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Certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys

#71

Post by araes »

whatsakandr wrote: post #9

If you haven't seen "What About Bunny" on YouTube, I highly recommend it. The dog has learned to use buttons to communicate her thoughts quite effectively. My favorite is "Why bunny dog?"

The huskies Mishka and K'eyush have also been pretty popular over the last years. Videos of 10M+ upvotes, so obviously somebody's been watching. A lot are kind of painfully viewing owners poke their canines for likes, yet there are a few that are rather clear human language use such as Miska singing "Jingle Bells". Very obvious human word use and response to human communication for a task.

Youtube, Mishka, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtDFxm4Wupo&t=84s

Re: Certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys

#72

Post by 1letterunixname »

_whiteCaps_ wrote: post #20

I surprised that poodles were called out as a less obvious smart dog. My dog learned on her own that me holding keys + wearing glasses = car ride, while keys + no glasses = walk. It took me a while to learn how she knew what we were going to do.

My first dog was a ¾ poodle ¼ cocker spaniel. She knew where the car was going; anticipated events from objects including leashes, combs, toys, and food; and deduced ever changing codewords for activities before moving a muscle.

Re: Certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys

#73

Post by 1letterunixname »

knodi123 wrote: post #25
_whiteCaps_ wrote: post #20

I surprised that poodles were called out as a less obvious smart dog. My dog learned on her own that me holding keys + wearing glasses = car ride, while keys + no glasses = walk. It took me a while to learn how she knew what we were going to do.

My dog recognizes different cars by their noise profile. So he'll wake up from a nap and get excited whenever my wife pulls onto our street, but stay down for any other car. It probably helps that we're the only prius on the block, but still impressive!

Yep, mine does too. Their hearing is amazing.

Re: Certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys

#74

Post by spike021 »

whatsakandr wrote: post #7
soperj wrote: post #4

They should breed them... I'm sure we could select for language geniuses.

That's a new breed I could support. Just throw together a bunch of different breeds of smart dogs. They'll be much mror healthy than most breeds of dog.

On the other hand, smart dogs can be much more difficult to train.

They can easily pick up what you're training them to do, but when you want them to actually do it the results can be far more mixed. This is because they're so smart that they seem to know whether doing the thing they were trained to do is worth it to them.

Source: I have a Shiba Inu, which is simultaneously one of the smartest and most primitive of dog breeds. From the beginning he picked up tricks and other training extremely quickly, usually within a handful of repetitions. But he can be very independent and stubborn. He seems to know whether something is worth doing or not. Almost.....too smart.

Re: Certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys

#75

Post by Scubabear68 »

The amazing thing to me about dogs is the tremendous range of variability we have bred into them. Size, shape, color, intelligence, basic body makeup, senses, hunting instincts, even average life span vary by an astonishing amount.

And sadly, of course, the selective breeding has also caused systematic weaknesses in some breeds (prone to bad hips, knee injuries, relatively short life span, etc).

The genie is out of the bottle but I wish we could breed healthier animals.

Re: Certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys

#76

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

sandworm101 wrote: post #68
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They would call us stupid for not being able to remember the smell of more than a few dozen objects. Dogs obviously have incredibly more advanced olfactory systems but I feel like you're downplaying humans here. I'm pretty sure there's hundreds of very specific smells I could identify pretty well. Smell of home, pencil rubbers, chalk clouds, rotten bananas, denim.. things do have quite specific smells and there's a…

>> I could identify pretty well. Smell of home, pencil rubbers, chalk clouds, rotten bananas, denim.. things do have quite specific smells Those are classes of things, not specific objects. We all know the smell of erasers, but can we identify the smell of a specific eraser? Part of it is sensitivity but it is also largely that our brains are not designed to associate smells with individual objects. Think of how we h…

This is a really good way to frame it that would indeed mean we only remember dozens of individual things, if that. The smell of home remains, as well as the smells of close relatives.. but I can't think of much else.

Re: Certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys

#77

Post by kemayo »

airbreather wrote: post #3

I have owned six dogs in my life, most recently getting a 7 week old pup staffy x ridgeback, now 16 weeks old. He goes with our 9 year old girl staffy, who can follow conversations, eg planning to go to the park or beach without directly mentioning it in any way. All my dogs have understood a lot of words, some more than others, but all way more than 20. The aspects that promote this, I believe, are this: 1. They are…

The argument I've seen made for crating from an evolutionary-history perspective is that dogs are den animals -- they actively like having a small nook that they can feel safe in, where they're comfortable and nothing can sneak up on them.

I have a crate for my dog. The door stays open all the time, it has a comfy mat on its floor, and sometimes he goes there to take a nap. He's only ever shut in it when there's a reason -- a contractor in the house, or I need to keep the front door propped open for a while, or similar. (When he was a puppy it was incredibly useful, though, because it was a way to teach him to settle down.)

Re: Certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys

#78

Post by araes »

sandworm101 wrote: post #13

Memorizing 100 names for things might seem like a big deal, but I guarantee that all dogs have memory for 100+ smells associated with things. They would call us stupid for not being able to remember the smell of more than a few dozen objects. My point: don't judge intelligence based on how well an animal can replicate human behavior. Each of them can do things that make us look like the idiots.

A quick search to WP Dog Intelligence [1] will quickly note that there have been cases of 1,000 words and this is actually fairly well known. It's perhaps interesting that researches are confirming anecdotal reports online, although as noted in another comment below, there are 10M+ videos from multiple channels all on the same subject. I donno, it's like humans are just realizing animals might not be that less intelligent. Parrots ask existential questions. Prior research on dog language:

"2008, Betsy, a Border Collie, knew over 345 words by the retrieval test, and she was also able to connect an object with a photographic image of the object, despite having seen neither before."

(mentioned in article) "Rico initially knew the labels of over 200 items [and] inferred the names of novel items by exclusion"

"2013, a Border Collie, "Chaser", who had learned the names and could associate by verbal command over 1,000 words[...], and [was] capable of linking nouns to verbs"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_intelligence#Learning_and_...

Re: Certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys

#79

Post by br3d »

I think what's way more interesting is that dogs can master class inclusion: they can understand that this toy is "Mr Shakey" and this toy is "Elephant" but they can also understand that there is a superordinate category of "toys" that includes both Mr Shakey and Elephant, and when asked "Go and get me a toy" can choose either. This is mind-blowing, as children normally have to reach 7 or 8 before they have a solid grasp of class inclusion [0]

0 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1129264#:~:text=showing%20relat....

Re: Certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys

#80

Post by grimgrin »

br3d wrote: post #79

I think what's way more interesting is that dogs can master class inclusion: they can understand that this toy is "Mr Shakey" and this toy is "Elephant" but they can also understand that there is a superordinate category of "toys" that includes both Mr Shakey and Elephant, and when asked "Go and get me a toy" can choose either. This is mind-blowing, as children normally have to reach 7 or 8 before they have a solid g…

I did not know what class inclusion was, but now I'm thinking it's more complex than that? After a little bit of reading. "all daisies are flowers" and not "all flowers are daisies", this example seems more like the "solid grasp" you're referring to. And not basic categorization that a 3 year old might have: "foods", "toys"
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