One big advantage of being a pet parent over an actual one is report cards, by which I mean the absence of them. You don’t have to sweat whether your spaniel is keeping up in algebra or how her G.P.A. compares with the pointer’s next door.
I went and messed that up.
A few months ago I took Regan, my Australian shepherd/Siberian husky mix, to the Duke Canine Cognition Center for tests. I was interviewing Brian Hare, the center’s internationally renowned founder and director, and Vanessa Woods, his collaborator and frequent co-author, about their research, and I figured they could use Regan for a demonstration.
While I held Regan by her collar, Woods set up two pedestals about five feet apart. She positioned herself between them. Making sure she had Regan’s attention, she dropped a treat into an opaque bowl on one of the pedestals. Seconds later, she pointed to an identical bowl on the other. I then released Regan, who went where Woods pointed — and thus went treatless.
Ouch.
We repeated the exercise. Again, Regan followed Woods’s finger. Again, no treat. And again, I winced. I’d always thought Regan brilliant. But suddenly she was a sorry sixth grader exiting a spelling bee in the first round. I muttered something along those lines.
“Stop!” Woods chided me. She explained that canine intelligence doesn’t express itself the way human intelligence does and that I didn’t understand what I saw. “Just wait,” she said.
Hare and Woods have written three books together, including “The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think” and “Puppy Kindergarten: The New Science of Raising a Great Dog.” They work in a building at Duke University just a short walk up the road from my office there, and I’d been meaning to stop by for years before I finally got around to it. I figured: I love dogs. I love talking about dogs. I love unraveling the riddle of my dog. I’ll learn something.
I learned a lot, and over the coming months in this newsletter, I’ll produce occasional squibs about those insights. But my main takeaway dovetailed with something that has long fascinated me in terms of our own species: the limits, even uselessness, of the blanket assessments “smart” and “intelligent.” Someone deemed clever in one manner or setting can be clueless in others. Someone who speeds through any crossword put before him but can’t read the room is arguably dumber than someone who bungles puzzles but aces social interactions, at least if the goal is to become the top dog at a major company.
Just as we speak of intelligence sloppily, we measure it clumsily. Consider a ranking of dog breeds by intelligence that any dog obsessive who has futzed around on the internet has probably come across. It was constructed in the 1990s by a psychologist named Stanley Coren, who gave Border collies the top spot and Afghan hounds the bottom one. I’m not going to tell Regan this, but Australian shepherds and Siberian huskies were both midpack.
Coren decided how smart a dog was based on how many attempts it took to get the dog to follow a new command and how frequently the dog performed a previously mastered command upon the first request. But do those results reflect acuity — or deference? Are low-scoring breeds knuckle-headed or just headstrong? To fuzz things up further, breeds’ general performance rates weren’t observed in a lab but recalled and reported by dog obedience judges whom Coren surveyed. So how much did conventional wisdom and preexisting impressions color the results?
When it comes to supposed intelligence tests — for people, dogs or other species — interpretation is everything. For example, Hare and Woods have given many dogs the “impossible task” of extracting food from a locked container. Some are persistent in their trying and creative in their prying. Others quickly abandon the effort and look to a person for help. Have those quitters sagely realized the futility of the task? Or are they just lazy and dim?
Regardless, Hare and Woods have found that the impossible task illuminates something that’s arguably more predictive than brightness: disposition. The dogged dog is a better candidate for, say, drug or bomb sniffing. The dog more attuned to a human’s presence and eager for a human’s involvement is more likely to excel at guiding the visually impaired.
How much of what we call intelligence is really proclivity for and mastery of a valued job? That’s often what Hare and Woods are studying. Recent research of theirs — done in partnership with Canine Companions, the country’s largest provider of service dogs — has focused on ways to identify early on which puppies will successfully complete the training necessary for such work and how environmental factors might shape and direct them.
For example, Hare and Woods have assessed the impact of dissimilar methods of puppy rearing, comparing pooches that grow up on the Duke campus — where they interact with hundreds of people and even bunk with students, cycling through a sequence of dorm rooms — to those nurtured in single-family homes. As the puppies mature into dogs, Hare and Woods gauge how well the members of each group perform tasks such as using the right portal in a transparent cylinder to reach a visible treat or inferring, through the process of elimination, where a missing object might be.
