new dog and came across this article. I hope to be gloating and showing off a new dog by the end of March.
So, duh: dogs are a lot smarter and mentally acute than even we have imagined.
It's not really news, but it's fun.