Don’t tell your dog, but scientists now believe that while dogs are intelligent, they aren’t as smart as some of us would like to believe.
Yes, there are dogs that stand out as doggy Einsteins, like the Border Collie, Chaser, who understands (and can pick out) the names of 1,022 toys, or the toy poodle Chanda-Leah, who performed 469 different tricks to get into the Guinness World Records 1999 book. But while most dogs are smart, what makes canines stand out is their ability to pick up our emotional cues (and our ability to intuit theirs), developed from years of domestic cohabitation — rather than their cognitive IQ.
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When Stephen Lea, professor in the psychology department at the University of Exeter, launched a study of canine intelligence as compared to other species, he found that almost everything that a dog can do that sets them apart, other animals can also do. (But he is a cat person after all!)
Dr. Lea worked on the study with his co-author, Britta Osthaus. “who is more of a dog specialist than I am,” he notes. They reviewed over 300 recent publications on cognition in dogs and in animals that are in related to them in three ways: they belong to the same biological group, Carnivora, which are mainly meat-eating animals; they are cooperative social hunters, which means they work together to acquire food; and they have been domesticated by humans. The animals they compared to dogs in terms of intelligence included wolves, cats, spotted hyenas, chimpanzees, dolphins, horses and pigeons, among others.
“What we found was that pretty much any cognitive skill that dogs had been shown to possess could also be demonstrated by one or more of these other species, in one or other of our three groups,” Dr. Lea says, noting that there’s more research on dogs than on many of the other comparison species. Because of this, they didn’t always have a similar study to compare.
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Dogs do have aspects of intelligence that are impressive: they can count (a dog will go for the bowl with more food every time); they can read human faces (dogs understand the power of looking into our eyes to communicate and to attract our attention); and they excel at what’s known as “object-permanence” (they understand that when they can’t see an object, it doesn’t mean it’s ceased to exist). The last one is pretty impressive — human babies take a lot longer to learn this about the world.
“But there were also animals that had been found to perform cognitive tasks that didn’t seem to have any parallels among dogs,” Dr. Lea says, such as the use of tools. For example, a 2009 study discovered that chimpanzees were using a new tool to hunt for termites. Sea otters use rocks to break open the hard shells of some seafood such as mussels and clams.
There were some surprises, Dr. Lea says. Research revealed that other animals deserve more recognition for intelligence. “Animals like pigs (domesticated, but neither carnivores nor social hunters) and hyenas (carnivores, but not really hunters, and certainly not domesticated) did as well as or better than dogs across a range of cognitive tasks.”
Other animals can also learn tricks. Horses perform elaborate dance moves in Dressage — to hip-hop! Pigs can learn the same commands as dogs can. Cats can even eat with forks. With this in mind, it becomes obvious that many animals need social interaction and mental stimulation; they are so much more than meat.
Still, dog parents know that dogs are special. Dogs are social. They’re comedians. They are joyful, curious, and are masters of living in the moment. Dogs are loving and loyal companions. And that beats smarts any day.
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