Blog-Wa, the Dog-Wa Blog

Harvard University has recently debuted its Canine Cognition Lab. According to the article, “Researchers have long looked at other species’ reasoning abilities and behavior to discern what makes humans distinct. The Harvard team is now turning to dogs because on certain tasks, such as understanding pointing, dogs easily outperform animals much more closely related to humans, even chimpanzees.”

We have never been 100% convinced that humans are as closely related to chimpanzees as we are so often told.  But that’s a whole different issue.

What we find confusing with the Canine Cognition Lab is the premise. Evidently, they hope to learn whether domestication has led to dogs that think and act more like their masters – or whether we just think they have human traits. In other words, do we crazy, dog-loving humans just project cognitive capabilities onto our dogs?

Here’s a true story that shows you why we’re confused.

When I was knee-high to a grasshopper, back in Ohio, we lived across the street from a family with four extremely active boys. They were always up to something, so managing the four of them was quite a handful. It was all their parents and their German Shepherd, Babe, could do to keep an eye on all of them.

The youngest of the four boys, Phillip, was famously accident prone. He was the biggest “pronie” in the neighborhood. (Does everyone say “pronie” or is that an Ohio-ism?) Now just for the record, I’d like to clarify right here that I was the all-time neigborhood champion in the “number of stitches” category, but sadly I never broke a bone so there were several kids I couldn’t compete with, let alone Phillip, who trumped all of us with the story I’m about to tell you.

One day Phillip was high in a tree up over the creek. He and two other neighborhood children were putting the finishing touches on their new tree house. Phillip took some kind of a misstep, and began falling with a great crashing of branches through the tree.

In case some of you have never been to Ohio or thereabouts, we had some really huge trees back there. Oaks, maples, walnuts. Of course they’re nothing compared to redwoods and sequoias. But they weren’t little ornamentals that were planted in the yards at the time the houses were built, either. These were full grown, big trees. How big? Well, let’s just say that when Phillip began his fall, he went past the wires that supplied electricity to all of the houses in our neighborhood. I guess they ran the wires along the creek to keep them out of people’s front yards.

Flailing wildly as he fell, Phillip grabbed hold of the wires. Well, as the lawsuit subsequently showed, those wires weren’t insulated and covered the way they ought to be. So Phillip was electrocuted. His heart actually stopped beating at that point, according to the doctors. And I guess when he was electrocuted, his hands went limp enough so that he continued falling. Down his lifeless body plunged, until he hit the ground with such force that it actually started his heart beating again. Which was great. Except for the fact that he landed face down in the creek.

The two neighborhood children who were with him watched the entire thing in stunned disbelief. They scrambled down the tree, took a closer look at Phillip, and then ran as fast as their legs would carry them for help. But instead of going to Phillip’s house adjacent to the scene, they ran home to their own house to tell their mother what had happened. Several blocks away. And they left Phillip face down in the creek.

That’s when Babe took charge. At this point, Babe was roughly 8 years old. Phillip couldn’t have been much older. And you know that dogs grow faster than children. So we always figured that Babe felt pretty maternal about Phillip. She had basically raised him, after all.

So Babe trucked into the creek, grabbed Phillip by the scruff of the neck, and dragged him out. Losing no time, she then ran back to Phillip’s house and barked frantically to alert Phillip’s mother. Once Phillip’s mother came to the door, Babe turned and ran to the creek.

The rest of the story is pretty much what you’d expect: the ambulance came, Phillip was rushed to intensive care, his life was saved, and he returned to the neighborhood covered with glory. You see now why I say that no matter how many stitches I had, this was just not an accident you could compete with.

But here’s our point. We aren’t the only people who know amazing dog stories. There are whole books full of them. And almost all of them revolve around some act of brilliance on the part of the dog that demonstrates a true understanding of the situation at hand, and the action that needs to be taken. In this particular instance, Babe demonstrated a better grip than the other kids playing with Phillip.

So when Harvard University decides to create a Canine Cognition Lab in order to determine whether dogs are capable of higher cognitive functions, what exactly do they mean? Is there something we’re not getting here? Frankly, my own dog treats me as though he’s quite confident that I possess at least a modicum of intelligence. From what I read, dogs have been domesticated for something like 100,000 years. You would think that after that length of time living with dogs, we would have figured out by now whether they are capable of higher cognitive functions. And if some people still aren’t convinced, I’m wondering what they’re going to be able to do at Harvard to change those people’s minds.