“I thought there were going to be big differences — things like memory, communication, inhibitory control,” Hare told me. But no. The campus dogs and the off-campus dogs scored similarly. “You couldn’t get a more nothing result,” he said.
In terms of temperament, though, the two groups did diverge. Confronted with novelty, the campus dogs “go explore, they’re not alarmed, they’re interested, they’re very confident,” he said. “The dogs raised at home are a little bit more reticent, less confident, more vigilant.”
“Honestly, for the purpose of training service dogs, we still don’t know which is the better response,” Hare said. But if or when he and Woods make that determination, it will reflect not raw brainpower but how well a certain trait or set of traits serves the particular mission at hand. Isn’t that what we’re frequently noticing and praising when we bestow the unspecific compliment “smart”?
Smart takes different forms. Some dogs are masterful at communicating what they want but have unremarkable memories. Others are the opposite. And while apes outclass dogs at finding hidden objects, dogs reign supreme at hijacking human attention, finagling human affection and translating human cues. They’ve flourished for that very reason.
Which brings me back to Regan, the bowls and the treat.
Woods ran the test again but tweaked it, placing the treat in one bowl and then not pointing anywhere. This time, Regan went to that bowl. Before, she hadn’t been forgetting where the treat was. She’d been choosing to trust, heed and please the human, an indisputably smart decision in the larger, long-term, all-important context of safety and survival.
Hare explained: “Dogs and wolves are almost genetically identical, yet there are hundreds of millions of dogs, and they’re on every single continent. And, sadly, there are a few hundred thousand wolves. What happened?” The answer is us, by which I mean dogs’ recognition of our value and their finely honed talent for co-opting our big brains and (when we’re at our best) big hearts.
“It’s an evolutionary genius to have this partnership with humans,” Hare said. Then he did the pointing — straight at Regan. “This dog is the absolute archetype of the genius of dogs.”
Absolute archetype! Is that like a valedictorian?
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What I’m Watching, Writing and Listening To
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I’m not sure why I skipped it when it first came out or what tugged me toward it over the past two months, but I finally watched all four seasons of “Ozark” on Netflix. As many of you know, it’s about a Chicago couple, played by Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, whose decision to dabble in crime upends their lives (à la “Breaking Bad”) and abrades their souls (ditto). They move to the Ozarks and descend into darkness. Downing the series in one big gulp exposes the redundancies in its plotting and the whopping implausibility of the relationships between the couple, a Mexican drug cartel, local politicians and the F.B.I. But “Ozark” is gripping fun nonetheless, and I’m outraged that Linney, though she was repeatedly nominated, never won an Emmy for her performance in it. She’s magnificent. This year’s main Emmy Awards ceremony is tonight, and another “Ozark” alum, Tom Pelphrey, is up for best supporting actor in a drama for his work in “Task.” While his competition includes three superb members of the cast of “The Pitt,” he deserves the trophy. Here’s hoping.
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I actually had the privilege and pleasure of spending many hours with Linney a decade and a half ago for a long profile of her in The New York Times Magazine. She was a boundlessly courteous delight. Many months — maybe even a year — afterward, we spotted each other across a crowd of people attending a performance at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, and though I figured we’d simply wave, I watched her weave her way, step by careful step, inch by difficult inch, through the mass of theatergoers to say a face-to-face hello. And I was wowed all over again.
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How terrifying is today’s world, and how much less so would it be if President Trump, his minions and his movement were marginalized? Bret Stephens and I discussed that earlier this month. Last week we wondered at Trump’s betrayals of the working-class voters to whom he promised something better.
