Earlier this year, I wrote about dogs with an unusual talent. Although many dogs can master basic commands, these animals had amassed enormous vocabularies, learning the names of hundreds of toys. It was, the story noted, a rare skill in the canine kingdom; in years of searching the globe, scientists had identified very few of these “gifted word learners.”
And yet, as soon as the story was published, I began to hear from readers who said that their dogs were linguistic prodigies, too. And while a few of the dogs did indeed sound gifted, it seemed statistically unlikely that they all were. Many sounded as if they were perfectly normal dogs, who had learned to recognize a handful of words that mattered to them, like “walk” or “dinner.”
As the emails streamed in, I began to wonder whether I was witnessing a canine version of the better-than-average effect, a cognitive bias in which people tend to overestimate their own abilities, and those of their loved ones, relative to those of other people. (It is also sometimes known as the Lake Wobegon effect, named after Garrison Keillor’s fictional town where “all the children are above average.”)
It wouldn’t be surprising if the same bias extended to our dogs, given how many of us consider our pets to be full-fledged family members. But it is a remarkable shift from just a few decades ago, when even scientists viewed dogs as too simple-minded to be interesting subjects of study.
That assumption turned out to be staggeringly wrong, of course. Research now reveals that dogs are capable of all kinds of sophisticated cognitive feats. They excel at reading human social cues like pointing gestures and gaze direction, for example, and can make logical inferences about the world. They seem to have a basic grasp on object permanence, or the understanding that items don’t disappear when they are out of sight. They may also possess a rudimentary theory of mind: the awareness that other individuals might have perspectives and knowledge that differ from their own.
Although it’s impossible to make direct comparisons between the overall intelligence of dogs and children (toddlers can do lots of things that dogs cannot, and vice versa), scientists have noted that some canine cognitive skills put dogs roughly on par with children between 1 and 3 years old. That message has gotten out — and taken on a life of its own.
In a 2013 study, for instance, nearly half of dog owners ranked the mental capacities of dogs as equivalent to those of 3- to 5-year-old children. More than 20 percent of respondents rated dogs even higher; more than 5 percent reported that dogs had mental abilities on par with those of someone who was at least 16 years old. Intriguingly, the researchers found, people who felt more emotionally close to their own dogs tended to give higher ratings to the cognitive abilities of all dogs.
A handful of small studies also indicate that people do tend to rate their own dogs more favorably than the “average” dog on a variety of positive traits, such as loyalty, friendliness and intelligence. In a 2025 YouGov survey, two-thirds of dog owners said that their animals were smarter than the average dog. Just 6 percent rated their dogs as possessing below-average intelligence.
Statistically speaking, of course, many of us must be sharing our lives with dogs who fall on the slower end of the spectrum. I’m delighted to be one of them. If I had sheep to herd, I would absolutely want a whip-smart dog. But I don’t, and I don’t. And intelligence strikes me as an overrated trait for a family pet. Smart pets can be enormously challenging, requiring a lot of enrichment and becoming bored (and, sometimes, destructive) when they don’t get it.
Take my cat Juniper. (Please!) She’s the smartest of my three pets and also, hands down, the most demanding. She solves food puzzles so fast that they provide only the briefest of distractions, and we have to rotate her toys with frustrating frequency. My husband and I are constantly trying to meet her need for novelty, rearranging our furniture into ad hoc feline forts and carrying her around the apartment while holding her at different angles and heights. (She seems to love being upside down.) And when she does, inevitably, get bored, she opens our drawers, shreds our toilet paper and pushes our dishes off the kitchen counter.
Lazing at the other end of the spectrum is Watson, our dog, who has never displayed any particular cognitive gifts. He seems befuddled by pointing; when we drop food on the floor, we often have to personally escort him to it. And while we’ve kept the same daily schedule for a decade, he doesn’t always seem to have a firm grasp on it. Commands? He used to be able to sit. Sort of. These days, his vocabulary doesn’t extend much beyond “treat.”
But does it need to? Perhaps the word-learning dogs impress us because vocabulary size is a trait that maps neatly onto human intelligence. There are many ways to be smart, though, and word learning probably isn’t the most relevant skill for most dogs.
After all, Watson seems to have all the abilities he needs to thrive in his highly specialized ecological niche. He can sniff out the dog food in a stack of otherwise identical Amazon packages and is highly attuned to the sounds of modern cooking appliances. (It took him about two days to learn to recognize the telltale beep of the air fryer.) He knows that when I change out of sweatpants, I’m getting ready to leave the apartment — and that if I also walk toward the closet where we keep his travel crate, it means he’s coming with me. And he is, if I may, an absolute street-snacking savant. (An abandoned pizza crust hates to see him coming.)
More important, Watson is everything we could want in a dog: sweet, gentle, goofy, loving. I don’t need him to help me with the crossword — I just want him to curl up next to me while I do it. And at this, he excels.
Indeed, what makes dogs exceptional is their ability to forge these relationships with us — bonds so strong that we are all somehow convinced that our own canine companions lead the collective pack. Watson might not know his hedgehog toy from his stuffed turtle, but he is — and I say this with all due journalistic objectivity — the absolute best.
Emily Anthes is a science reporter, writing primarily about animal health and science. She also covered the coronavirus pandemic.
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