I adopted an Australian Shepherd from a friend a year ago and I'm absolutely blown away by how smart he is. He even knows the neighbor dogs' names. I can say "go get spot!" and he'll run after the right dog. He knows all my family members names. He knows that "you've arrived" on Google maps means we are there. He knows that "power on" coming from my Bluetooth headphones means we are going for a walk. He gets the concept for new tricks in about a half hour. I do have to practice them daily, but he gets the gist almost immediately.
I knew Aussies were smart and I'm not sure where he is on the bell curve, but yeah, some dogs really have a knack for language.
I did this with my Aussie as well. I'd hide all of her toys throughout the house then instruct her "go get your hamburger!" and in a few minutes, she'd come back with her hamburger. It was wild that she'd remember what toy she was looking for during that time. More impressive still, was she would be able to learn new toy names through inference. I'd come home with a new toy turtle, hide all her toys, say "go get your Turtle!", and she'd come back with the new toy. And from then on she'd know which one was Turtle. She had an insatiable appetite for training and learning!
> More impressive still, was she would be able to learn new toy names through inference. I'd come home with a new toy turtle, hide all her toys, say "go get your Turtle!", and she'd come back with the new toy.
Is it possible that she already knew about turtles before, though?
In that case, she might just be running a rehearsed routine. You know, a shell script.
I can tell my dog to get your “new toy” and she’ll come back with the new toy. She’s a terrier and chihuahua mix. Before her, I hadn’t ever really considered that dogs are so capable. She’s learned words and phrases that are relevant to her consistently. If I’m on a walk with her and want to bribe her to go home I’ll say “Turkey?” and she’ll start pulling on her leash. The funny part is she normally gets a treat after taking a dump, but if I say “turkey” she will drop her treat and wait for me to give her Turkey. If I say “chicken” she will wait, with an unholy focus, until I give her chicken. She makes me keep my promise and knows what it is.
Her being small has sort of caused me to be more nurturing and closer than I had been with dogs growing up. As a result, I think it’s enabled her to express herself because I’m able to perceive it. It's a positive feedback loop. It’s also led me to believe there’s a lot of division between “us” (humans) and other animals is only because we can’t directly talk to them or lack the patience. We’ve tried to make our existence special, and we just aren’t (even if the amalgamation of our traits makes us unique).
That’s not to say she’s gonna be doing calculus (1) or philosophizing with me, but she’s much more capable than I had ever assumed the other “animals” are. And it’s made me acutely aware that we get what we give when it comes to our understanding of other species (or our lack thereof).
1) she’s able to “count” to three (or understand quantities at some level), and while, it is unlikely to impress a mathematician unless they have a love of dogs dogs. It certainly impresses me.
> It’s also led me to believe there’s a lot of division between “us” (humans) and other animals is only because we can’t directly talk to them or lack the patience. We’ve tried to make our existence special, and we just aren’t (even if the amalgamation of our traits makes us unique).
This is truth. My dog isn’t going to do calculus, but - really - what does doing calculus get you in the end. We’re born, we live, we , we get old if we’re lucky, and we die. We are no different than animals in this regard. I would go so far to say that dogs have evolved to mirror almost many of the best traits of humans while leaving the worst.
I used to think it was crazy people would talk to their pets. But then I realize most of my human conversations drop off the memory map after a week or two anyways. And my dog is a better listener than most of my coworkers.
I have a 3 year old pug. He'll run through the house searching for the right family member if you count down from 10 and say "Go find X! Where is he?!"
That's too cute! I like to imagine that you have hardwood floors in this house, and he skitters around in a frantic panic Tokyo-drifting his way to that family member
A good friend of mine had an Aussie who was really smart. My friend was a dog trainer, and she once told me "the secret is Grace (the dog) does most of it - the puppies learn better by watching her demonstrate, and she keeps them in line".
One day a mutual friend of ours died in a car wreck. I went to see my friend and we were sitting there telling stories and grieving... Grace read the room and brought my friend her favorite movie on dvd - something she watched when she was feeling blue. Grace wasn't quite sure what to do for me, but she brought me the cup I usually drank from when I was visiting.
I don't know how much of that to attribute to smarts, training, and/or natural empathy, but that was an impressive dog, and its an impressive breed for sure!
I have two koolies (an Australian herding breed that is very closely related to Australian shepherds, border collies, and kelpies). I got my older dog during the lockdowns when I had a lot of free time to train him, and I got my younger dog a couple years later, when I had much less time to train her.
The younger one has taught herself almost everything the older one knows, mostly by observing him, but sometimes by him actively trying to teach her. When she doesn't know something, he shows obvious signs of frustration and urging: I give a command, he does the thing I'm asking for, she doesn't react because she doesn't know the command, and then he starts growling and harumphing (and sometimes even air snaps near her face to get her attention) until she follows his lead.
Herding is a self rewarding behavior for herding breeds.
You can train herding by simply stopping the herding when he messes up (negative punishment). As long as he does it correctly he keeps doing it (positive reinforcement).
For my border collie it's similar in agility. He doesn't care about treats and barely needs toys - doing the agility is the reward for learning it for him
I had a dumb labrador that was hard to train. Now I have a kokoni who knows 20 commands & words, and she is super easy to train. We haven't tried to test the limit of her abilities, we just ran out of things to teach her (that we cared about, at least). She never cared for toys though.
I noticed while teaching her to "speak" that she would sneeze a lot, I guess it's kind of a reflex for her when she tries to speak. So I wondered, can I teach a dog to sneeze? And sure enough, after a bit of training, she will now sneeze on command.
I think that yawning is also something dogs do when they are frustrated. My dog does it a good bit, and that’s when I know to give her a break. Or maybe I’m just being trained too…
She sounds like my dog, who has sneezing fits a lot. The shelter said she was a shepherd/boxer mix when I adopted her, but I believe she's a mountain cur.
Either way, she's wonderful, and learned every trick I taught her in the first couple of months. She still knows them all 9 years later. She's learned a lot about me without my instruction, we just fit like a glove.
I don't have an exact count, but she knows at least 30 commands (some are for the same thing, like "wait for me" and "slow down"). I use natural language. I'm not sure how many other things she's picked up. I always tell her "be right back" if it's true, but I'm not sure if she understands it or not, because she's not an anxious dog.
