I DIDN’T WATCH a lot of television when I was a child as there were always far more interesting things to do outside, following Dad around the farm. But on a wet afternoon there was one programme I really enjoyed: the TV films about Lassie, the amazing dog that always came to the rescue, performing feats of great daring and endurance to bring help when it was needed.
It never occurred to me that the dog’s skills were exaggerated, and achieved by clever editing. After all, I lived with highly intelligent sheepdogs, and I had no doubt they were capable of similar exploits should the occasion arise. If ever I was going to round up a gang of baddies, a dog would fetch help for me. If ever I was stranded by a raging torrent, a dog would swim for help. If ever I needed a dog to leap through the air and knock down a criminal, or drag an injured person from a burning building, a dog could do it for me. And that dog, of course, would be a collie. We had Labradors as house dogs and gundogs, but I knew from a very early age that collies were the ones with the brains, who would share these amazing adventures with me. Just like Lassie.
Lassie, as she appeared on screen, was a rough collie. At least, from her first appearance in cinemas in 1943 through to her last appearance in 2007, she was played by many rough collies, most of them direct descendants of the original, Pal, who shared the screen with a very young Liz Taylor, and most of them male. ‘She’ starred in nine feature films, a TV series that ran for 18 years, a radio series and animated cartoons.
Why was a collie chosen for the part of this amazing dog? I’m not exactly impartial, because of my love for the breed, but even without my bias, it’s a no brainer. It’s an accepted fact in the canine world that collies are the brightest, most intelligent and agile dogs. There are now dog shows that hold agility and flyball classes labelled ABC, standing for Anything But Collies, in order to give other breeds a chance. If there’s a collie or two in the class – and up to 95 per cent of the entrants to the large dog category at agility shows are collies – they invariably take the top spots. They are fast, the right shape, and good at jumping, plus they are the brainiest of all the breeds.
But how do we know this? I have my own experience to go on, but that’s not scientific. I understand my own dogs and what they can do, but I don’t understand how their intelligence works, and whether or not it can be compared to human intelligence.
So when Countryfile wanted to look into a new intelligence test for dogs, I was very happy to take Peg, my super-bright sheepdog, and our Hungarian wire-haired Vizsla, Boo, a lovable buffoon of a house dog, along to be put through their paces. To make up a threesome for the trial, I also took Millie, our collie/kelpie cross farm dog. They made up a good cross section: Peg who (not really thanks to me, but because of her previous owner) is a highly trained ex-trials dog; Millie, who is a sweet, good-natured hardworking sheepdog trained to the level we need on a farm, but not as refined as Peg in her abilities; and Boo, who is completely lovable, knows how to behave, but has never struck me as particularly bright.
The test has been devised by Dr Rosalind Arden, who is a research associate at the centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics. Rosalind normally researches cognitive abilities (known to you and me as intelligence) in humans, but she is very interested in exploring differences in intelligence in non-human species, like dogs.
She told me why she has chosen to work with dogs, rather than other animals: ‘Dogs are charismatic, they are not stressed by working with us, they are easy to work with, fun, and they enjoy doing the tests.’
The intelligence test involves giving the dogs six different tasks, and under scientific conditions each task would be carried out twice by each dog. But my dogs were doing the tests as a demonstration for the cameras, so we only put them through five of the tests; enough, Rosalind said, to get a relative score for their intelligence. Her major university study, done with 68 working border collies, set out to demonstrate that the bright dogs who excel at one task will also be reasonably good at the other tests, even though the tests are completely different. This tallies with how intelligence works in humans, and has long-reaching implications for the study of the relationship between high IQ and dementia (dogs can also get dementia in old age).
More relevant for me and others who rely on dogs for work, the tests will also be able to give a guide to how trainable a dog will be, from a very early age.
Apart from the scientific importance of the test results, I was simply intrigued to see how my dogs would fare. I was pretty sure Peg would come out best, but she did not get off to a flying start …
The first test set out to see how long a dog faced with a bowl of food behind a mesh barrier would take to work out that it needed to go round the barrier to get its reward. It sounds simple to us, but dogs see the world differently, and this ‘Detour Barrier Test’ is a good starting point.
