Researchers are once again taking seriously the notion of smart dogs:
Their apparent ability to tune in to the needs of psychiatric patients, turning on lights for trauma victims afraid of the dark, reminding their owners to take medication and interrupting behaviors like suicide attempts and self-mutilation, for example, has lately attracted the attention of researchers.In September, the Army announced that it would spend $300,000 to study the impact of pairing psychiatric service dogs like Jet with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. Both the House and Senate have recently passed bills that would finance the training and placement of these dogs with veterans.
Hungarian researchers reported in a study last year that a guide dog for a blind and epileptic person became anxious before its master suffered a seizure and was taught to bark and lick the owner’s face and upper arm when it detected an onset, three to five minutes before the seizure. It is still somewhat mysterious how exactly dogs detect seizures, whether it’s by picking up on behavioral changes or smelling something awry, but several small studies have shown that a powerful sense of smell can detect lung and other types of cancer, as the dogs sniff out odors emitted by the disease.
Dogs can understand language and perform other “human” cognitive tasks much better than scientists used to accept:
By giving dogs language learning and other tests devised for infants and toddlers, Dr. Coren has come up with an intelligence ranking of 100 breeds, with border collies at No. 1. He says the most intelligent breeds (poodles, retrievers, Labradors and shepherds) can learn as many as 250 words, signs and signals, while the others can learn 165. The average dog is about as intellectually advanced as a 2- to 2-and-a-half-year-old child, he has concluded, with an ability to understand some abstract concepts. For example, the animal can get “the idea of being a dog” by differentiating photographs with dogs in them from photographs without dogs.
Steve Sailer adds an interesting meta-point about such articles:
Something I’ve noticed over the years in this kind of article or television documentary about all the new tasks to which dogs are being applied is that they seldom mention what would have immediately occurred to a pre-20th Century reader. Contemporary readers are interested in the selection process for finding dogs with the best propensities for the job and the subsequent training process. But a 19th Century reader would have immediately thought of taking the dogs who are best at a particular skill and breeding them together.Consider the Newfoundland, a giant water dog with webbed feet who doesn’t dog paddle like the average dog, but uses a more powerful technique rather like the breast stroke. Moreover, Newfoundlands desperately want to rescue people from drowning. On shorelines all over the world, there are statues of heroic Newfoundlands who rescued humans from watery graves. Unfortunately, you can’t really take a Newfoundland for a walk along a public beach because he might immediately splash into the water and start hauling protesting swimmers out.
Presumably, it took a lot of generations of selective breeding to come up with a great beast with these characteristics. Presumably, you could breed together dogs that are best at each new job and eventually come up with new breeds where a much higher percentage of the dogs would pass the selection process and would require less training. But modern readers don’t want to hear about that because that would be eugenics. For example, here’s Jonah Goldberg’s 2002 National Review Online column:
Westminster Eugenics Show
Repugnant thinking that’s died out for humans is thriving at the Westminster Kennel Club.This is not to say that foresighted individuals aren’t developing new breeds, just that the entire concept is usually left out of mainstream discussions.
For example, I’ve seen it claimed that a few dogs can sniff out cancer in people, at least melanomas on the skin. I don’t know how accurate that is, but say you could develop over a few decades a breed of dog that could detect a variety of cancers by sniffing people. Think of what a boon that would be to the world’s poor — instead of expensive scans, doctors in poor places could do cancer screenings for the price of dog food!
But this kind of thinking is unpopular today because the conventional wisdom is that eugenics is a “pseudoscience” — i.e., it’s not just morally wrong, it’s impossible.