The Intelligence of AnimalsFollow

Get a couple of cats! Now there you have personalities! Animals like people come in all varieties and levels of intelligence. Sometimes the dumb carefree ones have the best lives. Sure they tend to die faster. But thats the way things are.

Nixnot is a golden retriever?

This...I have two of them, but I would trade them both for almost any type of dog.

I have a 3/4 Timber Wolf and 1/4 German Sheppard, he is pretty smart. I taught him sit, shake, lay, come, and stay. He listens for the most part, sometimes he has a defiant streak in him and refuses to come, mainly when other dogs are around outside.

He has learned when I say "want to go potty" to run to the door, I would say the best thing he does is when I say 'lets get a bath" he goes to the bathroom and sits in the shower, awaiting his bath. He doesn't like it, but he knows he's gonna get it anyways.

Although he has his quirks, he licks the sidewalk at times, not sure why, maybe coke was spilled on it at one point or something else. The only thing I dislike and he is almost broke of it, is he eats cat **** on occasion. Drives me insane.

My ferret is pretty smart too, along with my chinchilla. I've never seen an animal that could figure out so many ways to escape from there cage. My Savannah monitor is pretty intelligent. He knows when I'm calling him for food, comes out and play some, just still a wee aggressive at times, that is might fault to some degree. I need to tame him down a bit more.

The animal I have that has the most personality though I would say would be my leopard geckos.

My cat has this tendency to lick the windows in the winter, and in true fashion his fur on his head looks like a helmet.

Pretty sure my cat is also retarded.

Interesting. I saw a science clip that compared the intelligence of wolves and dogs. Apparently wolves are more intelligent overall. They can solve puzzles to grab the meat at the centre of the puzzle much faster than all types of dogs. Dog breeds are so incredibly various that dog intelligence varies wildly with the breed.

But although dog brains are smaller and appear overall less functional, dogs have a social intelligence associated with humans that wolves don't. If a human points, almost all dogs always look at what the human is pointing at. If the dog knows there is a choice of containers, one that contains meat, and a human points at one container, the dog will almost always go to the container pointed at, reaping the meaty reward. Some dog breeds are smarter than others, or pay more heed to human gestures.

However, wolves don't have that human link in their logic chain. When offered containers, one of which the wolf knows contains meat, the wolf disregards any gestures by a human at the containers, and chooses for itself, only succeeding at a statistically random rate.

My two dogs are like night and day, but I love them both so much.

The Shih Tzu is a little dumb, adorable (often on accident), and content to just lay at my feet nomming on a plush toy. The Shepherd, on the other hand, is a brilliant dog, connivingly cute, and just so goddamn eager to please. I enjoy making crazy facial expressions that confuse her. The one thing that I don't understand is, when the weather is bad, she will give no notification that she needs to go outside, and will go sneak off somewhere (or do it right behind you). She'd rather spend the day in her kennel for punishment than go outside in the cold rain for 5-10 mins. Whenever the weather goes through changes (like now, it's been rainy and cold the last week), she almost completely loses her house training. Just yesterday, she went outside and did her duties, and 10 minutes later she was inside doing it on the floor. She's not quite a year and a half, but considering how smart she is and how quickly the core of her house training went (less than a month), it's just astounding. She went from being a barn dog to being a 99% "I need to be inside!" dog - she lived the first couple months of her life in a barn in the middle of winter. For the first couple of months after we brought her home, she greeted the couch as if it were another being in the house. Nothing says comfort like a warm, dry, soft place to jump up and down on.

I'm hoping as she gets older and get used to the crazy weather swings here something will click. She has to be psyching herself out because there's no way she's not smart enough to understand "10-15 minutes total outside today, or 5 extra hours in my kennel...."

And then, on the other hand, the Shih tzu loves nothing more than being outside and peeing on things. You know, I was watching something on TV recently lol, it was American Idol. One of the girls auditioning referred to her family and Shih tzu, and they bleeped out the "shih t-" part. Really? Do people really get offended by a dog breed? What's next, if I say coonhound will I get bant?



Oh, and more tl;dr for Ari - I caught a short clip recently about how scientists are using monkeys? chimps? (I am not sure which species - I only caught a very little of it) and seeing if they can train a dog and if a dog will listen to them. So far, for the simple tasks, like pointing to food etc, it is working. Pretty interesting. I wish I would have seen more. I want to see an excited monkey because it got a big furry predator to listen to him. Dogs are pretty amazing.

Love the chimp/monkey to dog training experiment. At moment dogs have an average capacity vocabulary of 1000 human words they can recognise when engaged properly.

Then there was the case of the ape in a zoo somewhere that they taught sign language, and to communicate via large sign-language alternative pitures on buttons on keyboards, so that she could communicate over the internet. I bet she got really sick of school children asking "Do you like bananas?". I forget how large her vocabulary was, but it was pretty significant for an animal, and certainly large enough for her to communicate effectively at a simple level with her zoo keepers.

The really cool thing about her is she had a daughter, and her habitat cage was large enough that she could hide her kid away at the back in the bushes. The keepers mostly left her to it. One day the daughter ape astounded and thrilled the keepers by coming out and asking for a specific type of food in sign language. The keepers hadn't taught her any sign language; her mother ape had.

This is exactly how Butters begs. He sits at your feet all innocently, with the most loving saucer eyes, penetrating your soul with "FOOD NOM I AM GOOD BOY". If he's getting on my nerves while I'm trying to eat, and I give him a gentle scolding, he lays down and faces away from me, as if to say "I understand that you're not going to offer me anything, but I'm not leaving in case something happens to fall on the floor..."

Dexter, on the other hand, likes to get all up in my business when I'm in the kitchen. She knows the only safe spot for her to be is watching nervously from her kennel. It's so funny that she punishes herself usually when she knows she's behaved badly.