She's never been that interested in food or toys. She's a farm dog. The best.
I wish they'd speed up that research on dog longevity. She's 9.
That makes sense, because it is indeed when she's excited. We play a little game where I pretend I don't know what she wants, and she gets very excited when I figure out she wants to go outside, and has a few sneezes to celebrate.
I also have a Kokoni. He has a doll that looks just like him since he was born. Sometimes he will pose it to be doing things you tell him to do that he doesn't want to do. So wild to see.
I have had greyhounds and lurchers, and every one of them does it. It's not a full sneeze, I call it a "snit" because that's what it sounds like. They're large dogs, so when they're being playful, jumping around and play fighting, we sometimes tell them "no!" is they're about to knock something over. This always gets us a "snit".
The yawn thing that someone else mentioned is also common. If they are displeased with you, you get a yawn. Like if you ask them to do something (sit, paw etc) too many times and they're bored of you, you'll get an exaggerated vocal yawn.
And the last one I'll mention, because it's so common in all dogs I've seen, is the shake. Directly after a tense situation, they shake, like they do when they're drying themselves. For example, if you're walking your dog and they encounter another dog that is larger, or a breed that they don't know or don't trust, they'll sometimes do a quick shake a few seconds after the encounter. I always reward the shake with a treat, to tell them "good dog, you kept your shit together in a stressful situation". A trainer told me to do that when I had a grey who had very bad social anxiety, and it really worked.
I've only ever seen dogs yawn on purpose as submissive/appeasing behavior. Kind of a nervous "I'm not trying to cause trouble." I'll get it from dogs if I've asked them to do too many behaviors in a row and they think it's because they haven't given me the correct one. Kind of an apology that they don't know what I want.
I see it occasionally between dogs when one is being stiff/dominant and the other yawns to kind of apologize and diffuse the situation.
Then again, I haven't worked much with sighthounds and they're basically a different species from other dogs, haha.
I have a Shiba Inu and he's very much the same. If I say "look there's your friend Bella!" He goes nuts because that's his favorite friend to play with. He can even recognize the sound of their owner from multiple apartment buildings away. Not kidding at all. He'll go frantic begging to go outside and as soon as we're out he'll perk his ears, figure out the direction to go, and take off. And then after five or so mins heading that way he finds his best bud.
My Shiba has learned the days of the week. I have a family member that visits every Thursday, and he sits by the door waiting for them (only on Thursdays).
And god forbid I work a weekend or do something off schedule, he gets stressed out thinking something is wrong.
I often joke he would be a more normal dog if he had a lobotomy. Sometimes I wish he were a bit dumber :)
That's amazing. Have you looked up whether this ability has been observed in other dogs? Do you think your Shiba is counting the days, or maybe there is something different about Thursdays (besides your family member visiting) that's giving him a hint?
My Shiba knows his "spots" where he meets friends of his and what times we usually run into them. And when they miss those times he will lead us to their apartment because he knows which door they live behind. It's crazy.
Lucky guess! I take the garbage out on Thursdays :)
I doubt the dog is actually keeping track of the days. Definitely picks up cues from my own behavior based on the day/schedule, like taking the garbage out.
I had a Samoyed when I was a child that knew Sunday. We had a specific routine for him while we went to church. He’d stay in the backyard in his large kennel while we were gone. After not too long we’d wake up Sunday morning and he’d go straight to his kennel. :)
In our case it was probably him sensing other things that only happened on Sundays.
Cool! Mine can hear my neighbors garage door open when they get home from work and goes nuts because his bestie is about to be let outside. Took me a while to figure that one out, haha. "How the hell are you predicting when the neighbors dog gets let out??"
Our shetland sheepdog as kids was super smart (and funny as a consequence) in this huge vocabulary way too. Our current feral ancestry central american dog (dna tests call them village dogs, meaning not of a breeder created subset of the gene pool) is scary smart too. She’s probably got a HN account come to think of it.
I know a cocker spaniel who knows lots of such things - except tricks. Doesn't care much for tricks. But the little rascal observes and listenes keenly on everyone and everything around ...
Sheepdogs are insanely bright. I have a border collie and she learns names by observation and deduction. My partner asked her where I was and she came running to me, despite never having put effort into teaching her my name. A couple of months later, a friend was at my door. I asked her “where’s Lucas?” to which she responded by looking at me and my partner before running to him.
This behaviour has been observed, where a collie identified a new toy name by reasoning it was the only “new” thing so must be the thing being asked for!
I had a toy poodle growing up that would often know what I was going to do before I did.
He also growled at my girlfriend for the only time around when she started cheating on me. Maybe coincidental, but it was the only time I ever recall him growling at anyone and he had known her for 2 years.
I think what's way more interesting is that dogs can master class inclusion: they can understand that this toy is "Mr Shakey" and this toy is "Elephant" but they can also understand that there is a superordinate category of "toys" that includes both Mr Shakey and Elephant, and when asked "Go and get me a toy" can choose either. This is mind-blowing, as children normally have to reach 7 or 8 before they have a solid grasp of class inclusion [0]
I did not read the paper, so I cannot comment on the "solid grasp of class inclusion", but regarding the capacity that you described in your comment, I have a 2-year-old and it's been a long while since she has mastered this (book vs this book, toy vs toy, fruit vs an apple and so on). As far as I know, most two year old have already acquired this concept.
(EDIT I see the other comment says something similar and you have replied)
Yeah, it's not really convincing that it can typically take up to 7-8. By that age kids are already able to read, write and do basic math, which of course requires them to understand "classes" like numbers and letters, such that they could handle both "write a number" and "write 23".
I did not know what class inclusion was, but now I'm thinking it's more complex than that? After a little bit of reading. "all daisies are flowers" and not "all flowers are daisies", this example seems more like the "solid grasp" you're referring to. And not basic categorization that a 3 year old might have: "foods", "toys"
Hmm, I'm now struggling to remember basic developmental psych, but there's definitely a phase at which linguistic children struggle with things having two names (it can't be both "dog" and "Rex") but I think you're right - this phenomenon is subtly different to class inclusion. But either way, dogs can do something with language comprehension that speaking children can't, which is the bit I find really interesting
My niece and nephew are being raised semi bilingually and they were happy to accept things could have multiple names before age 2 IIRC. The youngest only just turned 2.5 and can happily flick between Chinese and English (though has a bias towards English because that's what she hears more by a big margin)
Will be interesting how my future kids will be as they will be pretty much exactly 50:50.
