How Smart Are Dogs Compared To Other Animals – Researchers at the Wolf Science Center in Vienna, Austria, found that wolves are better at understanding cause and effect than domesticated dogs. Michelle Lampe/Wolf Science Center
My chocolate lab, Loretta Lou, is one of the most intelligent dogs I know. It took her no time to learn how to catch a frisbee, and she can pick the used cat boxes out of the recycling bag in the sink with surgical precision. (If only she could put them back.) Plus, all I have to do is lift a finger and she sits. Nod your head and she jumps off the bed. Loretta, in a nutshell, is devilishly smart. So I was intrigued when I read a study that said wolves are more intelligent in some ways than Loretta Lou and all her dogs.
How Smart Are Dogs Compared To Other Animals
The study, which was published in the September 2017 journal of Scientific Reports, is by an international team of researchers at the Wolf Science Center in Vienna, Austria. They found that domesticated dogs cannot make the connection between cause and effect. However, wolves can.
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They came to that conclusion by testing and comparing how the two species searched for food after being given clues as to its location. Researchers used 14 dogs and 12 socialized wolves in their experiments. During the tests, they had to choose between two containers, one with food and one without. The first thing the researchers did was to find out if it could make sense with “communicative cues”, by pointing and looking at the container with the food.
Researchers then wanted to see how the dogs and wolves reacted to “behavioral cues”. The experimenter pointed to the container of food, but did not make eye contact with . Finally, in the final experiment, they had to infer for themselves which container had the hidden food using only “causal clues,” such as sounds made when the experimenter shook the container with the food.
Both the wolves and the dogs did well on the communicative clue tests – all found the hidden food. However, both species failed the behavioral cue part. Without direct eye contact, neither dog nor wolf could find the food. During the last part of the test, however, only the wolves were able to make random inferences about the location of the food. In other words, the researchers said, the wolves, not the dogs, understood cause and effect.
“The results of our study suggest that domestication has affected the causal understanding of our dogs,” study author Michelle Lampe of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, said in a statement. “However, it cannot be ruled out that the differences can be explained by wolves being more persistent in exploring objects than dogs. Dogs are conditioned to receive food from us, while wolves have to find food themselves in the wild.”
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What shocked the researchers was that the wolves were able to interpret direct eye-to-eye contact. This understanding of communicative signals, researchers said, may have “facilitated domestication.”
The study is also unique in that it used dogs that lived both in packs and with families. “The results for the dogs were independent of living conditions. This makes our study the first to make a valid comparison between these two groups of animals in this particular setup,” said study author Juliane Kaminski, from the University of Portsmouth in England. in a statement. Your dog may be a good boy – but he’s not as smart as you think, a new research paper suggests.
Dogs have a unique set of cognitive abilities, but they are not inherently smarter than other animals, says the new paper, which was published in the journal
“Dogs are special, but they are not exceptional,” says co-author Britta Osthaus, senior lecturer in psychology at Christ Church University in the UK. “They’re smart, but they don’t stand out.”
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, says Osthaus. Lea, now emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Exeter in the UK, saw many articles about dogs’ special abilities, but noticed that other animals were rarely tested with the same types of cognitive tasks. In collaboration with Osthaus, Lea decided to set the record straight by analyzing more than 300 existing studies on animal cognition in an attempt to compare dogs with other similar species.
Dogs fit into three main classifications, the paper says. They are carnivores, an order of animals consisting mainly of carnivores; they are social hunters, meaning they work together to find and retrieve food; and they have been domesticated by humans.
For their new paper, Osthaus and Lea compared dogs with species in each of these three categories, such as wolves (a close ancestor), wild dogs and hyenas (carnivores and social hunters), cats (carnivores and domesticated animals), dolphins and chimpanzees ( social hunters) and horses and pigeons (domestic animals). Across many cognitive categories—from the ability to extract information from sensory stimuli to problem solving to social intelligence—the researchers found that other animals could match or surpass the dogs’ abilities.
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“They’re the only species in the middle of those three categories, so they’re pretty special,” says Osthaus. Because of their overlapping classifications, canines are uniquely well-suited to certain tasks, such as serving as guides for the blind or assistants to police officers. But in each of those three categories, “you’ll find other animals or other species that will do just as well as dogs, or maybe even better.” And many animals can be considered special when examined through the lens of their specific characteristics, she adds.
The popular belief that dogs are exceptionally smart probably persists for several reasons, Osthaus explains. Dogs are easy to study, for one thing, so there is simply more information about their cognitive abilities than that of other species. And because humans have a particularly close relationship with dogs, there is likely an element of confirmation bias in the scientific literature. “We like our dogs to be very smart, and we like them to be appreciated,” says Osthaus.
But treating dogs as a superlatively intelligent species can actually be doing them a disservice, she says. “We have to take into account that dogs are dogs. We have to be fair to dogs, to know what their limits are, so we don’t expect too much.”
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The research also suggests that other animals may deserve more credit than they get. “If we know a lot about the cognition of pigs or goats, we need to look at their welfare and how we keep them,” says Osthaus. “If they have a need for social interaction and for mental stimulation, we have to provide that.” Researchers at Britain’s University of Exeter and Canterbury Christ Church University looked at more than 300 scientific papers analyzing animal abilities and found that dogs matched or surpassed them in almost every category.
“During our work, it seemed to us that many studies in dog cognition research aimed to ‘prove’ how clever dogs are,” said Professor Stephen Lea of the University of Exeter.
“They are often compared to chimpanzees, and when dogs ‘win’, this adds to their reputation as something exceptional. But in every single case, we found other valid comparison species that do at least as well as dogs do on these tasks.”
Take smell, for example. Dogs are valued for their sense of smell, which is put to good use in law enforcement and border security. But the researchers found that their sense of smell can be overridden by something as simple as a human pointing in the opposite direction.
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“Cats can distinguish between their own and other people’s kittens by smell… Among domesticated animals, the pig’s sense of smell is unique and may even be better than that of the dog, and pigs can also distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar human odors. Horses can identify [ other horses ] based on stool odors.
“So the olfactory performance of dogs is not that extraordinary among two of their comparison groups, carnivores and domestic animals.”
Dogs’ whiskers are less sensitive than those of cats and seals, and their ability to distinguish human faces is about the same as that of chimpanzees, pigeons and sheep.
When it comes to sound, yes, dogs can hear very high pitched tones – but when it comes to understanding what is said they are apparently not significantly better than cats or ferrets, and are well behind chimpanzees and bonobos.
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No dog has ever been recorded as spontaneously deciding to use a tool, so they are behind crows, monkeys, elephants, otters, alligators, octopuses, crabs, and even some ants for that matter.
“The closest thing is an allegation … that a captive dingo spontaneously moved a table around the enclosure to obtain food that is not available,” the study said.
The researchers found that the dogs’ ability to know which cardinal direction they were facing when they pooped didn’t seem to translate into much navigational skill.
“Dogs have shown good performance, but so have others
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