Albert Einstein once said, "if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." When it comes to the discussion about dogs and their intelligence, this notion speaks volumes: dogs are bred to be good at certain things. For hunting dogs, this means they use their noses to track animals over miles and can even be taught how to not damage the kill in its mouth. Medical alert dogs can be trained to sense a seizure before it happens and to even retrieve medication for their owner. Guard dogs can be taught how to defend their home from intruders and protect the ones they love. Are any of these dogs smarter than the other? Maybe a better question is, what defines intelligence?



They say an intelligent dog has the mental capacity of a two-year-old human child. On some levels, this is impressive: children of that age know and understand many words and are capable of learning lessons, but can a toddler be taught how to herd a hundred sheep, or how to guide a blind person through a busy city street? Probably not. When it comes to determining the smartest dog breeds, many factors must be taken into consideration, including inherited traits, training, a dog's bond with his owner, and the different types of intelligence measured in our canine companions. This article will also discuss the top ten smartest breeds recognized by a dog behavior expert, dog IQ tests you can perform at home, and finally, whether you should consider getting a highly intelligent dog for your family.



Should I get a smart dog?
Many prospective dog owners consider intelligence when shopping breeds of dogs for their family, some believe that smarter automatically means better, while others are convinced that potty training will be easier for a smart pup vs. a not so smart pooch. If you are in the market for a dog, however, you may want to reconsider getting a highly intelligent dog: dogs that rank high on the IQ scale often rank high on the misbehavior scale as well. A bulldog, for example, may be content to sleep on the couch all day and only begrudgingly goes for his daily walk. A Border Collie, on the other hand, would not fair well being left at home all day with no interaction and minimal exercise. Smart pooches that are not challenged - much like children, will often result to destructive behaviors and even deteriorate mentally if not given ample opportunity to exercise his body and mind.



When you are searching for a forever friend, the most important thing to consider is your family's lifestyle: how much time will you have to devote to Fido? Who will take him on daily walks? Do you have a large yard? If not, where will he get exercise? Also don't forget about the intelligent pup's mind: how will you make sure that his smarts are being put to good use and not mischief? Owners of smart dogs find that doggie puzzles work wonders, while others enroll their pup in a therapy dog course so he can be taken to hospitals and nursing homes to bring joy to the residents and fulfillment to Fido. Others find their dogs excel at agility, tracking, lure coursing, and dock jumping.

Whether you have a pup that is the smartest dog on the block, or have a pooch that is more cute than clever, remember that the most important thing between a dog and his owner is love and care. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter whether your dog has an IQ like Einstein or Frankenstein, but what really matters is the joy he brings into your life, so be sure to treat him like family no matter what.



Cultivate a desire to learn
Tell your dog he is clever, smart, a genius. Get him so greedy for praise that he will work hard to learn what you want. You do this by putting your dog in a situation where you know he will perform a behavior on his own, then you ask for that behavior and praise extravagantly when he does it. A natural place to begin this is when you know your dog or puppy has to pee - after sleeping, eating, or being inside his crate. You take him to the right spot and give the command. When he inevitably obeys, you praise him until he is fully excited and pleased with himself. You have now cultivated in your dog the habit obedience and reward. With young animals and horses in particular, you will achieve superior results by asking very little in the beginning so your dog enjoys a high rate of success and minimal correction.



There are other rewards which can strongly motivate a dog. If you require your dog to perform a behavior before an event he strongly desires, he will more actively try to figure out what you want. An example is to have your dog bring you his leash before leaving for a walk or his dish before being fed - teach him to present it properly, sitting before you with the dish in his mouth-heavy dishes dropped on your feet can be rather painful. Make your dog feel needed. When he has learned to fetch, ask him for help when you drop something and cannot reach it easily, then be extremely grateful when he hands it to you. Teach him to put waste paper in the trash and then deliberately toss and miss so he can put it in for you. As always, shower him with gratitude so he will want to do it again.



