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THE MOST INTELLIGENT DOGS -- Finding Yours
What are the most intelligent dogs? How did they get that way? How can you find them? Intelligence translates as trainability. The smarter your dog, the easier it is to train. How to find one.
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Yes, it's a basic fact: the smarter your dog, the easier it is to train. If your time to train your dog is limited, then it's important that you know what the most intelligent dogs are and where to find them.
1. "Left for the wolves."
In the late Spring of 1902, Constable Richard Morris, of the Royal North-West Mounted Police, reported an incident dealing with the native Cree Indians and their dogs. Stationed in a community north of Lake Winnipeg, he noticed that a number of dogs had been staked out in the forest, each one left alone and fastened to an iron stake by a chain. When he asked the reason for this, the Crees told him that the dogs were "left for the wolves."
When Const. Morris objected to this treatment, the Crees explained that the dogs wouldn't be harmed by the wolves. The dogs -- Ungava huskies -- were females in heat. Male wolves without mates of their own would be attracted to the females and mate with them, resulting in cross-bred puppies with "wolfblood."
Morris said, "Oh, I see. This is so your sled-dogs will be bigger and stronger."
"No," said one Cree. "A wolf can outrace our dogs in a quick dash -- but our huskies have much more stamina than wolves and can easily outlast them in a long run. Wolves make poor workdogs."
"Then," concluded Morris, "it's because wolves are healthier."
"No. They are the same."
"Then -- why?" asked the Mountie.
"Up here," replied the Indian, tapping his forehead.
Father LeBeaux, an Oblate Missionary, later explained, "The Cree people believe that when an animal becomes domesticated, each generation loses in intelligence. That's why wolves are more intelligent than dogs. The Indians say, 'The closer to the wolf, the smarter.' If it is true of domesticated animals, what does that say of civilized man, eh?"
2. "How intelligent are they?"
Our ancestors might have asked this 15,000 years ago when they played with their adopted wolf pups -- the first dogs.
Even the ancient Egyptians asked that question, and studied their own dogs to answer it.
The first modern attempt was by Rene Descarte, who only went one step beyond the cloudy thinking of his time, saying all animals were just soulless biological machines. Descarte set up the narrow, human-centered theory of behaviorism that would dominate until well into the 20th Century.
For decades, behaviorists put animals -- including dogs -- through sterile tests in sterile labs, looking for mechanical results that proved worthless. In the middle of this muddle came one sane voice: Donald Griffin, professor of biology at Rockerfeller University, who said, "Behaviorism should be abandoned not so much because it belittles the value of living animals, but because it leads to a serious incomplete and hence misleading picture of reality."
In his ground-breaking book THE INTELLIGENCE OF DOGS -- CANINE CONSCIOUSNESS AND CAPABILITIES, Stanley Coren, psychologist, dog trainer, "and avowed dog lover," presented his controversial Ranking of Dogs for Obedience and Working Intelligence.
Coren ranked 133 breeds, from #1 on... The reaction was predictable: "The Poodle? He ranked a POODLE above my Belgian sheepdog?" "Come on! My Samoyed is smarter than any Australian Cattle Dog!" "No Papillon can out-think my Lassie." "OK, maybe a Poodle is intelligent --but..."
"Controversial" doesn't begin to describe the reaction to "Coren's Ranking." But his observations have proven to be pretty accurate. Coren was testing, of course, pure breeds. The "purebred" Siberian husky, for instance, isn't as quick-witted as the native husky of northern Siberia. This is even more true of the Alaskan malamute. We deliberately breed out some of the "wolfishness" in our pets.
3. Never Cry Wolf
In 1963, Farley Mowat's NEVER CRY WOLF appeared on the bookshelves. Described as "an intimate casebook in wolf sociology," Mowatt described how, as a biologist employed by the Canadian Wildlife Service, he had spent a summer on his own, studying a pack of Arctic wolves. The book sparked an avid interest in wolf research that has never dimmed.
IN PRAISE OF WOLVES and SECRET GO THE WOLVES described R D Lawrence's close experiences with wolves in Canada. DANCE OF THE WOLVES by Roger Peters describes his three winters in the forests of northern Michigan. These and others have shown us the remarkable lives and intelligence of the wolf.
R D Lawrence wrote: "Reality, particularly in the case of wolves, means that these animals have keen intelligence, excellent memory, and demonstrable capicity of conscious thought. When Shawano fed his pack before keeping a piece of chicken for himself, he demonstrated not only that he could profit from experience in a profitable way, but that other wolves could do so as well. This demonstration is alone sufficient to discredit the mechanistic theory which contends that evolution, by means of hereditary imprinting, has led to the thoughtless or automatic responses of animals to any one of an enormously wide variety of natural stimuli... Memory, by allowing an animal to benefit from experience, plays an important role in the formulation of conscious decisions; the better its memory, the better able will the animal be to adapt to a changing environment."
