dog-gonnit.com

Perhaps the most famous of the Dog IQ Tests was written by Melissa Miller. Rated 4 stars at Amazon, here’s some snippets from customer reviews:

“Interesting, insightful, book that has questions designed to determine how observant, intuitive, intelligent your dog is as well as their social behavior.”

“It is a blast to see how smart your dog is and what you can do to help them improve their intellectual capacity.”

“…see how your dog ranks among other dogs on the intellience scale.”

“ Neat book for us dog lovers to examine our dog’s intelligence…”

I stumbled across this article while surfing for dog brain size info. It was originally entitled “Dogs and the Human Brain Size – Theory Suggests Greater Role for Man’s Best Friend.” It was posted to primate-talk@primate.wisc.edu, and the credit for authorship goes to Shelly Simmonds. The article is quite fascinating, and adds an interesting twist to the Dog Intelligence question with regard to the synergistic relationship between man and dog. Let’s just call this Part 3 in our Dog Intelligence series (Parts 1 and 2 can be found here and here).

Dogs and humans have been best friends for a long time – about 100,000 years – according to the latest estimates. But one ANU anthropologist could create a new controversy with his latest hypothesis about the human-dog relationship.

Here’s another take on Dog Intelligence as reported in this post.

Dog intelligence is the ability of a dog to learn, think, and solve problems. It can be exhibited in many different ways, and a dog who might not be easy to train might still be very good at figuring out how to open kitchen cabinets or to escape from the yard. In a sense, the ability of a dog to do certain acts that cannot be done by other animals commonly defines our understanding of dog intelligence.

Basic Intelligence

Recently we were having a family conversation about which dog breeds were most intelligent. I recalled watching a documentary a few years ago in which dogs were tested using a very simple deductive reasoning test – a large towel was placed over the dog’s head, and the number of seconds it took for the dog to remove the towel was tracked. Some dogs were awfully slow, taking well over a minute to complete the task. Other dogs completed the task in mere seconds. If I recall, the clear “winners” were Border Collies and Poodles (not sure about the order).