Teach your dog English
or any language you prefer
While dogs cannot speak, they are capable of learning words and understanding and acting upon those words in different contexts. Our border collies average about 20 minutes time to learn a new word and one of them knew over 100 words before he was a year old. We start teaching our dogs from puppyhood, but it is never too late to begin. When you bring home that puppy, even if you considered yourself a sensible individual, it understandable to begin speaking funny words to it in high pitched voices - we are perfectly guilty of prattling. However, this is the ideal time for your dog to begin learning English as a second language and you will be so proud as you watch him develop. With better communication your dog will be able to learn tricks faster, help you around the house or farm, and much more. There are many ways to teach vocabulary. Here are a few tips. You will find increasingly more methods to teach your dog as his vocabulary and your understanding of his thinking grows.



Use repetition.When you begin to learn a new language, you do so by repeating words and phrases until they become familiar. Announce events and activities to your dog, using the same phrases such as "Let's go outside!", "Do you need to go paper?" or "Are you hungry?". We like to tell our dogs "I'll be back soon." when we leave a room. This allows them to relax and wait instead of anxiously trying to follow. Say "Good morning!" and "Bedtime!" and announce meals.

Name the rooms of your house. Give your rooms names such as: My Room, Auntie's Room, Kitchen, Big Room. Announce the room when you are going to it with your dog. He will soon learn the names and run ahead. You will eventually be able to tell your dog "Take this note to John. He is in the Study".

Name objects. Name toys and any objects you want your dog to handle. Show your dog a toy and say "This is Stinky". You then touch the toy, shake it, encourage him to grab it while saying "Where is stinky?" When he grabs it, you shout "There is Stinky!" If he has learned to fetch, you then tell him "Bring me Stinky." Point at the toy or poke it if necessary to get him to pick it up, then praise him extravagantly. You will probably need to repeat this and any other new word or behavior for a few days before it is solid in his memory. The more object names he learns, the faster he will learn new ones. Eventually, your dog may hand you the remote control or join the the search for lost keys.

Name people. Give everyone in your house a name that your dog can easily recognize: Mummy, Auntie, Grandpa, Uncle George. Teach your dog the names by saying "Go to So-and-so" and have that person immediately call the dog. Make sure So-and-so is attentive or your dog will end up responding to "Call him!" as a command to go to the other person. Learning names is useful because your dog can learn to deliver notes and objects from one person to another and save you from shouting across a big house.

Break up commands into many parts. A command such as "Fetch" can be broken down into "Go get it", "Pick it up", "Bring it", and "Give" or "Drop it". You can then combine these words with others to form new behaviors.

Play hide and seek. Show your dog his favorite toy and then hide it and say "Where is Bunny?" Keep asking "Where is Bunny?" until he finds it. Try it with all his toys one at a time.

Show contrast. To understand a word, your dog also needs to understand what the word doesn't mean. To know what qualifies as "In the trash" he has to know that dropping a paper on the floor next to the trash won't do.

Start from the goal. When teaching a complex behavior, starting at step one may seem logical, but starting at step 10 will accomplish it faster. Make the objective clear immediately. If you want your dog to learn to close a door the objective is the door clicking shut. Start with the door only slightly ajar. When he can close it by pushing one inch, open it a little wider. omplete steps for this trick will be provided in a separate article. Teach him to drop things in the trash while he is standing with his mouth over the basket where he cannot miss then gradually increase the distance.

Tell your dog facts relevant to his daily life. Show your dog objects that are forbidden such as chocolate and tell him it is bad. He will learn to be wary of forbidden things. We also taught our dogs the word "Hot" by touching hot bowls of food ourselves and pulling our hands away yelling "Hot!" Then we let them sniff it closely to feel the heat. They now wait patiently when we tell them their food is still hot and move considerately around us when we say we have hot tea.