They can also be taught certain distinctions within a class after having recognized the class itself.
For instance my pup picked up pretty early on that it’s big fun to chase birds. Where we lived at the time there were few crows (I honestly don’t recall seeing any), and when we moved to Seattle where crows are many she of course wanted to chase them too. But since I know that it’s better not to make crow enemies, I taught her not to chase them specifically. She now recognizes (usually) that crows are off limits, but still understands that other birds are generally fair game. (I don’t know if she’s also picked up on the fact that the crows recognize her too, but they definitely do.)
I don't know if it's a solid grasp of abstract class inclusion so much as the concrete difference between "let's play (with a toy)" and "go get this specific toy (which will prompt play)" but yes, it's still impressive.
While Ernie is certainly smart, I've found one gap in his IQ:
He has some favorite houses because the person who lives there gives him treats. Several times, we'll see that person on the street and then pass their house, and Ernie still gets excited.
I tell him, "Ernie, we just saw Jan. She can't possibly be in the house."
Yeah, my pup gets very excited when my wife comes home and can even tell the sound of her car before she sees it. But... I can tell her, "mom's home!" and she'll get very excited and start running between the front and the back door, when "mom" is actually sitting right next to me in full view.
On the other end of the intelligence scale, I've got a buddy with a pup who I once told to get a stick, which he dutifully did and when I said, "no, not that stick, the one by the ball" he quickly dropped it and went and got the one by the ball. You can also tell him which color ball to get and he will.
My German shepherd is 9 and tho I don’t think she could learn 100 different toys, it’s fun to be like “blue ball” and “go get a toy… no not that one” etc. Beyond learning that stuff, this dogs emotional radar is incredible. When she was younger if I was watching sports and something stupid would happen she would immediately comfort me and climb in my lap. And as she’s gotten older I don’t even have to say anything. If I am quiet deep in thought about something that is upsetting me, she knows it. Just beyond a sweet heart dog.
Definitely seen articles about yawning in unison with dogs and that’s exactly me and her. She’s basically my shadow. I’m convinced she can hear my heart beat and listens to my breathing. It’s always funny to reach for the tv remote and she’s getting up because that’s become a cue. Dogs have a lot of those.
I surprised that poodles were called out as a less obvious smart dog.
My dog learned on her own that me holding keys + wearing glasses = car ride, while keys + no glasses = walk. It took me a while to learn how she knew what we were going to do.
My dog recognizes different cars by their noise profile. So he'll wake up from a nap and get excited whenever my wife pulls onto our street, but stay down for any other car.
It probably helps that we're the only prius on the block, but still impressive!
I heard about a test someone did, after wondering how their dog was always standing in the window at the end of each workday, anticipating their owners arrival home. After casting about, a theory was developed that the dog "smelled time". That is, as the day wore on, the scent of their owner, decreased in the air; at a low-enough concentration, the dog knew it was about time for the front door to open and their owner to arrive home.
To prove the theory, someone went to the owner's work at noon-time, and gave him a new shirt, collecting the one he'd been wearing for half a day. They took that worn shirt, and swirled it through the air back at the house; recharging the owner's scent in the air. The dog was asleep and away from the front door, and surprised when its owner arrived home at the normal time.
My parents dog knows where she is going in the car. On the way to the beach where she goes for her runs there are 3 rumble strips on the road, she always starts getting excited as soon as the car goes over them. Even though she's probably still 6-8 miles from beach!
They also take her to a local pub that is dog friendly and she has friends there. She knows when she is going there as she starts getting excited when the car turns right at a certain roundabout. Go left or straight on, nothing, but turn right and she's right up all excited!
My dog is like this. She knows (without looking out the window) when we are close to home or some other exciting places, and I can only imagine that she has memorized the turns we take to get to those destinations.
It blows my mind because there are no obvious indications, and I highly doubt I would pick up on them if blindfolded in the car.
Our dogs are also also very good at picking up other cues. Not only can we not say "walk," but the "well..." as in, "well, time to take the dogs" gets the same reaction now.
Our SPCA-special (shepherd / husky / other?) learned after _one_ event that the tub running with the bathroom door open means that it's bath-time, and time to head out through the pet flap to the safety of the outdoors.
This is not a difficult task but my dog absolutely recognizes the various ways I end meetings during work or discord chats while gaming and always starts bothering me for pets when I'm done.
My pup knows that when I say “thank you” in a certain tone of voice that it’s nearing the end of a meeting. She’ll wait patiently the whole time until I say it, then perk up. And she gets annoyed when anything prolongs the meeting after that signal, and start getting restless because she knows the meeting should be over.
I love this kind of cause and effect linking that dogs do - mine has noticed that I often go in the downstairs restroom before walkies and now I regularly find her sitting expectantly on the bottom of the stairs when I come out. She only seems to be able to remember about 4 words though.
My first dog was a ¾ poodle ¼ cocker spaniel. She knew where the car was going; anticipated events from objects including leashes, combs, toys, and food; and deduced ever changing codewords for activities before moving a muscle.
For mine, when I have my keys he runs right to the car. Without them, he'll run past to the sidewalk. If I grab my keys and laptop (to go to work) he'll walk away and lay down.
She hates car rides, so she'd run and hide when she saw me with glasses on. I finally clued in the day I forgot to put my glasses on before going to the car, and she was happy to go outside.
If you haven't seen "What About Bunny" on YouTube, I highly recommend it. The dog has learned to use buttons to communicate her thoughts quite effectively. My favorite is "Why bunny dog?"
There's a massive sampling and confirmation bias with Bunny, though admittedly as a sheepdog owner the videos are very cute.
Whenever I talk to e.g. coworkers about an impressive ML demo that was sped up and pre-recorded, I point to Bunny the dog to show how impressive a talking dog is.