It's the wolf's intelligence, as well as its loyalty and great heart that caused our ancient ancestors to bring the wolf into their families.
"In the summers there is one visitor, however, to that valley, of which the Yeehats do not know. It is a great, gloriously coated wolf -- like, and yet unlike all the other wolves. He crosses alone the smiling timberland and comes down into an open space among the trees. Here a yellow stream flows from rotted moosehide sacks and sinks into the ground, with long grasses growing through it and the vegetable mold overrunning it and hiding its yellow from the sun; and here he muses for a time, howling once, long and mornfully, ere he departs.
"But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat abellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack." -Jack London, THE CALL OF THE WILD
4. Finding an Intelligent Dog
It's important that you know exactly which breed of dog is best for you. To see our Ranking of MOST INTELLIGENT DOGS and where to purchase or adopt one, just Click on PUPPY DOGS INFO Now! "You'll be glad you did!"
And see our DOGS IN LITERATURE!
The American Jack London wrote CALL OF THE WILD, a novel of dogs against the background of the Klondike Gold Rush, red-coated members of the North-West Mounted Police, prospectors, trappers, outlaws and the white wilderness of the Alaskan and Canadian Northwest. His literary masterpieces created a demand for more.
Michigan-born James Oliver Curwood followed, becoming one of the world's most popular adventure writers, as popular as Jack London and Zane Grey (whose KING OF THE ROYAL MOUNTED would establish his own foothold in the Northwestern genre). Curwood's THE WOLF HUNTERS (1908) first caught public attention. But it was the publication of STEELE OF THE ROYAL MOUNTED and KAZAN THE WOLF DOG that made him a bestselling author. With Kazan, he created one of the most enduring portraits of a real dog -- a true literary masterwork. He wrote a sequel -- BAREE, SON OF KAZAN.
Curwood actually travelled to the Canadian Northwest to research his books. Drawing on the Cree Indian meaning of "Manitoba," Curwood coined the phrase "God's Country" for the Canadian North, using it in the titles of several of his works. He was an experienced woodsman and hunter -- and after an encounter on a hunting trip in the Rockies with the open jaws of a full-grown male grizzly bear which chose NOT to kill Curwood (Curwood had fallen and broken his gun), he wrote THE GRIZZLY KING, later made into the movie THE BEAR. After that, he favored the camera over a rifle because of his ever-increasing respect for animal life. Curwood fought to preserve the wilderness along with its inhabitants, which were being destroyed at an alarming rate at the turn of the century....
Max Brand (Frederick Faust) has been called "The Shakespeare of the Western Range." (Kirkus Reviews). He wrote two classic Northwesterns about dogs in the Jack London tradition. In the 1920's, Faust moved his family to Katonah, New York State, where he raised white bull terriers. He let them run free over his new estate, training them and intensely studying their actions. The result was one of his best ever novels, THE WHITE WOLF. This novel's central character was a white bull terrier.
Faust's other Northwestern was CHINOOK. The title character is a savage wolf dog, whose master's life is saved by American Joe Harney. Reluctantly, the taciturn dog-master alows Harney and a mysterious woman, Kate Winslow, to accompany them to the Klondike gold fields.
Other writers of Northwesterns who included dogs as characters include: Rex Beach, Samuel Alexander White, James B Hendryx, Lawrence Mott, Harold F Cruickshank, Frederick Nebel, Victor Rousseau, William Byron Mowery, Ryerson Johnson, Robert Ormond Case, H Mortimer Batten, Roderick Haig-Brown and Francis Dickie...
Richard Adams, author of the wonderful children's fantasy WATERSHIP DOWN (1972), gave us THE PLAGUE DOGS in 1977. This novel tells of the escape of two dogs from a research facility in the Lake District of England. The dogs -- a black Labrador Retriever named Rowf and a Fox Terrier named Snitter -- must survive on their own. Believed to be carrying a dangerous plague, they are hunted ferociously by humans until they find sanctuary. Like other English novelists, Adams mixes talking-animal fantasy with the North American Realistic Animal genre -- but his works are too much fun and are just as beloved by "realists" as fantasists.
In North America, more realistic dog stories appeared. A modern classic is THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY, by Canadian Sheila Burnford. It's the story of three animals who walked home: Luath, a young and gentle Labrador retriever, with a reddish gold coat -- Bodger, the old half-blind but tough Bull Terrier, with a strong doggish sense of humor -- and Tao, a sleek wheat-colored Siamese cat...
American author Fred Gipson, who had first established his reputation with HOUND-DOG MAN in 1949, published his masterpiece OLD YELLER in 1956. The novel told the powerful story, set in 1860's Texas, of a stray dog who helps protect a boy and his family while the father is away...
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