Music can make your dog smarter
Music lessons have been proven to improve children's performance in school - it has the same effect on dogs. Learning to recognize songs and melodies is an effortless exercise that improves the memory. Dogs are attracted to the same elements of music that please children so we sing a lot of nursery songs to amuse our boys. Their faces light up when they hear a song they know and they bark along to certain songs. They are also fond of hand motions to act out songs which they memorize and bark along even if we do the motions without singing. Dogs are also capable of recognizing and enjoying classical music both live and recorded. Pat your dog in rhythm to a symphony and he may learn to tap his tail to music. Use songs to announce events regularly. "Happy Birthday!" can be sung as "Happy baff (bath) day to you!", "Here come the bride" can become "Here comes the food".

The lyrics of dog name
You can also change the lyrics for your dog's name to please him. Ludwig is named after Beethoven and he likes to hear his nickname Luvie-Wuvie sung to the tune of Beethoven's 5th symphony or Eccosaise. For Wolfgang, named for Mozart, we changed the military march from the Marriage of Figaro to sing "Wolfie poo on the paper" and Cherubino's aria to have the words:
Good dogs get treat!
Bad dogs get beat!
Good dogs get dinner
Bad dogs get thinner

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Beyond simply being hairy, smelly love machines, a growing body of research shows that dogs may be even more in tune with us than we previously thought. So, why our relationship with dogs seems so uncomplicated?



Dogs read our body language
Human babies understand that pointing and gaze direction are indications of what's going in another person's mind. To examine whether this skill is learned or inborn, research has explored these capabilities in our closest evolutionary relatives - chimpanzees and bonobos. The classic test is to hide a treat in one of two locations then point to where it is. Children from just over a year old will have no difficulty recognising this signal and will come and claim it. Chimps do no better than randomly choosing between the two locations, completely ignoring the cue. Given that chimps seem to struggle with this task, it was widely assumed that it couldn't possibly have evolved in other, "lower" animals. Do this experiment with your cat and she will probably gaze uncomprehendingly at your finger for a while.



Imagine researchers' great surprise then when it was revealed that dogs, who are miles away from us on the evolutionary tree, passed this task with flying colours. Hide a treat in one of two locations and point at it and dogs will reliably bound over and gobble it up, even when the treats don't smell of anything. Not only that! If you stand a long distance away and point, dogs will unfailingly go to the right location. If you simply bow or nod in that direction, they get it. If you look at one hiding place rather than another, they get it. Perhaps most impressively, if you walk in one direction and point in the other, they still get it.



Dogs know what grabs our attention
Another test of mind reading ability is knowing what someone is paying attention to. Given the option of begging food from two people, one who has seen where the food is hidden and one who has a bucket on his head chimps will randomly go to either one. Dogs, on the other hand, will consistently choose the person who can see. If you have a dog you can try this yourself. Throw a ball and then turn away and the dog will almost invariably come round and drop the ball in front of you, where you can see it. This indicates that dogs are not just playing with their humans, they are also keeping track of what their humans are looking at and how best to get their attention. This sort of gaze reading ability can take months to develop in young children and may never develop in inhuman primates.

Dogs love us
Like cats, dogs also seem to form strong emotional attachments to their owners in much the same way as human babies do to their mothers. The typical test of babies' attachment is to plonk them down in an unfamiliar environment and see how they fare. If babies have a strong emotional attachment to their mothers they will explore the new environment, returning to her regularly for reassurance, get terribly upset if she leaves the room but be quickly consoled when she returns. Dogs show an almost identical pattern of responses with respect to their owners. Sniffing about, returning to the owner, pawing the door and whining when the owner leaves followed by exuberant greetings on their return. Like babies they are distrustful of strangers in the room with them and tend to show signs of increasing distress the longer their owner is away.