The huskies Mishka and K'eyush have also been pretty popular over the last years. Videos of 10M+ upvotes, so obviously somebody's been watching. A lot are kind of painfully viewing owners poke their canines for likes, yet there are a few that are rather clear human language use such as Miska singing "Jingle Bells". Very obvious human word use and response to human communication for a task.
I just watched a few videos and it’s seems obvious it’s all down to cherry picking and confirmation bias on the part of the owner. I’ve no doubt the owner believes the dog is deliberately constructing sentences, but that isn’t what’s happening.
There are some where I think you’re right, and some where there is pretty clearly some genuine communication going on. You might want to watch a few more.
Dogs and humans can clearly communicate. They recognise words and signal things they want all the time. And I don’t doubt the dog is pressing the buttons to interact with the owner. That is all pretty ordinary dog stuff, just with unusual equipment that makes it seem more exciting. But the dog is not forming sentences by pressing buttons in an intentional sequence. That would be awesome, but there is no evidence of that happening.
Sentences, in a grammatical sense? No. Intentionally using buttons as signifiers of a specific thing? I think pretty clearly yes. I don’t believe “why Bunny dog” is a deep philosophical question, or necessarily a question at all. It might just be “these are interesting buttons I am pushing for fun.” But “belly ouch” is pretty convincing communication, using words.
It's very clear that language use is occurring. A recent video shows the owner on the phone with the vet, and when she says "come in to express the anal glands" Bunny immediately gets up and uses the "no" button.
Another dog, while its owner is blowdrying her hair, presses the "wet" and then "dry" buttons.
Otter, Bunny's brother dog, learns the context of words from her, and they use words to each other, with clear, contextual meaning. They express humor, sadness, anger, frustration, empathy, caring, happiness, apathy, excitement, and more.
Their grammar is limited, the processing they can do is slower and on a smaller scope than humans. They definitely lack the breadth and depth of human cognition, but I can't understand how, given the overwhelming evidence of deliberate use of language in complex, nuanced, abstract, emotional, contextually relevant ways, people insist that "well that's not what they're doing!"
I think it's very likely that any and every mammal with a brain above a certain size will be able to use language, given the appropriate tools for it.
People are quick to point out the story of Clever Hans, but I think that story is worth revisiting. There's a very powerful bias for people to hold humans above other animals as somehow intrinsically special, fundamentally different from all other creatures, and language use being somehow unique to humanity seems to be one of the most stubbornly held beliefs.
I think we have language because we have vocal cords, complex mouths, opposable thumbs, fingers, and very large primate brains with a proportionally massive neocortex.
Take away the hands and we lose tool use, and probably can't develop culture, and so never develop language or complex vocalization, and never garner the benefits of those things. Take away culture and you have humans living in feral conditions. Modern studies of language deprivation, children raised in feral conditions, and other situations show us that it looks like some humans lose the ability to learn language past a certain age under those conditions.
Take away the effective mouth and vocal cords of human biology, and we may never have developed spoken language, but would likely have developed signing and nonvocal audible communication methods, and then developed culture around that.
So knowing that, when you take another look at the talking dogs with buttons, it's worth considering that up until a few years ago, people had essentially raised their pets in the absence of culture. No efforts were made to teach them language in the context they'd be able to handle. They didn't have tools that served as vocalization, limiting their effective vocabulary to bark, howl, sneeze, and whimper. Some dogs, through care and exposure, were seen as exceptional if they picked up words through context and repetition, like toy names and so forth.
If a standardized vocabulary was made available, with a repeatable training framework for dogs and cats, we give them what amounts to a culture prosthetic, and buttons give them a replacement for mouths and vocal cords.
It shouldn't be unreasonable or even particularly shocking to consider animals with brains similar to our own being capable of language use.
Imagine the conversations you could have with an orca trained to use buttons, or a pig, cow, bear, lion, or whatever your favorite mammal is.
I think we need to be much more open minded, not overly skeptical, and stop trying to find ways of insisting on human exceptionalism. It might help us learn more about how language and cognition work, and what it is about human brains that gives us such an apparent edge. Or maybe that edge isn't as significant as we think?
I spend lot of time watching birds, and they are really having complex conversations, definitely more than 100 "words" too. And we can say the same about ants, (it's more chemical/touch communication). Basically all animals are smart
I think it would do us all good to remind ourselves of this more. It’s not humans vs. animals. We’ve all survived billions of years of evolution / natural selection. Even in “dumb” animals there is a bar present that got them this far.
Canadian author Spider Robinson had a cat that spontaneously used a tool. The cat selected a narrow wedge shaped piece from a woodpile, carried it to the other side of the house, jammed the small end into a door crack, and levered open a locked bathroom door.
Intelligence doesn't pass reliably. You may be slightly more likely to get one smart pup in a litter from smart parents. Any given litter is likely to show the standard range of variation for the breeds.
It's my observation that lots of people have dogs who are smarter than the person appreciates. People don't listen to their dogs, they just talk at them.
I'd say it passes reliably enough that some breeds are smarter than others. Over generations, I see no reason you wouldn't be able to consistently breed intelligent dogs.
It's unclear why the researchers believe that when a dog doesn't learn the names of a bunch of toys it means that they can't.
There are lots of things people are able to learn today that they "couldn't" a few years ago (programming, math, reading). How are the researchers able to tell that the limitation lies with the dog and not with the trainer/household?
Indeed! The article talks about some kind of rare "genius" trait, but the findings just seem to demonstrate that there exists some dogs that were able to demonstrate a big vocabulary in their tests. Many people with dogs already knew that, but it's a sound finding to have citable anyway (especially since some people still hold weirdly dismissive beliefs about everyday animal intelligence).
But it doesn't say anything scientific about whether this is an inherent trait rather than a contextual outcome, what the frequency of any such trait might be, whether the dogs that failed the tests were incapable rather than indifferent, etc. Of course, the exact same pattern of ovverstatement shows up in human behavioral and psychological research, so we shouldn't be surprised to see it here :)
I adopted an older obese dog many years ago that seemed to understand hundreds of words, including the brand names of junk food. He would listen closely to human conversations. For example if someone mentioned socks, shoes, leash, walk or synonyms of those he would immediately go wait by the door for a walk.
