Sunday, August 09, 2009

What About Testing Humans On Dog Skills!

I'm not an animal rights person and I eat meat, but I'm still annoyed by research that ranks animals according to their performance on scales in relation to human skills. Why isn't there any research that ranks us in relation to the specific skill sets of birds, dogs, pigs, and fish?

Here's a summary of some research into the math skills of dogs.

The canine IQ test results are in: Even the average dog has the mental abilities of a 2-year-old child.

The finding is based on a language development test, revealing average dogs can learn 165 words (similar to a 2-year-old child), including signals and gestures, and dogs in the top 20 percent in intelligence can learn 250 words.


In my opinion, what's amazing here is that dogs can pick up that much of a skill like using human words. I wonder if human beings would be flexible enough to pick up very many of the dog skills connected with smell and hearing. I'm not so sure.

3 comments:

jinchi said...

I wonder if human beings would be flexible enough to pick up very many of the dog skills connected with smell and hearing.

I understand your point, but on these specifics, humans don't have the same skills connected with smell and hearing because humans literally can't smell or hear as well as dogs can.

You can't judge cognitive function on that basis any more than you could judge the relative intelligence of a blind versus a sighted child based on visual cues.

Ric Caric said...

Right, but it isn't legitimate to judge "dog intelligence" in terms of their ability to use human language either. If dogs are going to be evaluated on intelligence, they should be rated in terms of dog things like sniffing their way around a neighborhood.

Anonymous said...

A little off the direction of this topic and there is no way to measure this quality, but - I will forever be amazed by the capacity of dogs to unconditionally love us and how they can grab ahold of our heartstrings unlike any other living being on the planet.