Dogs listen to us
Finally there is some evidence that a couple of precocious pooches may have that most quintessential of human skills, comprehending language. Rico, a border collie, has been shown to differentiate at least 200 different labels for objects, an astonishing vocabulary for a canine. Chaser, another collie, understands more than 1,000 different words! Both will bring you the toy you ask for from a huge selection and will do so even if you instruct them out of sight. This means they are not simply picking up on unconscious not verbal signals. If you present these dogs with a familiar toy and a new object, then ask them to fetch the "dax" (a word they won't have heard before), they will reliably bring you the new toy rather than one they already know the name for.



This sort of inference is called "fast-mapping" and is thought to be the skill that underlies human children's astonishing speed of language acquisition in early childhood. But even human children don't show this ability to the same degree as Rico and Chaser until about 2-3 years of age. That dogs are so surprisingly proficient at reading human communication might come as no surprise to dog owners but has been something of a revelation for psychologists interested in how these skills have evolved. What is especially surprising is that they seem much less developed in our closest genetic relatives, inhuman primates for humans and wolves for dogs. So these skills cannot be explained by any simple evolutionary model or by straightforward pack behaviour.



What we are finding is that the rudiments of what we thought of as particularly human social skills may have their roots much further back in evolution than previously expected. Alternatively, they may have evolved in different species independently. What seems increasingly clear is that dogs have maintained the reputation of being "man's best friend" not simply through our own benevolence but also through developing an impressive set of social skills that make them ever-sensitive to our whims and fancies.

LIFE WITH ROBOTIC DOG
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WATCH DOG VIDEO !!!

BBC Go Digital's Jon Wurtzel looked after Sony's intelligent Aibo for a couple of weeks to find out how much fun you can have with a robot dog.



When I first saw Aibo come out of his box, a huge smile broke out across my face. This robot seamlessly became a him, not an it. He made me want to play with him. It helps that Aibo is one handsome looking robot dog. Roughly the size of a large puppy, Aibo is sleek and polished, and his movements are recognisably canine. His flexibility seems to surpass gymnasts, and watching him stretch, prance around a room, or chase a ball is entrancing.



Satisfying experience
As an aesthetic experience, Aibo is hugely satisfying. He also comes with some promising features. Sony's robot-dog can react to a name - You can program him to respond to a specific name. A camera within the dog enables him to see and can be wirelessly connected to your computer, allowing you to see the world through his perspective. You can also change his software so that he becomes a puppy, complete with crying and demanding behaviour. Since one of the principal advantages of a robot dog is that that you don't have to clean up after him, walk or take care of him, I didn't want to deal with a mewing puppy. I chose the fully developed, mature dog mode



Emotional response
Aibo inspired a strong emotional response in me. Without hesitation, I looked at, stroked and treated him like he was a dog. When he did something good like dancing for me, I enjoyed petting him and seeing his enthusiastic response to my attention. Sony Latte Aibo - Aibo's latest dog, Latte That was, however, as far as the relationship between man and dog was able to go. No further connections grew between us, and I grew increasingly frustrated with my inability to develop a mutual relationship with Aibo. Training him to obey commands he was programmed to respond to grew increasingly difficult and frustrating. This is a robot and not a thick-headed terrier, and I didn't want or enjoy the challenge of training and disciplining him.



Let down
What became increasingly clear is the power and importance of the emotional relationship with this robot dog. When I tried to develop a relationship with him, I felt let down. I stopped referring to him solely as a he, and started referring to him as the robot. This deflation felt even more acute because he had so successfully generated emotional cues and responses with me. He had seemingly promised me a canine relationship, and then failed to deliver. As art, Aibo is a tremendous success.

He makes a great interactive sculpture, and is fun and impressive to watch. But, as a pet dog, Aibo fell down.


GENIBO SD TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

DOG vs CAT INTELLIGENCE
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and
by Dr. Becker

There is perhaps no bigger debate among pet owners than the age-old question of who's smarter - dogs or cats?



