TO RATE DOGS’ SMARTS, HUMANS LEARN NEW TRICKS
The new academic field of canine cognition studies ways to optimise your pup’s intelligence, and the pet industry is cashing in on its findings
Pam Giordano thinks her dog is quite intelligent, and she has proof: Giorgio, an 11-year-old havanese, has diplomas stating he has a bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate from Yale. The bumper sticker on Ms Giordano’s car announces, “My dog made it to the Ivy League.”
The honours were bestowed on Giorgio and Giuliana, his sibling, for participating in the university’s Canine Cognition Centre.
“I wanted to know how much they know and how smart they are,” Ms Giordano, a real estate broker in Branford, Connecticut, said. “I think Giuliana really just goes for the treats. But Giorgio rises above it. He is very bright. I would say he knows over 100 words.”
The Yale researchers are on to something. They have figured out how to tap into the willingness of dogs’ human companions to support their studies. Enthusiastically.
Suddenly how smart your dog is seems to matter — an aspiration that has also not gone unnoticed by the commercial pet industry. Walk into any pet supply chain, such as the aptly named PetSmart, and take in the toys, gadgets and foods advertised as optimising a dog’s intelligence.
The swelling interest, eagerly amplified by the pet industry, has given a boost to the relatively new academic field of canine cognition, with research centres sprouting up on campuses across the country. In the fall, the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science devoted an issue to the topic.
At Yale, the 3-year-old canine cognition centre has been barraged by humans eager to have their dogs’ intelligence evaluated, volunteering them for research exercises and puzzles. Some owners drive for hours.
“People like their kids to be smart, and they like their dogs to be smart,” said Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology who directs the centre. “Some people will call and sound apologetic, saying, ‘I’d like to bring my dog in, but he might be too dumb.’”
But when owners use “smart” and “dog” in the same sentence, what exactly do they mean? Smart compared with what? A cat? Another dog? A human?
Scientists define and measure a dog’s smarts differently from the way owners do. More than a decade ago, evolutionary anthropologists realised that in the dog, whose development has been so strongly shaped by humans, they had a star subject to observe. Unlike gorillas, dogs are fairly inexpensive to study — their numbers are plentiful, their room and board happily covered by owners.
Now some researchers are studying the dog’s brain. Others are trying to identify the dog’s cognitive abilities, debating about the extent to which dogs may be unique among animals.
Experts agree that when owners discuss how smart their dogs are, they are imposing a human construct on an animal. A dog may seem “smarter” to its owner than the neighbour’s dog, but even the popular notion derived from some studies — that dogs are as intelligent as toddlers — is, practically speaking, meaningless.
Many animal behaviourists say that what people really mean when they call a dog smart is that the dog is highly trainable. But as some pet parents discover, a smart dog can seem less like an adorable toddler than a know-it-all teenager.
“Smart dogs are often a nuisance,” said Clive DL Wynne, a psychology professor who directs the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University. “They get restless, bored and create trouble.”
Though enthusiasm for canine research is fevered, funding can be hard to come by. Recently, some researchers have locked arms with commerce, to attract citizen scientists (aka dog owners) to help collect data.
Adam Miklosi, a prominent Hungarian canine behavioural researcher, plans to connect scientists with pet owners who can gather information about their dogs’ habits. His venture, SensDog, uses an iPhone app to communicate with Apple Watch sensors in the animal’s collar.
Then there’s Dognition, whose website professes to “Find the Genius in Your Dog.” It’s a project led by Brian Hare of Duke University’s Canine Cognition Centre. For $19, owners receive a questionnaire and instructions to gather information about their dog and submit the data on Dognition’s website. Dognition then sends back a cognitive profile of the pet. More than 25,000 owners have submitted data so far.
Of course, we are still generally talking about dogs as a species. While stereotypes of breeds are deeply rooted, Prof Hare said, there is no evidence to show that one breed is cognitively superior to another. But in 1999, Stanley Coren, now an emeritus psychologist at the University of British Columbia, produced a list of 110 breeds ranked by intelligence, based on his survey of some 200 professional dog-obedience judges. The top three: Border collie, then poodle followed by German shepherd.
But intelligence per se may not be the trait that truly sets dogs apart, at least in humananimal interaction, researchers say.
“There is something remarkable about dogs,” said Prof Wynne, who is studying how to train dogs to sniff for bomb-making ingredients. “They have this kind of open hyper-sociability. The dog itself wants to give out love.
“I think ‘smarts’ is a red herring,” he continued. “What we really need in our dogs is affection. My own dog is an idiot, but she’s a lovable idiot.”
Prof Hare, who is an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke, said he believed that dogs, like humans, had multiple types of intelligence.
Prof Santos of Yale agrees. “If you want to train an agility dog or a show dog, you value certain traits,” she said. “And if you have a stressful job and a family, you want a companion to cuddle. But they’re both ‘smart.’”