To my great surprise, Peg appeared to linger, looking around, before making her way round the barrier to the food. In contrast, both Millie and Boo did it very quickly, and scored better times than she did.
‘My guess is that Peg is being very vigilant, looking around in case she should be heading off to round up sheep,’ said Rosalind, as we were in a field where there are often sheep grazing. ‘That’s why we need to do other tests.’
It is true that collies are cautious by nature, always looking for possible problems. That’s part of their intelligent makeup, and it has saved many a shepherd who has not spotted a problem that the dog has seen, and taken steps to solve without any human command. But it meant Peg, surprisingly, came last in this test, probably because she had higher priorities on her mind than food.
The next test was similar, but with a much longer mesh barrier between the dog and the food, necessitating a much longer detour. Peg and Millie both did it in a very impressive 12 seconds. Boo decided to run off with a stick, and it took her twice as long – that’s my girl …
The next test demonstrated whether dogs react to social cues. In other words, do they take instructions from human beings, by watching what the person wants them to do? I had two bowls of food, one either side of me, and I pointed firmly at one of them. When Peg was released she went straight to the bowl I was indicating. Millie appeared to be more confused, and ate the food in the other bowl. Boo came good, following my pointing hand and eating from the bowl I was gesturing towards.
In fairness to Millie, she is not a dog I work with regularly or feed, although she knows me well enough around the farm, so perhaps the other two had the advantage of being more used to me serving their grub.
But in the next test, again Millie didn’t do too well, and this one was nothing to do with her familiarity with me. Two bowls of food were put down, one containing substantially more food than the other one. The test aims to show if dogs can discriminate between quantities. Peg went straight to the fuller bowl, whereas Millie went to the smaller amount and began eating it. Boo, who likes her food, made sure she went for the larger portion.
The final test was the hardest, a lot more elaborate. Two hay bales formed a passageway into a three-sided mesh cage. In front of the cage was a plate of food. Each dog was led into the cage, and then when released had to go backwards out of the cage, around the hay bales and round to the front of the cage to get the food. It took a lot more working out.
Peg sorted it out in a flash, and backed out, ran round and scoffed the food in five seconds flat. Millie, after a very slight pause, did the same, clocking a time that was only a second longer than Peg’s. Boo showed her true colours, jumping on the hay bale as I led her in, then looking very confused when she saw the food. It didn’t take her too long – she reversed out and ran round – but in her enthusiasm ran beyond the food and had to come back to it. All in all, nine seconds, four more than Peg.
Now the results were in, and Rosalind did the maths and gave me the final scores: Peg, nine; Millie, seven; and Boo not far behind with six.
It was exactly the order I thought they would come in, and it confirmed my belief that Peg would do very well. But I was agreeably surprised that Boo didn’t completely lose the plot.
‘Boo doesn’t have a terribly low IQ, does she?’ I asked Rosalind.
‘No,’ she replied, not too convincingly. ‘Besides, IQ is only one thing, and we love our dogs for lots of different reasons.’
That’s true, and we didn’t choose our wire-haired Vizslas for their MENSA ratings. But putting the dogs through the test was fun, they enjoyed it, and I discovered how their skills vary. I’m all for anything that helps us understand dogs better, because the more we know the better we can work with them, and if Rosalind and her colleagues can use their studies into dog intelligence to help human beings, that’s great.
Rosalind explained to me that scientists have known for some time that brighter people tend to live longer, but it is tricky to investigate because human beings make so many different lifestyle choices, like whether we smoke, how much we drink, the amount we eat and whether or not we exercise.
‘Dogs, on the other hand, are basically teetotal,’ she said. ‘They don’t touch pipes, cigars or mess around with recreational drugs – lots of things that muck up our findings in human reports can be very much better studied in non-human animals.’
By studying a cohort of border collies, all working dogs, it’s a good chance to get a fairly even playing field. And because dogs, like humans, can get dementia, which interferes with their behaviour and brain structure, it could lead to a better understanding of why some dogs are more likely to get it than others, with possible ramifications for humans.
