Who’s a smart dog (and an idiot)?
Documentary challenges everything you thought you knew about Fido
The only thing more divisive than religion or politics — and possibly cilantro — is the question of whether you’re a dog person or a cat person. This month, researchers do the near impossible by appealing to both factions, concluding in a new Canadian documentary that dogs are at once brilliant and absolute dolts.
Who would have thought, for instance, that the same animal that can’t unwind its leash from a lamp post is capable of everything from deductive reasoning to numeracy? Or that there’d be such a vast difference between dogs’ social problem-solving skills (outstanding) and non-social problem-solving skills (pitiful — see aforementioned leash conundrum).
“Intelligence isn’t like a glass of water, where you have more or less of it,” said Brian Hare, director of the Canine Cognition Center at Duke University. “You can be really vapid and be a genius at the same time, which is absolutely the case with dogs.”
Hare is among the scientists featured in A Dog’s Life, to air Nov. 21 on CBC’s The Nature of Things. Drawing on the latest canine research from around the world, the documentary offers a fascinating look at the furballs we call family — challenging cherished old ideas and introducing bold new ones.
For instance, are dogs truly colour blind? How accurately can they judge the passage of time? If they hide a toy, how reliable is their spatial memory to find it again? Is their smell worthy of its reputation? And why does the age of a television make a difference in the way a dog watches TV?
The program even unpacks the venerable belief that dogs share the same social hierarchy as wolves — a notion that has long informed the dog-training concept of owners establishing themselves as the “alpha.”
Turns out, even feral dogs raised without human interference will choose whom to follow based on social ties — that is, identifying the dog that has the most friends — as opposed to the wolf way of submitting to the dominant pack member.
Another striking difference? Although wolves raised by people still prefer the company of wolves, dogs raised by people almost always prefer the companionship of humans over other dogs.
“We really have learned more about dogs in the last 10 years than we have in the last 100,” said Hare, co-founder of Dognition. “This moment, right now, is super exciting.”
Indeed, Krista Macpherson, who’s been studying dog psychology for eight years, said she rarely knows what to expect from an experiment’s outcome because her research is so novel.
Macpherson has demonstrated, for example, that dogs possess the basic mathematical competence to decipher larger amounts from smaller ones — similar to how children have a sense of numeracy before they’re technically able to count. This study is among those featured in the documentary.
“They’re not necessarily seeing the world the way we see the world. But that doesn’t mean they’re not intelligent animals,” said Macpherson, who runs the Dog Cognition Lab at Western University in London, Ont.
Daniel Zuckerbrot, who produced A Dog’s Life, with wife Donna, said his conclusion after a year of filming is that dogs understand us far better than we understand them.
“As animal lovers and dog owners, we were full of questions — and full of assumptions,” said Zuckerbrot, coowner of Reel Time Images in Toronto. “In a way, the more you think you know, the more extraordinary the truth is.”