A recent essay by award-winning science writer Emily Anthes titled “In Defense of Dumb Dogs: Your pet is (probably) not a genius, and that’s OK” has generated countless emails, texts, and in-person comments and discussions so I decided it would be useful to: (1) clarify what Anthes is saying (or at least lay out what I think she is trying to communicate), (2) stress that some people seem not to have carefully read what she wrote, (3) revisit other myths about the behavior of dogs, and (4) explain why cross-species comparisons about the cognitive and emotional lives of animals are fraught with error, including those in which dogs and other animals are compared to humans of different ages.
I found Anthes’s essay to be important and thought-provoking, and decided to write this post because just yesterday four people asked me questions along the line of, “Aren’t you going to write something about who dogs really are and why we must be very careful about labelling them as being ‘dumb’?” One asked, “Isn’t the real problem that so many people are dog illiterate and not fluent in dog?”
Anthes’s main message is summarized well in her last paragraph:
Indeed, what makes dogs exceptional is their ability to forge these relationships with us — bonds so strong that we are all somehow convinced that our own canine companions lead the collective pack. Watson might not know his hedgehog toy from his stuffed turtle, but he is — and I say this with all due journalistic objectivity — the absolute best.
The importance of dispelling myths about dogs
There are numerous myths about dogs that are all too frequently repeated as if they are facts. Many are popularized by mass media and dog researchers themselves, including that they’re our best friends, they’re unconditional lovers, they live in the present, they don’t express dominance, there aren’t alpha dogs, they shouldn’t sleep in bed with us, all dog parks are bad, we shouldn’t give them human food, radios and TVs can be substitutes for us, and we shouldn’t hug them.1
Dogs who come across as dumb may, in fact, be bored, stressed because of the captive conditions in which they are forced to live, or be misunderstood by humans who aren’t “fluent in dog” or “dog literate.”
Who’s smarter than who?
In a 2013 interview in Scientific American, dog expert Dr. Brian Hare, co-author of The Genius of Dogs with Vanessa Wood and founder of the Duke Canine Cognition Center, was asked, “What is the biggest misconception people have about the dog mind?” His answer: “That there are ‘smart’ dogs and ‘dumb’ dogs…. There’s still this throwback to a unidimensional version of intelligence, as though there is only one type of intelligence that you either have more or less of.”
Hare is right on the mark. There are multiple intelligences in dogs and other animals, and individual differences are to be expected. Differences are the rule rather than the exception. Research has shown that many different variables can influence a dog’s performance in laboratory settings, and I often wonder how data collected in controlled experiments transfers to dogs in real life, as dogs run around at dog parks and other venues and cope with changing social contexts and physical environs.
The word “intelligence” generally refers to the ability of an individual to acquire knowledge and use it to adapt to different situations—to do what’s needed to accomplish various tasks, and survive. A friend of mine once told me about the free-running dogs she knew in a small town in Mexico who were cleverly street-smart and could survive in difficult conditions, but didn’t listen to humans all that well. Some were skilled at finding and snatching food and avoiding dogcatchers, unfriendly dogs, and people. Some were good at “playing” humans for food, whereas others weren’t. Conversely, I’ve known some intelligent, crafty, and adaptable dogs who weren’t street-smart and likely couldn’t make it in such an environment. However, a few with whom I shared my home could easily steal my food and that of the other resident dog in a heartbeat, without either of us knowing what was happening.
Which dogs were “smarter” and which “dumber”? Neither, of course. Relatively speaking, these dogs were equally intelligent, but they adapted their smarts to different circumstances. Outside those contexts, they might appear quite “dumb” to us. I’ve lived with and met enough dogs to know that saying one is smarter than another is usually a mischaracterization of who, as individuals, they truly are.
Questions I’m frequently asked deal with species differences in intelligence—are dogs smarter than cats, are birds smarter than fish, for example. I always say that animals need to do what’s needed for them to be “card-carrying” members of their species, and we must remember that numerous nonhumans outperform us in many different ways, so the question about comparing different species doesn’t mean much to me. Thus, I really like how Hare and Woods write about this topic:
“The cognitive approach celebrates many different types of intelligence and liberates us from the idea that intelligence is a linear scale with sea sponges at the bottom and humans at the top. Asking if a dolphin is smarter than a crow is like asking if a hammer is better than a saw. Which is a better tool depends on the task at hand or, in case of animals, which challenges they must regularly confront to survive and reproduce.”
But people still ask me, “What about dogs who truly act like idiots?” Aren’t there really dunce dogs? Once again, we need to be careful about characterizing dogs in this way. One of my favorite quotes about how we refer to other animals comes from the Hungarian anatomist János Szentágothai, who famously remarked, “There are no ‘unintelligent’ animals; only careless observations and poorly designed experiments.” We’ve known for a long time that dogs aren’t brain-dead beings, nor are they dumbed-down wolves.
In January 2017, Jan Hoffman wrote an essay called “To Rate How Smart Dogs Are, Humans Learn New Tricks.” A quote by dog researcher Dr. Clive Wynne caught my eye: “What we really need in our dogs is affection. My own dog is an idiot, but she’s a lovable idiot.”
Coda: It’s essential to understand and appreciate individual differences in intelligence among dogs and other animals
Calling a dog an idiot is wrongheaded, and cross-species comparisons are fraught with error. I know it’s sort of cutesy to make eye-catching statements like calling a dog a dummy, but it’s also very misleading.
It’s high time we stop using these sorts of words and comparisons and focus on dogs as individuals. There really is no “the dog,” and what’s so exciting about studying the cognitive and emotional lives of dogs and other animals is how much individual variation there is among members of the same species.