Of course, this work is very much in its infancy, and Rosalind and her colleagues at both the LSE and Edinburgh University are working on perfecting the IQ test. But so far their findings show that dogs that do best on the detour tests – finding their way round the barriers to the food – also did better on the choice tests, when they chose a fuller bowl of food or when they chose to interact with the human pointing them to one particular bowl. So those dogs are overall more intelligent, not just suited to one task, and the hope is that this will lead to more understanding of the evolution of intelligence.
As for me, well, I’m just delighted to have my faith in Peg confirmed.
Stanley Coren, a Canadian Professor of Psychology and the author of The Intelligence of Dogs, has done a lot of work on how dogs think and why. His interest was triggered when, as a student, he saw an example of a dog’s ability to reason. The family pet, Penny, a boxer cross, had done something wrong and Stanley’s mother was so angry with her she hurled a bunch of keys at the dog, hitting her in the rump and causing her to yelp. Stanley, who walked into the kitchen at the end of this scene, rescued Penny by suggesting she come with him to his room. As they were leaving the kitchen Penny made a wide detour round the keys, which were lying where they had fallen. As she reached the doorway, she dashed back, picked up the keys, carried them to another room and hid them behind a sofa, pushing the keys with her nose until they were out of sight.
Professor Coren concluded that Penny was actually using reason. She was hiding the keys that had been used to punish her, having reasoned that they could be used against her again. At the time that Stanley Coren watched Penny’s behaviour, the general belief in the scientific community was that dogs don’t have conscious reasoning abilities, even though many pet owners have similar stories to demonstrate that they do.
I’ll quote just one, and it’s not about a pet dog, but about a stray bitch who gave birth to nine puppies. When they were two weeks old the forest where the puppies were born, in Chile, was engulfed by a forest fire. Unable to carry all of her dogs to safety, the mother dug a deep hole, placed all the puppies into it, then dragged a sheet of metal from a nearby landfill site and covered them. She stayed close by, and when the fire was brought under control she led firefighters to her underground shelter. After publicity, all the pups were adopted. But, again, the mother showed a great deal of insight and reasoning.
Lots of research has been carried out on perception, awareness, memory and learning in dogs, and experts have found that dogs have very high interpersonal intelligence, higher than that of other intelligent mammals like the great apes and much higher than their own wild relatives, like wolves.
Interpersonal intelligence shows that a person, or an animal, has social skills and can relate to others. Dogs definitely relate to the humans around them, often showing preferences, and a recent study in Japan has shown that dogs even remember people who have been unfriendly towards their owners. They look to humans for help when they face a problem they cannot solve, whereas captive-raised dingoes do not, even though they are just as smart as dogs at solving the other problems.
Of course, other animals, including apes and wolves, live in societies where they relate to each other because there is a pack order, and they all know and accept the hierarchy. They learn from each other: a puppy set a simple task with a reward at the end of it will learn the task 15 times more quickly if an older dog demonstrates it than if left to its own devices, and it’s roughly the same success rate if a human demonstrates it.
But the relationship between domestic dogs and humans goes beyond the pack mentality. Dogs are the only animals that can discriminate emotional expressions on human faces. Without being aware of it, humans tend to look at the right-hand side of another person’s face, because that’s the side that most expresses emotion. Dogs also look at this side, interpreting signs of anger, happiness and irritation in exactly the same way that we do. The fact that dogs don’t look at any particular side of another dog’s face shows that they use this behaviour just with humans, where there is a point to it.
Another type of intelligence is linguistic, the ability to understand and use language. While dogs don’t talk in words, they certainly understand many and can express themselves to their owners. Professor Coren estimates the average dog knows 160 words or phrases. Seems a lot to me, and I’m not sure Boo would have such a big vocabulary, but clearly many dogs do.
A border collie called Chaser is believed to have the largest vocabulary of any animal in the world. Chaser has been taught by her owner, a Professor of Psychology in America, to correctly identify over a thousand different toys by their name, and to retrieve the right one when asked to do so. I’m convinced that it’s not the word they understand but the sound. As people we can understand the same word spoken in many different accents, pitches and tones, whereas a dog needs consistency of tone.
Dogs also understand body language and hand signals. Although chimps and other primates have been taught similar language skills, dogs of all breeds pick up words and gesture, often without any structured teaching.
