Think Like a Dog

A story in Time magazine details a new center at Duke University that will evaluate the intelligence of dogs.

On the one hand, this would seem like one of those boondoggles (heh) that we like to make fun of, where prestigious universities employ people that use their extensive educations to study things that are irrelevant or at least, extremely obvious. But on the other hand, figuring out how dogs learn stuff, as well as what they can learn, might help better train canine assistants like seeing-eye dogs that make lives a lot easier for the many folks they help. And it reveals some pretty interesting things.

For one, dogs seem to be the only other creature so far that has an instinctive understanding of what it means to point at something. According to the story, even chimpanzees had to be extensively trained to get what puppies figure out very early (Note from cats: We understand pointing. We just don't care).

Another interesting item was how Russian scientists investigating canine behavior did so. They gathered foxes and bred the ones that showed the most affability to humans. Foxes that showed curiosity and came up to a hand placed on their cage got to breed. Foxes that shrank back or snarled when people approached their cages didn't get to. I suspect that this procedure may have led to some resentment on the part of those foxes, who did not understand that the consequences of their behavior would mean no mating. I believe they share this condition with a number of husbands who slept on the couch last night.

Anyway, over the course of some 40 generations of foxes that have been bred since this experiment started in the 1950s, the scientists produced foxes that act like dogs, even down to the wagging of tails and the innate ability to figure out pointing. Meaning friendly, outgoing animals were actually more intelligent than the surly, anti-social ones, a finding which will not be well-received in the goth community.

I think all this interesting because, among other things, dogs are highly reactive to their people, and it's instructive to learn how dogs acquire knowledge and behavior from the people they're around. This means you can tell a lot about what kind of a person someone is by the way his or her dog acts.

Show me a dog that likes people, likes to jump and play and is eager to explore its environment and I will show you a person who has properly trained his or her pet and gives it proper care and affection. Show me a dog that growls, backs away from people and is aggressive about its food, and I'll show you a person who has mistreated an animal, and who should probably be kept from mating.