You are the profession. Have your say.™
Man's dumb friend is not so dumb after all?
Pet owners have always believed that their dogs are as intelligent as young children and that their pets have a small, but recognisable working vocabulary. A recent study has revealed that the average dog has the mental abilities of a 2-year-old child.
This finding is based on a language development test, revealing average dogs can learn 165 words (similar to a 2-year-old child), including signals and gestures, and dogs in the top 20% in intelligence can learn 250 words.
Furthermore, while dogs ranked with the 2-year-olds in their linguistic abilities, they would potentially beat a 3- or 4-year-old child in basic arithmetic.
In an interview for LiveScience - which includes details of some of the tests used - Stanley Coren, a canine expert and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, said that Border collies, poodles and German shepherd dogs were the brightest.
Those breeds have been created recently compared with other dog breeds and may be smarter in part because we've trained and bred them to be so, Professor Coren said. And at the bottom of the intelligence pile, he includes many of the hounds, such as the Bassett hound and the Afghan hound, along with the bulldog, beagle and basenji.
"It's important to note that these breeds which don't do as well tend to be considerably older breeds," he said. "They were developed when the task of a hound was to find something by smell or sight. These dogs might do better on tests of so-called instinctive intelligence, which measure how well dogs do what they are bred to do."
Professor Coren, who has written more than a half-dozen books on dogs and dog behaviour, presented an overview of various studies on dog intelligence on 9 August at the American Psychological Association's annual meeting in Toronto.
His special plenary lecture came hot on the heels of an earlier interview on The Telegraph website, in which psychology lecturer, Britta Osthaus, from Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent, suggested that dogs were smarter than cats too.
In her studies, Dr Osthaus attached fish and biscuit treats to one end of a string and tested 15 domestic cats to find if they could understand that pulling the string would pull the treat closer.
She found that the cats had no problem with tackling single pieces of string. However, when faced with two options, unlike their canine counterparts, cats were unable to consistently pick a baited string over a dummy.
So maybe all those Tom & Jerry cartoon storylines will have to be rewritten?
What do you think?
Published: 18 Aug 2009
0 Comments
Tags: News, Small animal
Commenting is now closed.