Dogs can pick up on a lot of human things that aren't spoken; they're actually very good at body language. That and their ability to eat starch/more omnivorous diets are probably the biggest differences between them and wolves.
I once visited a wolf rescue where a wolf pup was being raised in a pen with two Great Pyrenees puppies (to socialize it with them). The biggest behavioral difference I noticed between the two was that while the wolf was willing to be (and perhaps even enjoyed being) pet and handled, it absolutely did not care that we were in the pen. It wandered off after a few moments checking out the new visitors, whereas the puppies (being puppies) wouldn't leave us alone.
There is nothing in this world like a Great Pyrenees puppy at about 8 months. They're SO big, but SO dumb and cuddly. They're the perfect thing, and the embodiment of joy.
Anyone with a working breed dog - especially a herding dog like a border collie, kelpie, etc - will not be surprised. They can be scary smart.
I've seen my wife teach our kelpie a new "trick" in just a minute or two. A few repetitions to attach a command to the action, and done. We can't even keep track of it all, but the dog will remember, even months later.
N.B. Please realize that these dogs are not just pets. They need a job, or to be kept busy. Otherwise, they will invent a job, like dismantling your house.
That's a new breed I could support. Just throw together a bunch of different breeds of smart dogs. They'll be much mror healthy than most breeds of dog.
On the other hand, smart dogs can be much more difficult to train.
They can easily pick up what you're training them to do, but when you want them to actually do it the results can be far more mixed. This is because they're so smart that they seem to know whether doing the thing they were trained to do is worth it to them.
Source: I have a Shiba Inu, which is simultaneously one of the smartest and most primitive of dog breeds. From the beginning he picked up tricks and other training extremely quickly, usually within a handful of repetitions. But he can be very independent and stubborn. He seems to know whether something is worth doing or not. Almost.....too smart.
> whether doing the thing they were trained to do is worth it to them.
Also have a Shiba and 100% observe the same. I recently thought that he forgot certain commands, until I went on a trip and boarded him (which he hates), and the day I get back he's super excited and suddenly "remembers" how to do everything I thought he forgot how to do.
Quirks like this is why I definitely don't recommend them as a first dog. They are great dogs but aren't the easiest breed to train.
Same with my dog, it is a mixed breed and intelligent enough to learn quickly, but also intelligent enough to have "you want me to sit, out of the blue? nah I don't care".
So we had to build loads of trust with it. Now it trusts me and my partner that if we ask it to do stuff we mean it and there is some reason for the behavior like watch out for a stranger or other dog or it something interesting will follow.
There’s a distinction between intelligence and biddability, and I believe they are mostly independent traits.
Some dogs (and indeed most cats) will only use their intelligence to get what they want. Biddable dogs actually care what you want and try to please you, independently of whether it will directly benefit them. You could say their reward is seeing you happy (that’s not to say treats don’t also help!).
The most trainable dogs are both intelligent and biddable.
My pup is similarly discerning and stubborn in deciding whether or when to obey certain commands, but I appreciate it most of the time. In many cases it’s part of how she communicates her emotional state, and it helps me understand her better.
But creating any new breed, as in an actual breed rather than crossing mutts that will produce a variety of offspring, usually involved significant inbreeding. You need to weed out the genes that you don't want and concentrate on the few that define the breed in order to create a homogenous stock. Otherwise, in a couple generations the new offspring may pick start expressing the recessive genes and be nothing like the originals.
When kennel clubs formed in the late 19th century to standardize breeds, the border collie stood apart by only testing for herding ability and not selecting on anything else. Other breeds were selected mainly for looking like what that breed looks like.
Turns out border collies are consistently classed the smartest dogs. They also have less of the typical genetic issues other breeds have
The article suggests that we already have, as all of the found clever dogs are (at least part) a (formerly) working breed. One suspects nurture has a significant role, though, as it also does with human language development. Were we actually to pursue a program like this we’d need also and perhaps more importantly research dog pedagogy (skylogogy? dogagogy?).
hm, is it ethical to breed for sapience? It's interesting how literally building a new sapient being (i.e. AGI) _might_ be widely accepted and uncontroversial, yet the idea of selectively breeding dogs until they reach sapience feels wrong and yucky
Because suffering is a facet, perhaps even the salient quality, of sapience. Awareness of one’s ephemeral existence, awareness of absurdity, particularly that of pain’s pointless pangs, are attendant to any sufficient self-awareness. Ignorance is bliss, and who are we to deprive another class of being of its succor?
That said I doubt we’ll be able to breed canine buddhists for at least another millennium. We may (probably) leave aside such qualms until then.
that's putting it mildly. It's hard to believe SciAm could even publish this.
Neil deGrasse Tyson went on TV with Chaser and his owner. He tested Chaser by putting an unnamed toy in the pile, and then said "go get Darwin." ("Darwin" being an unused name)
Chaser successfully figured out it must be the toy whose name he didn't know.
I have owned six dogs in my life, most recently getting a 7 week old pup staffy x ridgeback, now 16 weeks old. He goes with our 9 year old girl staffy, who can follow conversations, eg planning to go to the park or beach without directly mentioning it in any way.
All my dogs have understood a lot of words, some more than others, but all way more than 20.
The aspects that promote this, I believe, are this:
1. They are treated as companion animals. They live in the house with the humans and generally have full access thru the house.
2. No crating. Maybe if it is some kind of working dog, but a companion animal is a companion, and would you put a companion in a crate 22 hours a day? I don't care if you think that a dog comes to like the crate, I would say don't confuse familiarity with liking it. In what evolutionary precept is crating a thing that ever had any parallel in the wild?
3. You talk to the dog, like it is a human that can't speak. You tell it what you are doing using consistent language. Example, when leaving the house, we tell the dogs what we are doing and how long we will be. eg I am taking J to school, I'll be back soon. Or, I am going to work. Very quickly they learn and know what to expect and anxiety is reduced. I can tell because if I say I'm going to work, they immediately head to their favourite long term day resting spots.if I say I am going to the shops, they know I will be 30-90 minutes and there is a chance I will be returning with treats and hang around the door.
Also just a few times now and then, especially early on, the dog will come with me to, say, drop the child at school, or visit work, so they can see where we go and understand a little better what goes on.
