They have been present in the great human feats of history: there were dogs aboard Columbus’s caravels, in the conquest of the South Pole, in the first trip of a living being around Earth’s orbit – do you remember Laika? – and even in the bin Laden capture operation. Still, these pets are not just living tools or working machines . In fact, you may not have realized it, but if you have one as a pet, you are living with a potential Einstein.
Until recently, we didn’t know much about the intelligence of Canis lupus familiaris , or how they see the world. But in recent years, research in this field has accelerated and it has been found that their cognitive abilities resemble those of a child.
In the Odyssey , Ulysses returns to the island of Ithaca twenty years after having left to fight in the Trojan War. So that no one knows who he is, he disguises himself as a beggar, but Argos, his old dog, recognizes him instantly. Apart from legends or literary anecdotes, what has science found out about canine memory? Since the beginning of the 20th century, it has been known that dogs have a prodigious ability to retain and retrieve information. For example, a gifted border collie named Chaser from South Carolina recognizes over a thousand objects by name. Also, he remembers them months later.
The experiments, indeed, show that they assimilate vocabulary in a similar way to children: through inference and exclusion . Some dogs are even able to associate abstract labels with concrete objects. If you teach a dog the word balloon and hide one among many other things, it will go for it when you name it out loud. But if you later remove it and say “ball!” Again, and this time he has to find a tennis ball, then deduce that you mean the same category and choose the correct option.
The psychologist Paul Bloom, from Yale University in New Haven, empirically tested the aforementioned power of exclusion by mixing books and toys that animals had not seen before. If the investigated specimen was ordered to “take the toy”, it would go to any of the articles that were used to play . Later, when he was told “take a non-toy”, he always brought a book. In other experiments, instead of talking to them, they were taught a replica of an object. The subjects got it right again every time.
Dogs are also capable of copying and imitating us, something that very few animals achieve and which is fundamental in social learning. Although they do not do it spontaneously, like the great apes, they do have an innate ability to do so . On one occasion, scientists conditioned a group of dogs to push open a door. Half would receive an award for emulating humans, while the rest were encouraged to do so by their own methods. Outcome? The group of imitators learned much faster. In other words, dogs don’t tackle these kinds of problems through trial and error – they can solve it right away if they see someone do it first.
The bottom line is that canine memory is more like ours than previously thought. In fact, they too have the so-called declarative or episodic modality, the ability to consciously retrieve memories associated with facts or knowledge. Plastic and flexible, the vocal cords of dogs allow them to emit sounds with meanings that both their peers and humans understand , since the barks vary depending on the context in amplitude, duration and pitch. Thus, they make themselves heard to recruit others of their species in case of danger and identify individuals by the sounds they perceive, classifying them as friends or enemies.
They also seem to adjust their expressiveness to the audience. This means that they modify their vocalizations and gestures depending on what they see or do not see – and hear or do not hear – who is accompanying them. Thus, guide dogs that help blind people lick their masters more, so they can receive their information : licking is their response to living with people who do not respond to visual cues. Similarly, they disobey orders if they endanger their owners.
In one experiment, a dog had to choose between asking for food from a blindfolded person or someone who could see. Well, the animal always went to the second: it knew that if it distinguished its eyes and face, then it could communicate with it. It’s something that most animals don’t do: identify who has the desired information.
To determine this more precisely, the psychologist József Topál, from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, hid several objects in boxes, all closed with a bolt. After hiding the keys in the presence of a dog named Philip, a human entered who did not know where they were. Philip’s responses were very similar to those we get with children in the same circumstance: he would take the keys and lead the person to where the object was stored.
If the volunteer was present when Topál closed the boxes, then the dog did nothing to help him. That is, he was aware of what he had or had not seen in the past. Although dogs do not have a language as complex as ours, their intelligence when communicating is fascinating.
The classic test to determine whether an animal has this perception or not is to confront it in front of a mirror. If we put a mark on a chimpanzee or an elephant inadvertently, they will touch the mark or try to remove it when they see their reflection, because they know that it is their own duplicate image.
The problem with using this type of testing with dogs is that they are not so visual; Due to that reason, not all authors agree on the validity of the test. For example, Marc Bekoff, emeritus professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, in the United States, believes that it is not useful for species that perceive the world through smell. If we consider that a canid has approximately 220 million olfactory receptors, and we compare it with the five million present in the human nose , the idea does not seem far-fetched.
In fact, Bekoff has designed a test that promises to open new debates among specialists. First, the researcher collects urine from a dog and hides it in a forest. Next, walk the creature around the area and examine its reactions to its own urination, to compare them with those it manifests when it sniffs that of others. Thus, the North American expert was able to verify that the study subjects did not urinate on their own marks, which gives some kind of indication of self-awareness.
As primates, human beings have the ability to put ourselves in the skin of others, but we are not the only animals that possess it. Dogs are also excellent at connecting with other people’s minds . In a natural way, it is common for them to come to console others who have been victims of an attack and ignore the winners of the brawl. In two-thirds of the observations made by the experts, the party not involved in the fight was indeed close to the worst offender.
But do they also experience empathy towards people? To find out, psychologists Deborah Custance and Jennifer Mayer, from the Goldsmiths School, belonging to the University of London, analyzed the behavior of eighteen specimens of different ages and races. The test consisted of examining their response to people who pretended to cry, standing next to others who were simply talking or humming a song . Custance and Mayer found that the dogs showed more concern and more frequently approached volunteers who pretended to be sad.
Another indicator of empathy is the contagion of yawning. For it to occur, it is necessary to have a certain brain structure and the famous mirror neurons, responsible for us laughing, crying or opening our mouths when we see others doing it. Dogs also give positive results: in recent research, 67% of the individuals studied yawned at the same time as humans.
Also, it is not something learned. Ethologist Brian Hare, from Duke University, in the USA, has shown that nine-month-old puppies do just as well as adult specimens, which means that they are already born with that gift. And while they understand signals from both acquaintances and strangers, this doesn’t mean they don’t care where they come from.
