Stanley Coren, a professor at the University of British Columbia, has adapted a language development test in order to test a dog's language abilities. He has found that the average dogs can learn 165 words (similar to a 2-year-old child), including signals and gestures. The dogs at the top of the pack are on par with a 2.5-year-old. He also found that the typical dog trumps a 3 to 4 year old in basic arithmetic skills.
A different study found that dogs are significantly better than cats at understanding cause-and-effect relations. Suggesting that this might explain why dogs are easier to train than cats.
2 comments:
Great link! I wonder if being smarter helps a dog go up in his pack ranking.
As for being smarter than cats, I'd have to agree. You can see the gears grinding in our Maximum Leader's head when she's trying to make a decision. But then again, how smart do you have to be? The Dodo was smarter than the garden worm and look where that got the Dodo.
;-)
Yes, I think it does go along with being highly social animals. What impressed me the most was how they developed new tests to tease out these results.
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