You may have your own (strong) opinion, but what does the research say about the intelligence of the two most popular pets in America? Before I get to that, first understand that this is a very difficult topic of investigation because, at its foundation, even the question is problematic. Dogs and cats are two different species, after all, so comparing intelligence between them is not comparing apples to apples. As Psychology Today put it:



"In the case of dogs versus cats, each are specialized to do different things. Dogs are designed to be more efficient runners while cats have better ability at manipulating things with their paws. Thus a test that involved pulling strings or operating levers would tend to favor a cat, while a test involving moving from place to place, where speed is a measure of performance, would favor a dog. Charles Darwin claimed, "intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive and one might argue that by this definition all species that stay healthy, remain numerous and avoid extinction are equally intelligent."



The Encephalization Quotient:
Are Dogs Smarter?
You may have heard the notion that bigger brains are associated with increased intelligence. This is true to a point, but problems arise because bigger animals necessitate larger brains (but this does not necessarily indicate superior intelligence). According to Stanley Coren, Ph.D, the "Encephalization Quotient" (EQ) was developed in the 1970s as a tool to compare intelligence and brain weight in relation to an animal's body size, thereby solving the problems with previous attempts to link brain size to intelligence. Using this tool, it turns out that higher brain mass in relation to body size is associated with increased intelligence. Based on EQ, the smartest animals are (in descending order) humans, great apes, porpoises, elephants and close behind are dogs. Cats come further down on the list (and further down are horses, sheep, mice, rats, and rabbits).



Study: Dogs Are Becoming Smarter Over Time While Cats Stay the Same
Social animals tend to have higher EQs than solitary animals, simply because socializing requires more problem solving, communication and interaction. Dogs are pack animals while cats are not. An interesting point made by Coren, however, is that research suggests dogs are increasing social demands are making them even smarter. Those demands come from their close interactions with humans, which have required them to understand human communications over time… to a much larger extent than cats. Oxford University researchers tested this theory and found, indeed, that based on EQ (using data from fossils to living species) dogs are becoming progressively more intelligent while cats have stayed mostly the same. As Coren explained: "This means that not only are dogs smarter than cats, but the gap between the species is increasing over time. At the risk of starting another argument, these data may explain why we never hear about such things as a "seeing eye cat," "police cat" or "search and rescue cat."



Feline Cognition Is Less Studied
To be fair, dogs are far easier to train and work with than cats, and this holds true for research studies, too. Could it be that cats are just as intelligent as dogs, or more so, but they just don't want to let us in on the secret? Some have argued, for instance, that the number of neurons is a greater indicator of intelligence than brain sizeand in this area cats excel. Cats have 300 million neurons in their cerebral cortex (the brain area associated with processing, problem solving, and perception), while dogs have 160 million.

However, it wasn't easy to get the cats to display their talents. In the case of distinguishing between different quantities. This is an ability that fish also possess, and the researchers said it was far "easier to work with fish than cats." Another interesting distinction, which you can take from what you will, is this: "The research also showed cats and dogs can solve simple puzzles to get food, but when the puzzle is unsolvable, dogs will look to humans for help, whereas cats will keep trying," Live Science reported.



Some other interesting cat versus dog facts to consider:

Cats can be housetrained in an instant as long as they have access to a litter box. There's really no training to it, in fact. It's instinct. Most dogs, on the other hand, take considerably longer to housebreak, and some just never get all the way there.

A dog's memory is only about five minutes long. Kitties can remember up to 16 hours.

Cats seem to remember human kindness and return the favor later. If an owner fulfills her feline's wish to interact, the cat will often comply with the owner's desire for contact at other times.



This research probably won't settle the age-old rivalry between dog and cat owners, but it does come with an Oxford pedigree. Scientists at the prestigious British university say canines are definitively more intelligent than cats. Their reasoning is simple: Dogs are more social animals, so they've developed bigger brains than their feline counterparts. Man's best friend, in addition to always being in a good mood, can recognize images of itself and pick up nonverbal cues.



Finally, if you think the differences between cat and dog intelligence are fascinating, you will be even more interested to know that whether you prefer cats or dogs may tell you something about your intelligence, too.

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