Having the dogs live with as part of the family means sometimes there are problems, eg our pup is currently teething and just can't help himself with items of certain texture. We keep important things out of reach, close bedroom doors when not home and use mistakes a chance to teach. The older dog has never once got into the bin or any other such misdemeanours when unsupervised at home.
I see a lot of people ignore their dogs most of the time, I wouldn't expect such dogs to have strong language skills, but try might. If they are around and a wake, ours are constantly talked to, just telling them what we are doing or what is going on. They learn to associate, often quite quickly.
Also many owners seem to make little effort for language consistency, outside of obedience commands like sit etc.
Living in the house, it's important the dogs are consistently treated in accordance with their position in the pack. What many people think is being kind, is people kind and dog mean. A dog is happiest when it knows its place. The happiness is not related to the level of that place, more the consistency of treatment. A dog confused about its place might instinctively feel the need to challenge for leadership of the pack, that's when people get eaten.
If your dog is looking stressed and uncertain of its place, by challenging you in little ways, you need to do the little things to reinforce its position eg it does not go thru the door before you, it does not eat before you. Maybe you eat and leave a very small amount if food on your plate, which you then give the dog.you admonish any challenge for control, not meanly, but firmly.grasping the muzzle with your hand, not hard, can be enough. When just weeks old, that is what the mother does with her mouth, it is a powerful gesture ingrained almost instinctively.
Pampering a dog is being mean to a dog, treats should be earned not given randomly, that is just confusing.
Just like people, dogs behave the way you treat them.
I learned from an ex military dog trainer who went way further in his work training, but those were special animals trained to cope with crowds etc and in that environment might be called upon to save someone's life one day. But many of the techniques used would shock most people, but make perfect sense when considered in the context of training a pack animal to be a working animal.
The argument I've seen made for crating from an evolutionary-history perspective is that dogs are den animals -- they actively like having a small nook that they can feel safe in, where they're comfortable and nothing can sneak up on them.
I have a crate for my dog. The door stays open all the time, it has a comfy mat on its floor, and sometimes he goes there to take a nap. He's only ever shut in it when there's a reason -- a contractor in the house, or I need to keep the front door propped open for a while, or similar. (When he was a puppy it was incredibly useful, though, because it was a way to teach him to settle down.)
Interesting my dogs have had the same lifestyle. My current dog I'm sure is a genius but we let him be a dog. He has an amazing vocabulary and after watching a Nova show regarding dog language we performed similar tests on him and he was able to complete the tasks.
While I fully agree with you that crating is to be avoided and I'd never do it - I can see some evolutionary parallel. My husky loves to settle in corners/L-shapes, and a crate is not so different than a small cave/den which offers certainty that no predator can sneak up behind you.
I've always tied "orders" to a specific gesture, performed simultaneously, and I use a specific intonation, a "command voice." It comes from a different place in the chest, is lower, and is easier to precisely reproduce than my usual wittering on.
Humanity has a choice about whether to help these intelligent animals reproduce more than the dumb ones. We've already taken over a great deal of the free will of every animal on the planet but especially domesticated animals.
Developing the genetics of additional intelligent beings on this planet is entirely within our capability if we want to invest lives. The advent of dogs from wolves in, iirc, about 50 years is a testament to Darwinian ideas.
Reducing our planet to a desert wasteland is also an option.
I'm a huge dog lover but it would be fantastic if we could find ways to coexist with more species in the long term as well. Given our own, still somewhat precarious existence, bringing up other species is of limited priority.
Take care of your pets and buy your zoo memberships at least
My dog seems to know least the names of 6 family members, 4 friends, and names of ~6-7 other dogs (in that she can go to those individuals on command). She also knows: cat, dog, cow, horse, friend, hello, "dai lapu" (Russian for give me your paw), "sidi" (Russian for sit), sneak, "bang" (for playing dead), dinner, breakfast, bath, outside, "go potties", and probably quite a few other snippets of English.
She also knows how to open windows in a car and looks for the buttons before pressing them with her paw.
I've seen a few videos on YouTube of cats trained on these push-down language buttons, mounted in a hexagonal pattern, on a mat laying on the floor. The cats press a button and the button plays back a word which the owner has recorded.
I'd like to see more testing out of it but the cats seem to be rather expressive. They pick the same button, so at least they are consistent in their wants. They have a few verbs in the mix, it seems, not just nouns.
I've watched a few in the past and I'm not convinced the more complex interactions are "real" language use instead of operant conditioning combined with confirmation bias. Too many of the videos will have button sequences that seem random get assigned a meaning, and even non-request button presses will get attention.
Buttons for "food", "water", "pet me", "play with me", "outside" almost definitely work. Before I lived with a cat again, I was skeptical of those as "well, duh, any of those buttons get a reward, they don't care what it is", but our cats ask for those specific things without buttons.
I know a dog that, if you've not paid attention to her water bowl and it's empty, and she wants water, will simply paw the rim of the bowl to cause it to overturn, which makes a loud clatter on the hard floor.
Once she then has your attention, she'll give you a look, as if it say "water, let's go."
I dare say she trained us — after all, we didn't teach her to do that. And sure, it's simple … but she's still purposefully communicating a desire/intent.
I've been on the lookout for that, but I was struck by some particular "conversations" that involved re-direction. "Sorry" "How about something else" "Mommy - Sick" and so on. There was some back and forth there that I could not quite discount.
The amazing thing to me about dogs is the tremendous range of variability we have bred into them. Size, shape, color, intelligence, basic body makeup, senses, hunting instincts, even average life span vary by an astonishing amount.
And sadly, of course, the selective breeding has also caused systematic weaknesses in some breeds (prone to bad hips, knee injuries, relatively short life span, etc).
The genie is out of the bottle but I wish we could breed healthier animals.
Just a quick note on this, it's not entirely appropriate to blame selective breeding "in general" for those issues. Quite often those issues come from specific selective breeding practises designed to make the dogs more "fashionable" by breeding specific aesthetic attributes over healthy dogs.
That being said, there is an enormous community of extremely passionate breeders around the world who are absolutely dedicated to breeding HEALTHIER dogs, especially in breeds that are known to have issues due to poor breeding.
