Story and Digital Mischief by Warrigal Mirriyuula

Over the past few weeks we’ve been dogsitting the nephew’s little black Moodle, a cross between a Miniature Poodle and a Maltese Terrier. They call her “Lolly”, a sweet enough name, and she is about the size of a licorice twist.

She’s still a pup at only eighteen months old but she’s a lot of fun, particularly when we play “crazy puppy”. This starts with me getting down on the floor on all fours and looking at her with an excited expression on my face. She “reads” my expression and will come to a position just in front of me, also down in the prone position, tail wagging, tongue out panting. She knows what’s coming; she knows my intention. We’re about to play “crazy puppy”, her favourite game.

At the cry “crazy puppy” she takes off at full speed, running around the perimeter of the room.

Our living area is a large open plan space incorporating the kitchen, dining area, lounge and TV area and the piano space with the stair well in the middle. It’s big for a little dog and she’ll skitter on the timber floors and drift onto the carpets. Better traction sees her reach full speed before nipping under a chair, turning on a sixpence and shooting out the way she came, going “round the outside” again.

To keep her going you just stand on the track and as she passes cry “crazy puppy” once more. She does this thing with her backside, like a half flip with twist, changes direction and shoots off again. It really is enormous fun and she loves it. She can keep going for quite some time.

She knows her toys descriptors too, and can fetch her tyre, her doll, her ball. Interestingly she also knows “stick” and when asked will go out onto the balcony and fetch back a stick, usually small and with not much girth; she’s only a tiny thing; and will bring it back in and chew it for a while. Unfortunately she doesn’t return the detritus to the balcony when she’s finished, but she does show a good deal of interest in the dustpan and brush when one of us goes to clean her mess up. She also likes reducing tissues to shredded paper and on one occasion reduced an entire toilet roll to pieces not much bigger than a few millimetres across. Fabulous commitment to the job!

Down at the park she likes to play all the regular games; fetch and tricks like roll over, shake hands and bark on demand. She shows good socialisation and plays nice with the other pups, particularly “Dougie”, a twelve month old Beagle/Spaniel cross. They tumble and run, growl and bark, like a couple of madmen on a spree. He’s all ears, paws and tongue and gets so excited he can hardly stay upright while she, being all agility and spirit, jumps him and tugs at him, all the time bearing her tiny little fangs for effect.

Having been trained and habituated to food rewards, she comes when you call, will reluctantly sit or occasionally drop. This last only when she can see the food reward; because of course while we train them, they too often train us.

It’s been a real delight having her and we were sad to see her go when the nephew and niece came round the other day to pick her up.

Though she’s only a pup and will never be bigger than a handful she still displays so many of the essential characteristics of “dogness” that we associate with the species, no matter the breed, no matter the size.

One of the areas in which she displays this essential “dogness” is that she understands my intention to communicate and can parse the “language” of that communication, whether it is a gesture, a word or even just a look. What’s more, recent studies have shown that she could probably do it better than our closest genetic relatives, the chimps and bonobos. These primates are good at understanding expression and will follow the gaze of other chimps, and experimenters, but they tend to fall down on gestures like pointing or conveying desired action by hand and arm gesture. Anybody that’s ever been to a sheep dog trial will have seen for themselves that interpreting the shepherds complex of calls, whistles and gestures is the working dog’s stock in trade.

We expect these dogs to understand us, to understand our intentions; but is there any scientific basis for our expectations?

Yes there is.

You’d think that it would have been studied sooner but recently there’s been a spate of research putting the whole matter on a more scientific basis

Brian Hare at the Max Planck Institute tested a group of dogs and chimps and found that while chimps and dogs performed roughly equally well at many tasks that involved interpretation of facial expression, gaze direction and simple “find the food” tasks, they signally failed to correctly interpret intention when it came to co-operation such as when the experimenter or even another chimp indicated the position of hidden food for them. The primates just didn’t get it but the dogs did. Put in psychological terms the dogs correctly inferred the experimenter’s mental state.

While chimps may fail to infer others’ mental states when cooperating, domestic dogs do quite well at such tasks. If you point to hidden food, dogs often grasp what you are trying to tell them. Puppies even do it without prior training, indicating that it is an innate ability, not simply one they acquire through contact with their owners.

What accounts for this piece of convergent evolution between humans and domestic dogs is nothing other than the process of domestication — the breeding of dogs to tolerate, rather than fear, human company.

According to Hare, domesticated dogs’ ability to solve social problems may have emerged once the brain systems mediating fear were altered — and the same thing may have occurred in human evolution. Chimps, he says, are constrained in solving cooperative problems by their impulse to fear more dominant individuals and behave aggressively toward more subordinate ones. Like parliamentarians, for instance.

