Dogs As Smart As Toddlers

The study points to border collies as the Most Trainable breed.

It is not a measure of intellect. It is a measure of obedience.

I’m finding it hard to take this seriously without a link to the original study. One could base an entire thesis and then some around the subject, but all we have are newspaper articles written by laymen.

Why I want to take this so seriously is unknown. Perhaps because I’m an advocate for canines.

social skills of teenagers…. yeah i believe that

I tried to “fake” throwing a ball past my 18 month old son tonight. It didn’t work. He turned to me with a look like “what on earth are you trying to do, Mom? It’s still in your hands.” I have yet to meet a dog that doesn’t fall for it.

In related news, toddlers are as stupid as dogs.

I think, dogs are even more intelligent than 2 years old children.

Dogs can understand our feelings than a 2 year old child.

Lets send them to public school. That will teach the smart out of them in no time.

Hmmm…interesting.
But are they as smart as cats?

Let it be known: Briannana does not actually hate cats. In fact, he loves all animals, and is practically the St. Frances of his day.
That said, I’m not a huge fan of comparing animal intellect to human intellect. It’s like when the study came out saying that chimps had the intelligence of a 2-year old. No, they don’t. There are completely different neurological and psychological processes going on in a human than any other animal. That said, I respect the intelligence of other animals and think they are more developed than a lot of people give them credit for. Just not quite like humans.

Hmm, some dog breeds are smarter than others?

Could intelligence be genetic? Could it be distributed unevenly in human populations?

What are the implications of this for humans?

There is no way that a dog is as smart as a two-year-old child. Sure, if you say “ball!” to a dog, it might go get its ball. In that sense, a dog can understand a lot of words and phrases. But there are many problems with this.

First of all, a dog’s understanding is highly based on tone of voice and body language. If you glared at your dog and said “good girl!” angrily, she would probably whimper in shame. A two-year-old would look at you as if you were crazy… why would you be calling her good if you sounded angry?

Secondly, there are many things a dog cannot grasp. For example, you cannot ask a dog, “Can you please put away your toys?” Unless you trained the dog to respond specifically to this phrase, it could never understand what you meant, especially if you said it in a slightly different way than what it was used to (e.g. “Put away your toys now.”) The human mind is capable of linguistic creativity, something a dog is absolutely NOT capable of. There are a vast number of things that a dog would never understand, for example, getting in someone’s way or hurting their feelings.

Can two year olds learn to independantly negotiate the subways like some stray-dogs do…?

@pad2: “Dogs can understand our feelings than a 2 year old child.”

Oddly enough, my 2 year old child can construct a better sentence than that.