We have a Boston Terrier we got from one such breeder after spending over two years looking for someone we trusted to do the process right, and we are so happy we did. Not only do we have an amazing pet, but we know we are activity contributing to the process of improving the overall health of the breed, even though it did cost us more to do.
A few things to look for in order to pick a "good" breeder.
1. How many litters do each of their female dogs have over their lives. If a breeder is expecting them to produce more than two (three at the most) litters, that's a red flag.
2. Do the mums deliver naturally, or via C-section. We only learned through extensive research that some breeds (often including Boston's) almost all have to give birth via C-section because they've been so extremely bread. We specifically looked for a breeder who's dogs a born naturally. If the pups are so extreme in your they've been bread that the mum can't get them out naturally... Something has gone too far.
3. Is the breeder a "purist" when it comes to the breed. Now this is going to be the opposite of what most people expect, but you WANT a breeder who is 1930's levels eugenicist when it comes to their breed. Fundamentally, most of the issues from breeding come about through mongrelisation of the breed. Low quality breeders cross-breed dogs to introduce "cool" or "fashionable" new traits, without caring about the million other genetic inconsistencies they're bringing into the mix at the same time.
A great example is with Boston Terriers we learned. The breed spec for them is VERY clear, they have a white base coat with a black or extremely dark brown "tuxedo" style coat covering their lower body and a portion of their front-legs.
ANYTHING that has colours other than those three, is a cross-breed for fashion purposes. There is no such thing as an "albino Boston", or a "patterned Boston" etc etc, these are marketing names people came up with for mongrelised versions of the breed which will almost always have major health issues.
Knowing what we know about the variability within species, why would anyone NOT think that there is immense variations in intelligence in other mammalian species?
Especially a species that we've been selectively breeding for specific traits, some of which include independence and the ability to problem-solve?
I've always thought my Grandmother's dog was a genius. It wasn't that the dog knew a lot of things - it was house trained of course, it would sit, fetch, heel and the biggest trouble I ever remember it getting into was scratching the bottom of door.
That said I swear it figured out all of that stuff on its own because I'm pretty no one in the house invested 5 minutes trying to train that dog to do anything. I honestly think it just wanted to be a good dog. I would almost say the dog was mistreated because benign neglect is almost cruel to a dog but it wasn't that bad, the dog wasn't ignored, it just didn't get a chance to really shine.
Our dog is not particularly smart but once we counted that she knows at least about 20 words, one of those being "cat", so we use "that furry animal" instead when we talk to not agitate her for no reason.
Everybody thinks their dog and/or child is a genius. But I've had a lot of dogs. Even within the same litter, some are bright, and some are dumber than a box of hammers. If your dog is smart, that's great, but your next one of the same breed might not be. Some individual dogs also don't take well to training, while others do. It's way more about the individual than the breed.
If dogs are smarter than we knew, what are some additional tasks we could give them?
I have manuals for disability support dog training (opening doors, getting medications, helping to dress, etc) but maybe we could teach them to:
- clean or arrange rooms or outdoor spaces
Just adopted a very sweet Irish Wolfhound mix. She's as dumb as bricks or just has no desire to impress us with any display of intelligence. I would be floored if she was able to produce any toy on command let alone a specific one, lol.
Yes! After scrolling past everyone else who explains how smart their dog is it's great to find someone who has the same kind of dog as we do. Finnish lapphund here.
And yea, I agree that it's hard to know if the dog is just dumb, or independent and lacking any ambition to please us by learning "silly" games.
One thing one trainer I listened to said was that some dogs are actually more like cats.
That stuck with me, and I have kind of accepted that she will probably never be the kind of dog that follows my hints and commands blindly. The important thing is after all that she doesn't have any "dangerous" traits like aggression or being over protective.
We had a Westie that we trained to do this. We’d make him “wait” then we’d his toy, and say “ok go find it” . He’d go all over looking for it and enjoyed the game. I highly recommend a community training camp if there is one in your area.
Memorizing 100 names for things might seem like a big deal, but I guarantee that all dogs have memory for 100+ smells associated with things. They would call us stupid for not being able to remember the smell of more than a few dozen objects. My point: don't judge intelligence based on how well an animal can replicate human behavior. Each of them can do things that make us look like the idiots.
> They would call us stupid for not being able to remember the smell of more than a few dozen objects.
Dogs obviously have incredibly more advanced olfactory systems but I feel like you're downplaying humans here. I'm pretty sure there's hundreds of very specific smells I could identify pretty well. Smell of home, pencil rubbers, chalk clouds, rotten bananas, denim.. things do have quite specific smells and there's a lot of things.
I recently started swimming for fitness after not doing so since 10 years ago in high school. I get a rush of nostalgia and a good feeling whenever I catch a whiff of chlorine on my hands or hair throughout the day.
>> I could identify pretty well. Smell of home, pencil rubbers, chalk clouds, rotten bananas, denim.. things do have quite specific smells
Those are classes of things, not specific objects. We all know the smell of erasers, but can we identify the smell of a specific eraser? Part of it is sensitivity but it is also largely that our brains are not designed to associate smells with individual objects. Think of how we handle faces, which we can spot even if at a different orientation than we have seen before. Or how we can hear a specific voice amongst a crowd. Dogs do that with scent profiles.
This is a really good way to frame it that would indeed mean we only remember dozens of individual things, if that. The smell of home remains, as well as the smells of close relatives.. but I can't think of much else.
Not sure how to word this without getting too weird, but It's certainly possible to identify well over a dozen people by smell alone — not just friends/family that one spends a lot of time with, but also attractive people.
The ability to remember specific sensory impressions just is not the same thing as sensory acuity. People can remember a bunch of things, but our noses aren't nearly as sensitive as dogs'.
Just yesterday i experienced the smell that was just like the apples from a tree in our yard 25 years ago. There are easily many hundreds of unique smells we can identify.
A quick search to WP Dog Intelligence [1] will quickly note that there have been cases of 1,000 words and this is actually fairly well known. It's perhaps interesting that researches are confirming anecdotal reports online, although as noted in another comment below, there are 10M+ videos from multiple channels all on the same subject. I donno, it's like humans are just realizing animals might not be that less intelligent. Parrots ask existential questions. Prior research on dog language:
"2008, Betsy, a Border Collie, knew over 345 words by the retrieval test, and she was also able to connect an object with a photographic image of the object, despite having seen neither before."
