Just about everybody who owns a dog thinks his or her dog is smart. I've never really felt that way about any of the dogs I have had. They were lovable, cute, loyal, cuddly and great company, but I never thought of them as that smart. I used to tell people that I never met a dog that could beat me at chess.
On the other hand, I had to admit that dogs did seem smarter than people in some ways: A dog would never bomb a country, killing hundreds of thousands of people. A dog would never accidentally send out an e-mail to his boss, bad mouthing the boss. And a dog would never tell a woman that she "looks thinner in the other dress."
The New York Times recently reported that Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, has done some interesting work with dogs and intelligence. He found that dogs can do pretty well on language learning and other tests devised for infants and toddlers.
He went so far as to say that the average dog is about as intellectually advanced as a 2- to 2½-year-old child. That's where I feel he went too far.
A dog as smart as a toddler? Show me a dog that is smart enough to always spit up on his mother's outfit right before she's supposed to go out.
But all of this discussion of which is smarter, a dog or a human, isn't looking at things right. I was guilty of the same thing until recently. Perhaps like most people, I was thinking of dogs' intelligence as the same kind of intelligence that humans have. It's like people who feel that if there is life on other planets, those beings will have the same kind of thoughts and feelings that we have. Dogs don't need to be smart the same way we are in order to be smart.
Service dogs have been demonstrating this more and more. Not only can they smell drugs in a suitcase -- or that salami you thought you'd be able to sneak on the plane -- but they help all kinds of people with various medical needs.
We're used to seeing dogs helping the blind. Lately, dogs have been paired with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. Somehow, the dogs seem to know how to calm down these veterans when the vets need it most. Some small studies have even indicated that because of their good sniffers, dogs have been able to sniff out lung and other cancers because of odors emitted by the disease that humans can't smell.
