Scientists Now Believe Dogs Know More Than We Think

SMART DOGS are not news to those of us who are doggie owners, however new scientific studies would now seem to be proving what we already suspected… our dogs are actually quite intelligent.

New research, which was presented at the Canine Science Forum in Hungary recently, suggests that dogs understand the concepts of right and wrong. Scientists from all around the world have been testing the cognitive abilities of dogs in comparison to children and discovering that actually the crafty canines are indeed capable of quite a lot more than most people give them credit for.

Previous studies (published in 2007) had shown that dogs were capable of displaying some aspects of human behaviour. To quote directly from the article:-

Based on the results published so far, dogs seem more similar to us humans than are our biologically-closest relatives, the chimpanzees, which will usually opt for the more efficient way of attaining the goal in analogous situations.

And if you thought that a dog barking was just its way of making noise for every situation… think again. Another piece of research published earlier this year (2008) confirms that dogs use different types of barks to communicate different things and the research team even used a computer to model the various barks in order to capture and predict the communication between canine and human.

The team now plans to compare the way different dogs communicate, comparing barks of different breeds such as sheepdogs, hunting dogs, toy dogs and so on, to find out what characteristic of bark were favoured as they were domesticated from wolves over thousands of years.

So the next time your dog barks at you… pay attention, he’s trying to tell you something important

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