Brian Hare - The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think

THE

GENIUS

OF

DOGS

How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think

BRIAN HARE

AND

VANESSA WOODS

DUTTON

DUTTON

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, February 2013

Copyright 2013 by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods

All illustrations courtesy of Bryan Golden

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

REGISTERED TRADEMARKMARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Hare, Brian, 1976

The genius of dogs : how dogs are smarter than you think / Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-101-60963-7

1. DogsBehaviorEvolution. 2. Evolution (Biology) I. Woods, Vanessa, 1977- II. Title.

SF433.H355 2013 2012033929

636.7'083dc23

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For all dogs

CONTENTS

The many flavors of genius

Wolves conquer the world, only to lose it all

The perfect place for a scientific discovery

How an obscure Russian scientist revealed domestications secret

How a little congeniality can get you ahead

Are we having a conversation?

Dogs dont beat wolves at everything

Dogs are best in a social network

The question on everyones lipswhich breed is smartest?

How do you train a cognitive dog?

Could we love one another more?

PREFACE

When we brought our new baby home from the hospital, our dog Tassie was faced with a dilemma. Since the day we adopted him from a shelter as a puppy, Tassie has had a basket of stuffed toys. Growing up, his favorite activity was to rip out the stuffing and leave it all over the house. Every now and then we would fill up the basket with new toys he could rip up all over again.

We also gave our baby, Malou, a basket of stuffed toys, which was almost identical to Tassies. As Malou started to crawl, she quickly developed the habit of dragging the toys out of her basket and leaving them all over the house.

Here was the dilemma. Of the dozens of toys, Tassie had to figure out which ones were his to rip up, or Malou was going to find her favorite toys in a heap of stuffing and there would be trouble.

Tassie turned out to be rather good at it. Of course, we were hopeful Tassie would have this ability, since Brians colleague at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, Juliane Kaminski, studied a dog named Rico who had solved a similar problem. Kaminski received a phone call one day from a very nice German lady saying she had a Border collie who understood more than two hundred German words, mostly the names of childrens toys. This was impressive but not unheard of. Language-trained bonobos, bottlenose dolphins, and African grey parrots have learned a similar number of names for objects. What was different about Rico was how he learned the names of these objects.

If you show a child a red block and a green block, then ask for the chromium block, not the red block, most children will give you the green block, despite not knowing that the word chromium can refer to a shade of green. The child inferred the name of the object.

Kaminski gave Rico a similar test. She placed a new object Rico had never seen before in a different room with seven of his toys that he knew by name. Then she asked him to fetch a toy using a new word he had never heard before, like Sigfried. She did this with dozens of new objects and words.

Just like children, Rico inferred that the new words referred to the new toys.

Without any training, Tassie has never ripped up one of Malous toys instead of his own. His toys and her toys can be lying in a jumble on the floor, and he will carefully extract his toys and play with them, giving her toys only a longing glance or a quick sniff. He adapted quicker than we did to life with a new baby.

* * *

In the last ten years, there has been something of a revolution in the study of canine intelligence. We have learned more about how dogs think in the past decade than we have in the previous century.

This book is about how cognitive science has come to understand the genius of dogs through experimental games using nothing much more high-tech than toys, cups, balls, and anything else lying around the garage. With these modest tools, we have been able to peer into the rich cognitive world of dogs and how they make inferences and flexibly solve new problems.

Thinking about dog genius will not only help us enrich their lives but also broaden how we think about human intelligence. Many of the same concepts used to study dog intelligence are being applied to humans. Perhaps the greatest gift our dogs will give us is a better understanding of ourselves.

Everyone has an opinion about what makes dogs smart. There is now an extensive scientific literature examining dog psychology that sometimes supports or doesnt support these opinions. To help all dog lovers debate what the latest scientific findings might mean, this book provides a comprehensive review of dog cognition, or dognition.

We have read thousands of scientific papers relevant to the study of dog cognition, and we reference more than six hundred of the most important and interesting of these papers in this book. If you are interested, there are ways to get access to these papers and read them for yourself.

While our review is comprehensive, it covers only areas that have been scientifically studied. We may not cover some areas of interest simply because no scientist has published anything on the topic. But on the flip side, there is tons of fascinating research on dognition you may never have imagined.