“Taken together,” Hare writes, “the results on chimpanzee cooperation and their use of social cues support the hypothesis that evolution in human social problem solving, much like that of dog social problem solving, occurred after changes in our species’ social emotions lifted social constraints.”

Apparently, like us, all the dogs had to fear was fear itself.

Dogs pick up not only on the words we say but also on our intent to communicate with them, according to a report published online in the journal “Current Biology”

The findings might help to explain why so many people treat their dogs like their children; dogs’ receptivity to human communication is surprisingly similar to the receptivity of very young children, the researchers say.

“Increasing evidence supports the notion that humans and dogs share some social skills, with dogs’ social-cognitive functioning resembling that of a 6-month to 2-year-old child in many respects,” said József Topál of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. “The utilization of ostensive cues is one of these features: dogs, as well as human infants, are sensitive to cues that signal communicative intent.”

Those cues include verbal addressing and eye contact, he explained. Whether or not dogs rely on similar pathways in the brain for processing those cues isn’t yet clear.

Topál’s team presented dogs with video recordings of a person turning toward one of two identical plastic pots while an eye tracker captured information on the dogs’ reactions. In one condition, the person first looked straight at the dog, addressing it in a high-pitched voice with “Hi dog!” In the second condition, the person gave only a low-pitched “Hi dog” while avoiding eye contact.

The data show that the dogs were more likely to follow along and look at the pot when the person first expressed an intention to communicate.

“Our findings reveal that dogs are receptive to human communication in a manner that was previously attributed only to human infants,” Topál said.

As is often the case in research, the results will undoubtedly confirm what many dog owners and trainers already know, the researchers say. Notably, however, it is the first study to use eye-tracking techniques to study dogs’ social skills.

“By following the eye movements of dogs, we are able to get a firsthand look at how their minds are actually working,” Topál said. “We think that the use of this new eye-tracking technology has many potential surprises in store.”

So just how smart is the pooch snoring on his mat?

Although you wouldn’t want Mongrel to balance your cheque book, it turns out he can count.

He can also understand more than 150 words and intentionally deceive other dogs and people to get treats, according to psychologist and leading canine researcher Stanley Coren, PhD, of the University of British Columbia.

He’s the author of more than a half-dozen popular books on dogs and dog behavior, has reviewed numerous studies to conclude that dogs have the ability to solve complex problems and are more like humans and other higher primates than previously thought.

“We all want insight into how our furry companions think, and we want to understand the silly, quirky and apparently irrational behaviours that Lassie or Rover demonstrate,” Coren said in an interview. “Their stunning flashes of brilliance and creativity are reminders that they may not be Einsteins but are sure closer to humans than we thought.”

According to several behavioural measures, Coren says dogs’ mental abilities are close to a human child age 2 to 2.5 years.

The intelligence of various types of dogs does differ and the dog’s breed determines some of these differences, Coren says. “There are three types of dog intelligence: instinctive (what the dog is bred to do), adaptive (how well the dog learns from its environment to solve problems) and working and obedience (the equivalent of ‘school learning’).”

Data from 208 dog obedience judges from the United States and Canada showed the differences in working and obedience intelligence of dog breeds, according to Coren. “Border collies are number one; poodles are second, followed by German shepherds. Fourth on the list is golden retrievers; fifth, dobermans; sixth, Shetland sheepdogs; and finally, Labrador retrievers,” said Coren.

As for language, the average dog can learn 165 words, including signals, and the “super dogs” (those in the top 20 percent of dog intelligence) can learn 250 words, Coren says. “The upper limit of dogs’ ability to learn language is partly based on a study of a border collie named Rico who showed knowledge of 200 spoken words and demonstrated ‘fast-track learning,’ which scientists believed to be found only in humans and language learning apes,” Coren said.

Dogs can also count up to four or five, said Coren. And they have a basic understanding of arithmetic and will notice errors in simple computations, such as 1+1=1 or 1+1=3.

Four studies he examined looked at how dogs solve spatial problems by modelling human or other dogs’ behaviour using a barrier type problem. Through observation, Coren said, dogs can learn the location of valued items (treats), better routes in the environment (the fastest way to a favourite chair), how to operate mechanisms (such as latches and simple machines) and the meaning of words and symbolic concepts (sometimes by simply listening to people speak and watching their actions).

During play, dogs are capable of deliberately trying to deceive other dogs and people in order to get rewards, said Coren. “And they are nearly as successful in deceiving humans as humans are in deceiving dogs.”

So there you are. All that and deceit too.

But I don’t think any of these investigators have met the dog in this clip.