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Parting songs: For its loveliness, “Butterfly Net” by Caroline Polachek. For its treadmill-friendly chug and chirp, “Shut Your Eyes” by Snow Patrol. For its evocation of the dazzling skyline — and even more dazzling possibilities — of New York City, “You Said Something” by P J Harvey.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols plumbed the president’s pique with Canada (and other countries): “When Donald Trump looks at a map, he doesn’t see nations. He sees property. All of those pretty colors do not represent actual places filled with human beings who have distinct cultures, languages, and histories; the planet, to Trump, is a big board game, like Risk or Monopoly. Greenland isn’t a real location — it’s a valuable chunk of territory nestled between Boardwalk and Park Place.” (Thanks to Will Glass of Warsaw for nominating this.)
Also in The Atlantic, Helen Lewis reported from a conference on surrogacy for would-be gay dads: “Words such as ‘bespoke,’ ‘boutique’ and ‘concierge’ appeared frequently in the literature. Words such as ‘episiotomy’ and ‘mastitis’ did not. It was here that I learned the industry’s preferred term for a surrogate pregnancy: a ‘journey.’” (Donna Peremes, Hyattsville, Md.)
In Rolling Stone, Nikki McCann Ramirez yawned at the short speech that Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general and the Republican nominee in the U.S. Senate contest there, gave at Trump’s me-me-me jamboree in Dallas: “Paxton, hands planted firmly on the podium to avoid the risk of making a humanoid gesture, delivered his prepared remarks in the flat, stilted monotone that electoral crowds go mild for.” (Robert Allen, Richmond, Va.)
In The Bulwark, Sonny Bunch further appraised Paxton’s va-va-voom: “He glistens like Richard Nixon, sans the charisma.” (Melissa Guensler, Fredericksburg, Texas)
In The Wrap, Ben Croll reviewed Alex Gibney’s new documentary about the richest man on the planet: “Whereas viewers might spend the ample runtime wondering just who stands to benefit from such a recent and immediate archive of material readily and regrettably available, the film’s grim coda casts ‘Musk’ in starker light. Here is work meant less for us than for posterity, an ongoing obituary for a world and a global order in palliative care.” (Dan Humistom, McKinleyville, Calif.)
In his newsletter, The Jew from Nowhere, J.J. Kimche described the archetypal feedback for an academic article getting obligatory peer appraisal before publication: “Reviewer One is generous, scattering compliments and a few painless suggestions. Reviewer Three offers some constructive grumbles, nothing that will ruin your summer. Reviewer Two, by contrast, descends from the Google cloud like an avenging angel of methodological displeasure, ferreting out various weak joints and pronouncing, with icy finality, the sentence that upends hearts and tenure clocks around the world: This requires substantial revision.” (Stanley Cohen, Baltimore)
In The Times, Anna Kodé defined bollards — those metal columns arranged in a protective phalanx between the road and a vulnerable building — in terms of a subtler obstacle: “If speed bumps are sometimes called ‘sleeping policemen,’ bollards are their insomniac cousins.” (Marybeth Manley, Wilton, Conn., and James Price, Kenilworth, N.J.)
Also in The Times, Ligaya Mishan provided a tour of the Manhattan restaurant Somssi, where there’s “a row of tables for two cozy enough to encourage the continuance of the human race, and a squarish back room whose décor includes a pig-shaped cutting board with a pink ribbon tail and a tattered white tapestry that Stevie Nicks might’ve shucked off her shoulders at the Oakland Coliseum in 1983.” (Peter J. Comerford, Providence, R.I.)
In The Athletic, Ava Wallace parsed a key moment in Carlos Alcaraz’s match against Tommy Paul in the U.S. Open tennis tournament: “This time, the Spaniard seemed to pause for a millisecond, as if rummaging through his spice drawer, deciding which flavor to dust onto this shot.” (Steve Fischer, Chilmark, Mass.)
And in The New Yorker, Jill Lepore recalled teaching in a Boston University lecture hall when the World Trade Center was struck by terrorists 25 years ago and wondering, along with her students, if their city might be attacked. “I ended class,” she wrote. “Then I got on my bicycle, turned on a radio bolted to the handlebars, listened to the unfathomable news, looked up at the clearest, bluest sky — no planes, no planes, no planes — and pedalled across the river to a day-care center to pick up my very little boys because mammals gather their young.” (Stan Shatenstein, Montreal)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
The post Your Dog Is a Genius. Just Not the Way You Think. appeared first on New York Times.