(mentioned in article) "Rico initially knew the labels of over 200 items [and] inferred the names of novel items by exclusion"
"2013, a Border Collie, "Chaser", who had learned the names and could associate by verbal command over 1,000 words[...], and [was] capable of linking nouns to verbs"
Why do we have K9 search and rescue dogs and drug sniffers instead of just having police officers sniffing everyone’s luggage?
The answer from the article is, essentially, because dogs are much better at odor detection than us. It weirdly seems to say because we have the ability to sense odors we are better than we think we are, which implies we think we can’t smell at all or something. But dogs are much much better than us.
The article made a quite different argument than "dogs are much better at odor detection than us" - that is contrary to what the research shows. Humans have much better ability to smell some things than dogs do, but, dogs are (as you noted) capable of smelling some things better than humans.
They make some squinty suppositions from some limited studies that suggest dogs (which can smell cannabis flowers) can’t smell flowers better humans etc. But then they conclude with this statement that sort of refutes the entire premise:
“””
Besides having more olfactory receptor cells than humans, dogs also boast a specialized snout adapted to methods of breathing that deliver a steadier stream of information-rich scent. Dogs and some other animals even experience scent differently. Their olfactory system allows them to smell liquid phase chemicals that aren't airborne—think of layers of urine and other liquids on your neighborhood fire hydrant—by working like a pump to deliver them to a specialized nasal organ.
“””
Which is pretty indicative that as everyone knows from daily experience with dogs, dogs are better at smelling things than humans. There may be a range over which that superiority falters at some chemicals but I saw nothing other than headlines and pop science supposition that indicates humans are superior at smelling than dogs.
```For example, Laska notes, the total number of odorants for which dogs have an established, lowest detectable threshold level is 15. Humans actually have a lower threshold for five of those. “Those five odorants are components of fruit or flower odors,” he says. “For a carnivore like a dog those odorants are behaviorally not as relevant, so there was no evolutionary pressure to make a dog's nose extremely sensitive to fruit and flower odors.”```
It wasn't clear to me from this that these dogs had any special cognitive abilities, as opposed to neurosensory abilities, e.g. maybe most dogs can't audibly distinguish human vowels and consonants well enough for this to work.
I wonder this as well. In my experience, dogs have a MUCH easier time learning hand signals than learning verbal cues. I wonder if dogs would generally be capable of learning many more words if they were taught in sign language.
We remember scents. We remember how chocolate smells. We do not smell well enough to associate smell with a particular object. Then, in turn, our brains are not hardwired to associate specific smells to specific objects.
Look at our memory for faces. It isn't all about eyesight. Our brains have specific circuitry for faces. Dogs have the same for smell. Sensitivity is one thing, how the brain is wired is another.
* how English Cadbury's smells
* how El Rey Cordoba milk chocolate (from Venezuela) smells
* how Hershey's smells
* how hot chocolate made with Swiss Miss mix smells
* how Toblerone smells
Although in a blind smell test, I wonder how well would you do? I've seen people fail hard at identifying what food their eating when blindfolded, and they have the additional power of taste rather than just smell.
We're wired to be able to pull up those memories and imagine a smell, but not to be able to identify what we're smelling when it's right in front of us.
I would do really well. Especially for Hershey's which I can detect from across the room thanks to that distinctive baby vomit smell from butyric acid they use as a preservative.
> Then, in turn, our brains are not hardwired to associate specific smells to specific objects.
I think you are speculating cause.
Culturally we tend not to communicate much about smells - it could just as easily be that most of us have the ability but it is never trained because it isn't much use to us.
Anecdotally I know people with a wide range of different olfactory abilities.
It is interesting to try and think of how we could test for the ability. Perhaps not testing for my pencil, but something else - a child - a dog - shoes - urine.
While it is of course true that humans can smell less acutely than dogs, I'm fairly confident that the number of odors I can remember is somewhere in the low thousands.
I do wonder if dogs recognise when other dogs are particularly intelligent/unintelligent. Given that there seems to be such wide variation amongst breeds, I'd assume so.
We have poodles, always have, they know amazing things, words, behaviors, when somethings "up", how to manipulate us. Love reading everyone else's anecdotes.
have two standards. both smart but in a different ways. one totally understands your intentions. the other one is "street smart" and tries to manipulate us
Totally, it's funny, one of ours manipulates the other. He'll bark, knowing he's not barking at anything, just to get our other dog to react. He'll even look right him, bark like someone is at the window/door, and then just calmly take his spot as our other runs away.
yeah. same with treats/toys.
she tried to pull off multiple times same thing with us, bark at door (and then runs back to see our reaction) in order to make us leave table with food, but we were able to outsmart her :)
My greyhound/pit mix knows my names of many of her toys. She also has a range of expressions she uses to disagree with me or tell me I'm wrong.
Her favorite toy is this kevlar llama unicorn that my mother has resewn for her twice. If I tell her to bring me her lobster (also kevlar) sometimes she'll shake her head, bow, and then stare intently at me. She understands the prompt for, "What is it?" and will lead me to the thing she wants or fetch it. On multiple occasions she's brought me her llama instead. I thought this was a fluke for a while but if I argue with her enough she'll go get her lobster. She has a really big toy bin and she plays with a lot of toys, so selecting these two by name has always been curious.
She also has toys for different purposes. The remnants of a Lamb Chop long lost are her snuggle toy, she doesn't play tug of war with it anymore. If you try to she'll display the same expression for dissatisfaction.
She must get it from the greyhound. My pit shows occasional flashes of intelligence, but I think she's too anxious to behave smartly almost all the time...
>To minimize potential inadvertent cues from the owner, the instructions required the owners to place the dog's toys in a different room. Owners were instructed to ask for each of the toys while ensuring that at least three toys were available for the dog to choose from.
For the test they had a camera in the room with the owner and another in the room with the toys (so the owner couldn't cheat by removing the other toys).
I knew Aussies were smart and I'm not sure where he is on the bell curve, but yeah, some dogs really have a knack for language.