And You Think Your Dog Is Smart...

I've seen the intelligence of a dog first hand - my cousin can command his dog to go into the fridge and retrieve a wide variety of beverages (obviously no where near 1,000). I was also very shocked that an animal could distinguish the difference between "human" objects, considering dogs are usually considered unintelligent animals. I guess I never even thought to associate this intelligence in dogs to psychology, so you present an interesting perspective on the topic. It leaves you wondering what animals are truly capable of...

This is awesome! I knew dogs were smart, but not that smart. I have a small dog, and I do not think I could teach him to do this is I was given an endless amount of time. This past unit has really shown me that many different types of animals can be conditioned to do really cool things. I think often times animals are thought of as unintelligent, but in reality most animals are intelligent. I did my blog on something similar to this. A golf fish was operantly conditioned to swim through hoops, to play soccer, and to limbo. Animals are pretty remarkable!

I more than agree with your last statement that you said in this blog. I obviously knew dogs can do some pretty remarkable things, but never knew exactly how far their knowledge can go. I wonder how long it took Pilley to train his collie to be able to recognize over 1000 items. For all I knew, I thought dogs could just shake hands, sit, fetch, play simple sports if taught, etc. But to now know how amazing their memory is, I'll look at dogs in such a different way! Aside from how amazed I am, this was a great blog as I will be looking up some of the things owners have taught their pets to do!

Sometimes ,we think animal is stupid or they have the totally different brain as human. However, in some how, the brain formation and the structure of the brain between human and animals are very similar, the biggest difference might be the size. So, the dog can remember names of the objects is a kind of potential energy I think. And this dog is really smart and intelligent. However, not only dog, many other animals can do something which human can't imagine. That are all the potential of the animals, they just need some training to develop their potential.

This is rather interesting blog because we are always underestimating how smart other organisms are on earth. We automatically assume we are the smartest since we can talk, process language, etc. But in reality there are other organisms like dogs that possess some abilities that are astounding and perhaps surpass our abilities as humans on certain tasks. As stated I think we don't realize how smart and intelligent dogs are because we don't normally take the time to teach our animals things beyond the norm like John Pilley did, because we don't have the time or the patience to do so. Your blog overall teaches us a lesson that dogs brains are similar to humans and we can learn a simple lesson or two about both when we take the time to compare and learn.

That's pretty incredible. I knew we had ways of teaching dogs the basics (i.e rolling over, sitting, etc.) but I had no idea that we could teach them names of toys. However, I'm curious as to how far we can go. What else can we teach a dog? Obviously they don't have the same capacity as humans, otherwise they'd be talking to us, but I wonder what the limit is. Can we teach a dog how to use a toilet? Can we teach them what right and wrong are before they look at us and know they did something wrong? I wonder how far we can go. Great entry.

This is really cool. I have had the chance to witness the intelligence of dogs, but i never knew that they could be taught to do so many different things. Like many of the other comments have said we really do underestimate the abilities of other animals. Conditioning animals can result in some amazing things and this dog proves it. Great Post.

I think this is a great post because it truly demonstrates how memory and object recognition is based off certain brain functions and shows up in animals as well as human. The way hippocambrius allows us to have short term memories and then transfer them to long term ones.

This is a very popular blob. You brought up a topic that many can relate to. I always thought that dolphins were the most intelligent animals right below humans and right now I stay true to that belief. If you think about it. Humans are able to recognize way over 1,000 objects. I do think it is amazing that this dog could retrieve so many different objects. I am still confused on it teaching methods though. I can see the cycle through the short-term memory and is now in the long-term memory after repetition. What I really want to know is how LONG does the dog remember these objects. Would he remember a year form now without practice?

I have always thought of dogs being pretty stupid and I saw no intelligence in the dog that I used to have. That might be in part because I spent little to no time in training my dog to do things like the owner of this dog did. I've seen dog races before and I thought that was remarkable that were able to know how to race, but being able to recognize 1,000 objects is even more remarkable. This makes me wonder if all dogs have the capabilities to do these things or if some dogs are just unique.

It is really amazing! I think it is really hard for a dog to remember 1000 names and it must take a quite long time to learn! I used to own a cute dog and I was dreamed about turining her into the smart dogs as you described. But as a matter of fact, I was suspicious about it myself therefore it didn't come true at the end. But I think some types of dogs are smarter than others so it really depends on what kind of dog you own.

It's really no surprise at all to read about how trainable dogs can be. People underestimate the intelligence that dogs possess. If you give the dog enough positive conditioning you can probably train it to do almost anything within reason. Good article.

This definitely surprised me! My dog barely knows how to come to me when I call him without food in my hand. However, after hearing about how the shaping technique could be used to teach a pigeon how to go bowling I guess it is believable with the right technique and amount of time.

I love dog very much. I have a dod for my friend for seven years. But it lost. I am so sad. I think every dogs are both smart, I hear some new,a dog it is look like a three year old child, for my dog I Training it picked the ball and picked nespapers, It can do very well. In fact, I consider the dog's intelligence and the intelligence of children, after the development is getting smarter.But may not be able to achieve a very high intelligence, perhaps into a year-old child's intelligence.

It's amazing how much certain animals can learn. I wonder if the owner used reinforcements or punishments to motivate the dog to learn. If she didn't, imagine how much more the dog could have learned using positive reinforcement on a changing variable basis.

This is really cool! I have a dog my self so i can relate to teaching it various things. Some of the thing i taught my dog to do include, taping her metal water dish when it's empty, ringing a bell when she has to go outside, and then the common sit and such. It's interesting that dogs can retain this much information, but are there certain things that they can't distinguish? Maybe mentioning what type of conditioning this could add to the story as well!

Dogs are definitely intelligent, I mean they're man's best friend after all, we can relate to them on many levels because they can tell when they need to be there for you in case you're upset or need help. Just like anything it involves the proper training and correct reinforcement, and just like with humans, dogs can learn at different rates, but I'd think that it would be more difficult to cause the dogs to be interested in learning so much, humans need to function on it whereas dogs don't need it as much, so I think that has a lot to do with how well dogs learn.