Dogs have been dumbed down by being domesticated. Wolves are much smarter. Right?
Not!
It turns out that by rubbing shoulders with brainy humans for so long (and being bred by brainy humans) dogs may have had some human smarts rub off on them.
That’s what some scientists are concluding.
Dogs even compare favorably in some tests with critters with a much higher brain rep, like chimpanzees.
EXCERPT:
Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, have been shown to follow a human’s gaze, but they do very poorly in a classic experiment that requires them to extract clues by watching a person. In that test, a researcher hides food in one of several containers out of sight of the animal. Then the chimp is allowed to choose one container after the experimenter indicates the correct choice by various methods, such as staring, nodding, pointing, tapping, or placing a marker. Only with considerable training do chimps and other primates manage to score above chance.
Dogs, however, performed marvelously, and even outdoor dogs with no particular master could solve the problem immediately. (The researchers controlled for the scent of the food.) By 2001 a raft of experiments by Mr. Csányi’s team and another led by Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, showed that dogs were far more skilled then either chimps or wolves at using human social cues to find food. Those results left researchers with this question: If dogs can pick up on human cues, do they turn the tables and put out cues for humans to understand?
I always figured my dog wasn’t all that dumb. When she was a pup she would stare at whomever eating and wait to get something.
Well after many scoldings, she stopped and the tables were turned on us.
When we would go to feed her and stick around to see if she liked what it was she was getting, instead she would stand there and stare at us till we left the room. Immediately after turning a corner she would start eating but if we stepped back into her area, she would stop and stare until we left.
She is going on 18 in September and she still does this.
eheheh
Why is it that dogs are so comforting, while chimps creep me out? I was a big fan of Lance Link as a kid, though.
Lacelot Link: Secret Chimp.
Now that was One Weird Show.
This does not prove dogs are smarter than wolves. It only proves that dogs are better than picking up human social cues than animals that are not socialized to humans. That is not the same as intelligence, not even close. Since dogs are breed to be companions to humans, it is also not even surprising, but expected.