Spatial intelligence is the ability to recognise places and remember them relative to other places. In other words, to have a mental map of the world. Dogs remember where the dog food is stored, where their bed is, which way to go when they are taken out for a favourite walk. What’s more, they have a spatial memory. Take a dog back to a place it used to live, or where a relative lives, and it will instantly know its way around, even if it hasn’t been there for years.
Another type of intelligence is logical-mathematical. Well, dogs clearly don’t do algebra and fractions (and plenty of us humans never really got the hang of them!) but dogs are able to make logical choices – just as the dogs in Rosalind’s intelligence test did when they went to the large bowl of food not the smaller one. Some dogs also have rudimentary counting skills, and it is more than likely that a bitch with pups has a mental count of them, so she knows when one is missing.
Professor Coren carried out a major study into which breeds of dog are the most intelligent. Nearly half of all the obedience judges in North America filled in a questionnaire for him and added their own comments. From their information he assessed 140 different breeds of dog, and ranked them from 1 to 79 for obedience and working intelligence. Of course, as he points out (and so did the judges) there are exceptions in any breed: dogs that do better or worse than their breed would suggest. Mixed-breed dogs are harder to place on charts, as it all depends what genes they inherited from which parents. Different research shows that, generally speaking, a mixed-breed dog will behave most like the breed it looks like. For example, a poodle/Labrador cross that looks more like a poodle is likely to have more behaviour traits of a poodle. But of course, some dogs are ‘bitzers’ – bits of this and bits of that – so their behaviour and character can only be judged on an individual basis.
So for the purpose of his list, Professor Coren has only assessed pure breeds. And guess what? Top of the list, numero uno, is the border collie. Out of 199 judges who assessed the breeds, 191 put the border collie in the top ten, so there was a great deal of overall consistency. At the bottom of the list too, where the ditzy but loveable Afghan hound took the wooden spoon, 121 of the judges assessed it in the bottom ten.
How did the other dogs in my life fare? Labradors came in at number seven, and springer spaniels at 13. As for Vizslas (and the list did not differentiate between smooth and wire-haired), they came in at number 25. According to Stanley Coren, dogs ranked in the top ten will start to understand commands after less than five goes, and will remember them with ease. He said: ‘These are clearly the top breeds for intelligence and seem to learn well, even with inexperienced or relatively inept trainers.’
Dogs ranked from 11 to 26 are ‘excellent’ working dogs, but they may respond a bit more slowly when the handler is further away: ‘Nevertheless, virtually any trainer can get these breeds to perform well.’
I don’t want to sound smug, but it’s no surprise to me to find border collies in top place. But there is a note of caution to be sounded: the Border Collie Rescue charity says that intelligence in dogs is a double-edged sword. Working dogs like Peg are fine: they have plenty of scope for exercise and to use their active brains. But the charity warns: ‘Having a smart dog means waging a continual intellectual war with your dog, trying to outsmart them. Put in a gate, and they figure out how to get over or under it.’ These are dogs that can lift latches and even turn doorknobs, and they need a lifestyle that allows them to burn off their tremendous energy and work their restless brains.
Before I end this chapter, I want to share one very heart-warming story with you, that takes me right back to my early love of Lassie, and demonstrates the intelligence of dogs. Two rough collies (probably not pedigrees but definitely collies from the look of them) called Panda and Lucy, escaped from their home in Ukraine and spent two days stranded on a railway track after Lucy was injured and could not move. Panda, a male dog and the larger of the two, stayed close to her, and every time a speeding train approached he lay down next to her and nudged her head flat, so that the train rattled over them. He never left her side, and was so fiercely protective that locals had to call in dog rescue experts to get them off the tracks.
‘I saw a train approaching, and felt sick,’ said Denis Malafeyev, a volunteer from a rescue centre who was contacted by a train engineer about the plight of the dogs. ‘The male dog also heard it, came close to the female and lay down next to her. Both of them pushed their heads to the ground and let the train pass. He had been doing this for two days, and keeping her warm. I don’t know what to call it: instinct, love, friendship, loyalty?’
I’d say it is all of those. But I’d add bravery and intelligence. The dogs were rescued, Lucy was treated, and they were returned home. That’s collies for you.